Agriculture and Nutrition Resource Review

This review finds agriculture-nutrition research to have a strong geographic focus on sub-Saharan Africa, concerned especially with nutritional impacts on women and children. Few projects consider the entire evidence chain linking agricultural input or practice to nutritional outcomes. There is comparatively little current research on indirect effects of agriculture on nutrition, or the effect of policies or governance. Most research is focused on undernutrition and small farmer households. There is very little work on the cost-effectiveness of agricultural interventions.

The authors find that the program substantially increases dairy and meat consumption among Rwandan households who were given a dairy cow or a meat goat, respectively. The study also found marginally statistically significant reductions in wasting (weight for height) and underweight (weight for age) in children of households that were recipients of meat goats, and reductions in stunting (height for age) among children in households that received dairy cows.

This baseline dietary intake survey in Uganda 1) estimates the prevalence of inadequate intakes of specific micronutrients, and 2) predicts the potential contribution of fortification of individual or multiple food vehicles to the adequacy and safety of micronutrient intakes among vulnerable subgroups of the population.

Resources include a GFRAS/World Bank report on strengthening linkages of nutrition within extension and advisory services, ACDI/VOCA factsheets on nutrition integration, reports on homestead food production and baby-friendly farms, and a Peace Corps training guide on nutritional rehabilitation and behavior change.

There remains insufficient evidence to support well-defined, scalable agricultural biodiversity interventions that can be linked to improvements in nutrition outcomes. The book provides a set of lessons learned and a basis to help practitioners carry out similar activities in other regional contexts.

This paper provides an initial opportunity to delve into the consolidated Household Economy Analysis (HEA) and Cost of the Diet (CoD) databases in an attempt address four key policy and operational questions related to food security:

• What does it mean to be poor in rural areas today and how does this relate to food security?
• What part does cash play in rural livelihoods?
• Should the livestock sector get priority attention?
• What can we learn from the limited urban HEA database about broad differences between urban and rural poverty

The symposium included two keynote addresses discussing the 2013 Lancet Series on Nutrition and the role of Aflatoxin in growth suppression, a session on multi-sectoral nutrition research and implementation, three sessions addressing research findings on different components of the agriculture to nutrition pathway (agriculture to market, market to home and home to nutrition outcomes), and much more.

An interactive snapshot of 125 countries showing the best and worst places in the world to eat. The raw data sets are available via Excel, Google Drive and as raw data sets.

This blog by World Bank Vice President Rachel Kyte highlights efforts to take climate-smart agriculture to scale through the “triple win” approach of increasing productivity and income, building resilience, and reducing emission.

Children living in areas of Africa with heavy tree cover tend to have more nutritious diets. Can boosting production of such energy-rich crops as rice, maize and wheat - at the expense of forests - actually undermine nutritional security?

The State of the World's Children in Numbers, is an engaging, interactive, and thoughtfully designed web-based tool highlighting data and stories about the children around the world. PDF downloads of the full report and tables are available.

The document serves as a simple guide on how the overall ENA framework is conceived to incorporate nutrition into all available contact opportunities in the health sector and beyond, how to forge partnerships to bring nutrition to scale, and how social and behavior change communication approaches are integral to the approach.

This webinar will provide an overview of the global malnutrition problem, the main approaches through which the agriculture sector can address malnutrition, some of the agriculture- related issues that can have a negative impact on nutrition, USAID programs and resources to address malnutrition, and an overview of  the Nutrition Innovation Labs (Asia and Africa) and their work  in this arena.

The first-of-its-kind report shows how innovations can affect maize, wheat, and rice yields in 2050, and their impact on farm productivity, commodity prices, hunger, malnutrition and trade flows. IFPRI will also unveil an innovative new online tool that enables policymakers to easily visualize the impacts of agricultural technologies at the micro-level.

The January 2014 edition of the WASH/Nutrition Literature Update included a wide range of articles, including several studies that examined WASH and food safety.

SPRING hosted the January Ag2Nut Community Call, focused on current activities of the global Food Security Information Network, a collaborative effort between the FAO, IFPRI, and WFP, with support from the European Union (EU) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

In December, the NALAN group held a webinar on integrating gender and social and behavioral change into projects featuring Helen Keller International in Bangladesh and Food for the Hungry in the Democratic Republic of Congo.