Nutrition indicator for biodiversity on food composition-A report on the progress of data availability

FAO in collaboration with Bioversity International is leading the Cross-cutting Initiative on Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition which has been established to measure, investigate and promote biodiversity and nutrition. Nutritional indicators for biodiversity are needed to address the diversity of plants, animals and other organisms used for food, covering the genetic resources within species, between species and provided by ecosystems. The indicator for food composition aims to report the annual progress regarding availability of food compositional data for biodiversity from different data sources by counting the number of foods with sufficient detailed description of genus, species, subspecies and variety/cultivar/breed and with at least one component. Since the development of the nutrition indicator for biodiversity on food composition in 2007 more than 10 000 foods have been counted for the indicator. A 54% increase in data availability was measured from 2008 to 2009. Due to the mode of searching most data were located in scientific articles. Most available data were on variety/cultivar/breed level and were from Asia (3741) followed by America (2297), Africa (1773), Europe (1541) and Oceania (1032). This research supports the increasingly recognized importance of biodiversity for food composition. Nevertheless a wider spectrum of foods and components needs to be analysed in order to mainstream biodiversity into nutrition activities.