Food and Nutrition Security is the Need of the Hour Across India

By Dr. Ezhil Arasan Ramanan | Nutrify India | Roots

WORLD FOOD DAY 

According to the Chairperson of Nutrify India's Medical Community Roots, Dr. Ezhil Arasan Ramanan,“Food and nutrition security is the need of the hour.   It is achieved when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to food, which is consumed in sufficient quantity and quality. Quality also denotes the nutritional value and hence there is a need for fingerprinting of agriculture to enable and empower the quality fo nutrition in food. The finger printing is something that should be promoted for consumer awareness, so that people take conscious decision of what they are buying. This may sound little futuristic, but the need to start this is now to realize this in the future.

We don’t need crop surplus. We need quality nutrition crops and the same should be traceable and fingerprinted. Entrepreneurs of India are taking initiative at their level supported by international players like Euro alliance enabling finger printing of quality crops that are sustainable and scalable in quality.

A good quality crop will positively impact consumer’s health and nutritional profile and assist in bringing down lifestyle disease burden of the country. India witnessed 61.8 per cent deaths due to non-communicable diseases which form part of lifestyle diseases. The new guideline from ICMR has upgraded average Indian weight by 5 kg. This puts additional stress on agriculture to nourish each extra kg of human weight. The need is not crop surplus but fingerprinted nutritionally rich crop that can be sustained and scaled up. This fingerprinted crop will assist in partially lowering the lifestyle disease burden of India. 

Lets move from quantity to mindful quality."