Understanding the Food Production Pathway

Introduction

© Stephan Bachenheimer/World Bank

Feed the Future is a U.S. Government initiative that explicitly aims to improve nutrition through agriculture-led activities that also strive to reduce rural poverty in 19 focus countries. The initiative strives both to improve nutrition where it works and to contribute to the evidence base demonstrating how agriculture affects diet and nutrition for rural families. There is growing international agreement on key pathways¹ and principles² for improving nutrition through agriculture, as summarized in Understanding and Applying Primary Pathways and Principles (Brief 1). However, there is still a lack of well-documented examples of programming at scale that are required to improve our understanding of how agriculture can best contribute to improved nutrition.

This brief focuses on the pathway from food production to better diets and nutrition, illustrated in blue in the figure below. However, all of the pathways are interrelated. Agricultural activities typically affect more than one pathway and interact with the enabling environment that includes policies, the natural resource base, and cultural practices, among other factors.

Food Production

© Stephan Bachenheimer/World Bank

In this brief, vignettes illustrate the potential pathways from food production (see figure below) to improved nutritional status. Food production affects and is influenced by several factors.

The Food Market Environment: Availability, quality, safety, and pricing of food; convenience of access; information about food related to quality and nutritional value; and marketing—that is, how certain foods are being promoted for sale and consumption.

Natural Resources: Access to land and water; the effects of climate change as they affect land and water.

Health, Water, and Sanitation: Health risks from production practices and chronic or seasonal illnesses.

Typically, smallholder households are net food buyers— that is, they purchase more food than they consume from their own production. Thus, what is available in markets affects their food purchases and their diet. Smallholders also usually produce some amount of food for household consumption to secure access to foods they need or prefer. It may be less expensive or more convenient to grow some foods than to buy them, particularly considering the cost of women's time and the fact that women may not always control the income needed to obtain nutritious food for the family.

From the Feed the Future Learning Agenda
Food Production in Focus

• What activities have enabled food crop value chain investments to lead to improved consumption of diverse diets?
• Does including nutrition education and SBC in agriculture extension services help reduce or eliminate household hunger and improve dietary diversity?
• What approaches successfully address long-term natural resource management objectives while effectively increasing productivity and profitability?

To date, biofortification initiatives such as those focusing on the production of orange-fleshed sweet potato have generally targeted the household farming system. Over the long term, however, they also aim to increase availability of more micronutrient-dense food in markets. Homestead food production activities have also illustrated the important role the household farming system plays in decisions related to diets and nutrition. These activities aim to boost production for household consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and animal-sourced foods. The evidence of success for these initiatives is mixed, however; implementers have reported an increase in consumption of these nutrient-dense foods, as well as in promotion of greater dietary diversity, but impact on stunting from purely homestead food production has not been documented. Impact on diets has been stronger where nutrition education, social and behavior change (SBC), and women's empowerment interventions have been incorporated (Ruel and Alderman 2013; Webb Girard et al. 2012).

Many current studies, including some within Feed the Future, are measuring overall dietary impact of interventions that mainly target the household farming system (Herforth and Ballard, forthcoming). In contrast, few value chain activities are monitoring or measuring impact on natural resources, food availability, and market prices or aspects of the health environment (e.g., water quality or disease risk). These areas of potential impact are important to consider in designing and implementing Feed the Future activities.

Through its learning agenda,³ Feed the Future is committed to learning by doing and strengthening the evidence base. In particular, filling the research gaps highlighted above can help answer some of the learning agenda's key questions.

The following vignettes provide information relevant to some of these questions. They shed light on how, within specific contexts, agriculture and nutrition strategies and activities can be effectively linked to ensure that people in target communities are well fed.

Conclusions and Observations on the Application of Pathways and Principles

Programming Principles

1. Incorporate explicit nutrition objectives and
   indicators into design.
2. Assess the local context.
3. Target the vulnerable and improve equity.
4. Collaborate and coordinate with other sectors.
5. Maintain or improve the natural resource base, particularly water resources.
6. Empower women.
7. Facilitate production diversification, and increase production of nutrient-dense crops and livestock.
8. Improve processing, storage, and preservation of nutritious food.
9. Expand market access for vulnerable groups, and expand markets for nutritious foods.
10. Incorporate nutrition promotion and education that builds on local knowledge.

The pathways and principles are useful frameworks for exploring how current interventions are working to achieve nutritional goals. The vignettes presented in this brief demonstrate how activities use the food-productionto- food-access-and-consumption pathway in pursuit of nutritional goals. PROMASA II underscores a characteristic common to most food production activities: production is integrated with income generation. Thus, the activities work along multiple pathways. Similarly, homestead food production activities such as HKI's EHFP frequently target women; therefore they are also operating along the women's empowerment pathway. It is critical for a homestead food production activity to consider demands on women's time and their control of resources to ensure successful movement along both pathways toward improved nutritional outcomes.

Both examples further highlight the necessity of applying key programming principles for improving nutrition through agriculture while working along the food production- to-consumption pathway. Coordinating with other sectors, improving the natural resource base, facilitating production diversification, and incorporating nutrition education are featured in the food production vignettes in this brief. All 10 programming principles (left) can be factored into program design and implementation.

The pathways and principles provide a powerful framework for confirming assumptions and defining causal relationships between activity components, which are critical to activity design, monitoring, and evaluation. In applying the pathways and principles described above and illustrated in the vignettes, Feed the Future presents opportunities for learning at scale. Use of appropriate process monitoring indicators and sharing examples from the field are two ways for Feed the Future to build evidence on how food production can work to improve nutrition.