One of the foundational philosophies of modern breeding of plants in the 20th century has been to increase the productivity of singular crops.

Now, we have reached a situation in the 21st century where we are having to research and implement bio-fortification for staple crops like rice.

This is a clear indication that over the last one century, while productivity of crops gone up, we have lost vitamins and minerals in our food. And therefore we are having to add them separately either in the form of diet supplements or fortification. This seems as a very circuitous and expensive to go about fulfilling our dietary requirements, doesn’t it?

The fact that food diversity has reduced across the globe has further increased the possibility of malnutrition amongst large swathes of populations in the developing world.

“What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so”.

– V. F. Ridgway

I am sure some agronomists were aware of this possibility of degradation of key nutrients in pursuit of increasing land productivity.  But it is much cheaper, faster and easier to measure the weight or volume of a crop rather than nutrients. Weight can be measured using an analog weighing scale. Volume is can be just eyeballed and even farmers who are not literate can estimate. The nutrients in the rice can be measured objectively only in a lab : using spectroscopy or chromatography. These need specialized equipment and will involve a much larger lead time for testing.

During my stint in ITC, whenever we used to carry out Lean Six Sigma projects for process improvement in the factory shop floor, we used to keep a close eye on consequential metrics in addition to primary metrics. Consequential metrics are important factors that might get negatively affected in the pursuit of the primary metric. If the consequential metric got affected significantly, the project was considered a failure and one had to start from scratch again.

Crop genetics and food testing technologies were evolving at a time when the colonized world was reeling from the effects of 2 world wars. A massive amount of grains were diverted to warring factions overseas, rather than feed the population at home. I am sure the wastage in shipping such large amounts of food while circumnavigating the globe was significant. The resulting famines at home dented the confidence that agriculturists had in their own open-pollinated seeds that several generations of ancestors had selected and improved over the centuries. This is why when the US offered their plant breeding expertise, which they primarily used to feed livestock, to other countries like India, we lapped it up immediately. We did tweak it slightly to our own requirements using native varieties. The technology or philosophy was not indigenous though.

Then, the incentive to determine whether the selective breeding for higher yields were having consequential impacts were absent – impacts on micro nutrients essential for human health or global as well as local ecosystems. I am sure a lot of the scientists didn’t even imagine the consequential impact of selective breeding on other metrics.

Conclusion

Most often, what is the easiest to get measured, gets measured and eventually managed – yields and calories. But whatever is the easiest to measure is often not the most important objective. Delivery of a diversity of nutrients and malnutrition in the country are much more important metrics to measure. And they are rarely surveyed because they are difficult, to measure and to digest.

Regards

Sudhakar