6 indirect approaches to improving nutrition – part one

Malnutrition, in its various forms, is thought to affect over 2 billion people in the world and, as such, has far reaching consequences for societies, economies and livelihoods. Tackling poor nutrition is both complex and opportunistic in that there are links between nutrition and a whole other range of factors. In other words by tackling nutrition directly we may positively contribute to other developmental problems but there are also multiple ways to address undernutrition indirectly. While there is broad consensus on the need to take direct nutrition interventions such as promoting exclusive breastfeeding or biofortification of crops with micronutrients such as vitamin A or zinc, there is also an urgent need to tackle the underlying and inter-related determinants of malnutrition. The Lancet, for example, suggests that direct nutrition interventions, even if implemented at 90% coverage in high-burden countries would only reduce global stunting by 20%.

So-called nutrition-sensitive approaches are gaining popularity and the importance of including nutrition in a wide variety of sectors and policies is becoming better understood. Here we discuss some of the alternative routes through which malnutrition is impacted and thus could be reduced.

1. Agriculture

The contribution of agriculture to meeting the nutritional needs of the population cannot be overstated, and the nutrition component of agricultural policies and investment plans needs to be strengthened. In Africa, agricultural development has been primarily focused on boosting production and developing markets with little attention given to nutrition. But agriculture is at the heart of addressing malnutrition. Its products provide us with the energy, protein, vitamins and minerals our bodies need. And in many developing countries the majority of people who are malnourished live in rural areas and depend on smallholder farming for their livelihoods. In fact, demographic and health survey (DHS) data shows that individuals living in rural areas are between 1.3 and 3.3 times more likely to be stunted than people in urban areas, which indicates that agriculture still has a long way to go in providing the global population with the right nutrition and adequate calories. It also indicates that by improving agricultural diversity and productivity in rural farming areas, malnutrition could be significantly reduced, although evidence on the impact agriculture can have on nutrition is currently limited in formal literature.

So how does agriculture need to change in order to better serve the world’s nutritional needs? The food system needs to provide access to enough nutritious foods, promote social norms that foster good nutrition practices and provide adequate income to purchase nutritious foods. Ensuring nutritious foods are affordable, accessible and available is essential and has typically been overlooked in the agricultural sector, rather being the domain of development and health. Home and school gardens, small livestock production, aquaculture and marketing policies which keep the prices of such foods at affordable levels are examples of food-based nutrition improvement initiatives. Some argue that the entire food chain needs to be put under a “nutrition lens” in order to identify areas for intervention such as “expanding and diversifying food production, improving food processing, preservation and preparation of foods, reducing losses and waste and assessing intervention impact on dietary consumption”.

The Soils, Food and Health and Communities (SFHC) project, used participatory research methods and awareness raising activities in Ekwendeni village in Northern Malawi to help smallholder famers select and test mixtures of diverse legume species for growing in combination with maize. Project results show that the intercropping of maize with legume mixes has led to improved nutrition for children in communities where the project is being implemented (over 9000 farmers have adopted this technology so far).

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Back agriculture to get the most out of aid to Africa, SciDev.Net

No-till agriculture may not bring hoped-for boost in global crop yields, study finds, UC Davis

Family farms produce 80 percent of world’s food, speculators seek land, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Can We Feed the World in 2050? A Scoping Paper to Assess the Evidence, GDAE

Principles for responsible agriculture and food investments are approved, FAO

Oxfam response to UN Committee on World Food Security Endorsement of Principles, Oxfam

Why ‘climate-smart agriculture’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, The Guardian

The Race Is On to Find Organic Pesticides, The Wall Street Journal

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

New Report Urges a U.S. Global Food Security Focus on Science, Trade and Business, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Pesticides Make a Comeback, The Wall Street Journal

The biodiversity challenge in Europe, Thinking Country

Q+A: Committee on World Food Security chair urges use of forest foods in diets, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Ghana hosts 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week, Joy Online

Trees on farms: challenging conventional agricultural practice, The Guardian

Disasters displaced over 32 mln people in 2012, rising trend forecast, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Feature: Curbing hunger, Ghana must go biotech, Ghana Business News

G8 under pressure to rethink biofuel mandates, EurActiv.com

Food Security when in Rome

This blog was first posted on Huffington Post

Food is often in short supply. The availability of and access to food is also, and has always been, highly political. Poor wheat harvests imported into Rome between 56 to 58BC led to grain shortages and fluctuating prices. As a result the Roman mob became volatile and “on one occasion crowds besieged the senate and threatened to burn the senators alive, apparently encouraged by the tribune Clodius who had passed a law increasing the number of people entitled to subsidised grain” (excerpt from Gordon Conway’s book ‘One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world?’).

Today food security is equally political and the 2007/08 food price spike led to political and economic instability and social unrest in both poor and developed nations. In Bangladesh, 10,000 workers rioted close to Dhaka, smashing cars and buses and vandalising factories in anger at high food prices and low wages. In Burkina Faso rioting broke out in the country’s second and third largest cities over food price increases of over 65%. In Cameroon large scale rioting in protest against inflating food and fuel prices saw at least seven people killed in the worst unrest seen in the country in over fifteen years. And the list goes on with unrest seen in Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Haiti, Egypt, Indonesia, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia and Yemen. Russia and Mexico froze food prices to avoid public backlash, the Pakistan government deployed military to protect food reserves from being seized and Brazil announced a temporary ban on the export of rice.

As ‘One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world’ explains, these acute crises are part of a chronic crisis; the paradox of food insecurity that we face today is that there is enough food to feed the global population yet around one billion people are chronically hungry and another billion are obese. In his book Gordon Conway lays out the routes for achieving a fairer, more productive, stable and resilient global food system. On the 27^th-28^th February 2013, he took this vision to the three Rome-based UN agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure

Ownership of land, or the absence of, is often cited as being a major barrier to increasing food production and achieving sustainable livelihoods in developing countries. When farmers do not own their own land, particularly true in the case of female farmers, it can be difficult to access credit and invest in on-farm improvements. Beyond the practical benefits of owning your own land it also reduces conflict over land use and removes the threat of having your livelihood taken away. An estimated five million people worldwide suffer from forced evictions every year.

Large-scale land acquisitions have become a topic of debate and in 2009 hedge funds and other speculators bought or leased almost 60 million hectares of land in Africa. In a bid to safeguard the rights of local people and avoid mass displacement, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has created Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure. Released in May 2012, the guidelines, seen as a landmark decision of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), set out principles and standards for responsible governance of tenure over natural resources. In the words of the FAO, “They provide a framework that States can use when developing their own strategies, policies, legislation, programmes and activities. They allow governments, civil society, the private sector and citizens to judge whether their proposed actions and the actions of others constitute acceptable practices’.