Flour Fortification to Address Nutritional Deficiencies in the East and South East Asia Region

The project seeks to speed up progress towards national flour fortification and consequent improved health in the East and South-East Asian region by creating a requirement and norm to fortify all flour with at least iron and folic acid as well as other nationally selected essential vitamins and minerals.

The aim is to stimulate interaction and partnership between governments, the UN and other development organisations, the scientific and disability communities and the grain, flour and food industries to adopt mandatory flour fortification and, therefore make fortified flour part of normal modern food production. The two year goals of this project are:

to support the governments of China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka to consider and adopt mandatory flour fortification
to help support Indonesia and the Phillipines to understand the necessity to keep mandatory flour fortification even during a time of increasing and high food and wheat prices. As part of this, the project implementers will work with governments and producers/importers to encourage them to establish effective measures to monitor industry and the market so that all the flour reaching the population is fortified.

If this project is successfu the global FFI goal will be successful ie. attaining 70% of roller mill wheat flour fortified with at least iron and folic acid (vs 18% in 2004). This will move the world closer to accepting fortified wheat in industrial mills being the accepted norm.

In Asia we are working through The Flour Fortification Initiative (FFI).

This group is a true public civic partnership where all the sector members are represented in the executive management team. FFI in East Asia's leadership comes from the CEO of Interflour (the largest wheat milling group in the region) and the Regional Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) East Asia and the Pacific Regional office. It has a Leaders Group that includes over 50 public, private and civic organisations active in the region, including the governments of the countries supported in this project. There is a small secretariat and the GHI project funds (from AusAID) support the activities agreed and coordinated in this initiative.