AÑO
2017
CATEGORÍA
Cuerpo
OBJETIVOS
Salud y bienestar
PAL. CLAVE
children's health
PAÍS
Perú
CRÉDITOS
The International Potato Center (CIP) and Harvestplus
LINK
http://cipotato.org/press-room/blog/let-food-thy-medicine-fighting-blindness-orange-fleshed-sweetpotato/
The Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato
Sweet Potatoes That Could Save Lives
The Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato / Developed by The International Potato Center (CIP) and Harvestplus
In sub-Saharan Africa, vitamin A deficiency afflicts more than 43 million children under age 6, leaving them vulnerable to blindness, malaria and more. It’s inefficient to provide entire countries with pills, so plant scientists from HarvestPlus and the CIP are helping countries grow their own solutions—in the form of sweet potatoes. The key is biofortification, or cross-breeding locally grown sweet potatoes with versions rich in vitamin A, so that over time the crops naturally get better at addressing the deficiency. Plant scientists have also bred them to be more resistant to droughts (as Maria Andrade did in Mozambique) and viruses (as Robert Mwanga did in Uganda)