Our staple rice and wheat are losing their nutrients

• Researchers from various institutes under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya found depleting trends in grain density of zinc and iron in rice and wheat cultivated in India.
• Like ours, countries with Zinc and iron deficiency have diets composed mainly of rice, wheat, corn, and barley.

There could be several possible reasons for such depletion:

• Dilution effect:

• ‘Dilution effect’ is caused by decreased nutrient concentration in response to higher grain yield. This is due to the fact that the rate of yield increase is not compensated by the rate of nutrient take-up by the plants.

• Decreased quantity of nutrients in soil:

• The increasing use of monoculture cropping patterns and intensive agricultural practices could have resulted in a scenario where the soils supporting plants could be low in plant-available nutrients.

Concerns and Recommendations:

• Counties like India which continue to battle micronutrient deficiency have diets composed mainly of rice, wheat, corn, and barley. The growing of newer cultivars of rice and wheat cannot be a sustainable option to alleviate zinc and iron malnutrition in the Indian population.
• Though the Indian government has taken initiatives such as providing supplementation pills to school children, it is not enough. We need to concentrate on other options like biofortification, where we breed food crops that are rich in micronutrients
• growing newer-released (1990s and later) cultivars of rice and wheat cannot be a sustainable option to alleviate zinc and iron malnutrition in Indian population.
• These negative effects need to be circumvented by improving the grain ionome (that is, nutritional make-up) while releasing cultivars in future breeding programmes.