As the world marked yet another World Environment Day, the urgent and collective action toward a sustainable future has never been more pressing. Among the most critical and interconnected challenges we face are hidden hunger and climate change — dual threats that undermine both human health and environmental resilience.
Hidden hunger, the chronic deficiency of essential vitamins and minerals, affects more than three billion people and costs the global economy an estimated $3.5 trillion annually. At the same time, climate change continues to disrupt food systems, reducing crop yields, raising input costs, and diminishing the nutritional quality of staple foods like wheat and rice. Addressing these crises through nutrition-smart, environmentally sustainable farming systems is not just a necessity, but a global imperative.
The 2023 State of Food Security and Nutrition report reveals alarming statistics: 2.4 billion people face hunger globally, with 900 million experiencing severe food insecurity. In India alone, micronutrient deficiencies are widespread, with the country hosting nearly a third of the world’s stunted children. Particularly concerning is zinc deficiency, affecting approximately 300 million Indians — 22 per cent of the population — including 44 per cent of children under five.
This crisis stems partly from soil health issues – nearly 40 per cent of Indian soil samples show zinc deficiency, a problem compounded by climate change as rising CO2 levels are projected to reduce micronutrient content in staple crops by 3-17 per cent. The consequences are potentially devastating: zinc deficiency contributes to diseases like diarrhoea, typhoid, and pneumonia, resulting in 2.1 million deaths annually among Indian children under five.
A sustainable solution
While conventional approaches to malnutrition focus on fortified products and therapeutic foods, nutrition-smart agriculture offers a more sustainable, scalable solution. This approach integrates improved crop varieties, soil health restoration, and farmer capacity building to enhance both yield and nutritional quality of food produced.
A section of wheat farmers across six districts in Uttar Pradesh have demonstrated the remarkable potential of this approach through the “Sustainable Nutri-Farms” pilot, a collaborative initiative with HarvestPlus Solutions, implemented in partnership with the National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management. By introducing biofortified zinc wheat varieties alongside innovative micronutrient fertilizers and sustainable farming practices, they achieved impressive results across multiple dimensions. The biofortified wheat contained 30.2 ppm zinc and 35.4 ppm iron as compared to 20.9 ppm zinc and 32.6 ppm iron, respectively, in conventional varieties, marking an increase in nutrients vital for immune function and cognitive development.
Participating farmers experienced yield improvements of up to 29.33 per cent, producing higher-quality grains that commanded premium market prices. This agricultural transformation translated directly into economic benefits, with farmers reporting an average income increase of 42 per cent, demonstrating how nutrition-smart agriculture can address poverty and malnutrition. Perhaps most encouragingly, surveys later showed an 87 per cent increase in adoption rates of biofortified wheat varieties, indicating successful knowledge transfer and mindset shifts among farming communities.
The incidents not only signal a transformative potential for sustainable agriculture that prioritises both human health and environmental resilience, but also firmly establishes that structured knowledge sharing is critical for accepting ‘experimental’ methods as a practice by the farming communities.
The path forward
Even though the world has a third of its time to meet the goal of ‘Zero Hunger’ by 2030, the lack of improvement in food security and the uneven progress in the economic access to healthy diets has left the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) wary of missing the deadline. As climate change intensifies and nutrition challenges grow, nutrition-smart agriculture offers a promising path forward — one that transforms food systems from being part of the problem to becoming the foundation of the solution. The approach is a beacon of hope as usual approaches fall increasingly short, calling for innovation and deeper collaboration. By increasing zinc and other micronutrients in staple crops through agronomic biofortification, the issue of hidden hunger can be addressed meaningfully while building climate resilience, reaffirmed by the evidence from field-level implementations that demonstrates its efficacy when deployed with the right partners and practices.
Nutrition-smart farming practices present a compelling opportunity to create shared value: enhancing community health and nutrition security while building more resilient supply chains and meeting growing consumer demand for sustainably produced, nutritious foods. By nourishing the planet one farm at a time through nutrition-smart agriculture, we can tackle hidden hunger and climate change simultaneously — creating a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable future for all.
The author is Managing Director, Yara South Asia.
Published on June 7, 2025