Biofortification—Present Scenario, Possibilities and Challenges: A Scientometric Approach.

What is it about?

Biofortification refers to the process by which food crops are improved by the application of biotechnology, conventional plant breeding, and agronomic practices to increase the bioavailability of their nutritious components to human consumers. The biofortification of staple crops is a long-term, sustainable solution to address nutritional inadequacies. Thus, it is a practical and cost-effective way to provide micronutrients to communities that have limited access to various meals and other micronutrient therapies. Existing therapies, such as supplementation and industrial food fortification, which are insufficient to eliminate micronutrient deficiencies on their own, are complemented by biofortification. However, biofortification offers two substantial competitive advantages: the capacity to reach underserved rural communities and long-term cost-effectiveness. Biofortified crops can also be used to target rural populations with limited access to various dietary options or other micronutrient therapies. Hence, an attempt is made herein to provide an overview of the biofortification literature by employing scientometric and network analysis tools to examine records extracted from the Scopus database that were published between 2010 and 2021. This study investigates the most influential authors and journals, top-contributing institutions and countries, variations across publication years, co-occurrence analysis of keywords, and bibliographic coupling of sources. The results obtained through this study describe the real impact of the research published to date and its usage.

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Why is it important?

nding all forms of hunger by 2030, as outlined in the United Nations’ second Sustainable Development Goal (UN-SDG2), is a difficult but necessary endeavor, considering the short time remaining, the poor global health status, and the socioeconomic effects of hunger. Malnutrition is a grave issue on a global scale. About one-third of the world’s population is affected by malnutrition or concealed hunger owing to micronutrient deficiencies, which significantly threaten economic growth [1]. Although the 1994 image of a dying child alongside a vulture waiting for food at a distance won the New York Times the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, it also exposed the shocking reality of widespread global poverty, hunger, and unmet food needs. According to United Nations estimates, 821 million people worldwide were undernourished in 2018. Women and children are disproportionately affected by micronutrient deficiencies, which affect more than two-thirds of the world’s population overall. There are 2 billion iron-deficient individuals [2], 2 billion iodine-deficient people, 150 million vitamin A-deficient people, and up to 3 million people in the world who are in danger of zinc insufficiency [3,4,5]. Thus, providing sufficient quantities of nutritious food is one of the 17 sustainable development goals outlined by the United Nations. The lack of essential nutrients, notably minerals such as iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), and vitamin A, is one of the main causes of “hidden hunger”, especially in underdeveloped nations [6].

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