~ 2644 ~ Journal of Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry 2018; 7(1): 2644-2647 E-ISSN: 2278-4136 P-ISSN: 2349-8234 JPP 2018; 7(1): 2644-2647 Received: 03-11-2017 Accepted: 04-12-2017 Jagadish Jena Department of Agronomy, I.G.K.V., Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India Pramod Sethy Department of Forestry, I.G.K.V., Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India Twinkle Jena Department of Agronomy, I.A.S., B.H.U, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India Sameer Ranjan Misra Division of Agriculture Chemicals, I.A.R.I, New Delhi, India Soumya Kumar Sahoo Department of Crop Physiology, I.G.K.V., Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India Goutam Kumar Dash Crop physiology and Biochemistry Division, ICAR- NRRI, Cuttack, Odisha, India JB Palai Department of Agronomy, P.S.B., Visva Bharati University, Sriniketan, West Bengal, India Correspondence Jagadish Jena Department of Agronomy, I.G.K.V., Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India Rice biofortification: A brief review Jagadish Jena, Pramod Sethy, Twinkle Jena, Sameer Ranjan Misra, Soumya Kumar Sahoo, Goutam Kumar Dash and JB Palai Abstract Green revolution significantly enhanced the productivity and achieved the food security problem of developing nations like India, but in terms of dietary diversification it is far away from the developed nations. About half of the global population reported to have deficiency of Zn, Fe and vitamin-A leading to impaired immune function, iron deficiency anemia and xerophthalmia respectively. To overcome the problems of micronutrient deficiencies, people advised to be cautious about the diversification of their daily diet, but most of the people can’t afford to supplement their diet due to poor economic condition. Biofortification of staple crops like rice and wheat got significant scope to solve the problems of nutrient deficiencies. Agronomic biofortification of crops has advantages of cost effectiveness, rapid result, accessibility and ease in application of agro-techniques over breeding and biotechnology based biofortification. There are different agronomic biofortification methods i.e. variability in method of nutrient application, dose of nutrition, sensitive crop stages for nutrition, use of biofertilizers or plant growth promotors and minimum or zero tillage practice. Keywords: rice, micronutrient deficiencies, biofortification, agronomic biofortification, anemia, crop diversification, food security Introduction There was a trending population explosion after independence but no significant increase in food grain production to feed them led to food grain insufficiency. During green revolution era (1965-70) the introduction of high yielding varieties (HYV’s) which are highly fertilizer responsive solved the problem of food grain insufficiency and the food grain production has now increased up to 257mt in India from 50.8mt during 1950-51. During pre-green revolution period the poverty was the major issue but it has been shifted to micronutrient malnutrition now-a-days i.e. night blindness, xerophthalmia, Iron deficiency anaemia etc. The main cause for this prevalence may be blamed to rare dietary diversity (Fig. 1) in under-developed and developing nations. Fig 1: Dietary diversity by sources of dietary energy (FAO, 2008) From the figure it is clearly observed that in low income countries they consume more cereals but less animal originated products like fish and meats and in other hand high income countries their proportion of energy source from other parts is higher than low income countries showing their diversity in foods. This imbalance in diet plan leads to micronutrient deficiency.