Agriculture and Nutrition Resource Review

Peanuts are an integral agricultural commodity and food crop within Feed the Future, contributing to smallholder incomes and nutrition in ways that lead to food security. This online discussion engaged practitioners around the world who helped each other identify what additional, new, and innovative research is needed, and how peanuts and similar foods can be integrated into nutrition and agriculture programs.

SPRING and Land O’Lakes International Development co-hosted this webinar to explore links between markets and nutrition sensitivity. Last year, the USAID Bureau for Food Security engaged the SPRING project to assist in identifying challenges and possible solutions to the collection of data for the new Feed the Future indicator for nutrition-sensitive agriculture. SPRING shared the broad findings from this multi-country research which led to the development of a data collection guidance document. Land O’Lakes shared their lessons-learned in collecting consumption data in the field, as well as the overall role of livestock and animal-sourced foods in improving household nutrition.

This webinar explored women's health and empowerment; critical factors that are frequently overlooked in agriculture and nutrition research. With the focus of interventions and studies so often centered on child and household indicators, IMMANA Grantees Amy Webb and Erin Lentz examined why women's empowerment matters and reflected on the implications of its omission for women's health outcomes. This interactive session led to a discussion regarding the types of methods, metrics, and tools that could fill these important data gaps.

The Intervention Guide for the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a resource to help USAID missions and implementers design interventions for the domains of empowerment prioritized in the WEAI using market facilitation and social/behavior change approaches. The Intervention Guide for the WEAI complements the Feed the Future Gender Integration Framework, which is an analysis tool to help USAID missions and implementers use WEAI data to determine where are the programmatic needs and ensure that they are being addressed. This webinar explored what’s in the Intervention Guide for the WEAI, how it complements the Gender Integration Framework, and how to use both resources to best implement interventions within a project setting. 

The 68th UN General Assembly declared 2016 the International Year of Pulses. In the context of this campaign, FAO experts Teodardo Calles and Fernanda Grande hosted a webinar to present the benefits of pulses from agriculture, ecological,and nutrition perspectives. Pulses are annual leguminous crops yielding between one and 12 grains or seeds of variable size, shape, and color within a pod, and are used for both food and feed. Pulses provide  benefits for soil fertility and climate change, as well as for combating malnutrition.

The purpose of the U.S. Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan is to strengthen the impact of the many diverse nutrition investments across the U.S. Government through better communication, collaboration, and linking research to program implementation. Through coordination mechanisms, the U.S. Government will maximize its support to country-led programs, continue its global leadership and partnerships, and generate, share, and apply knowledge and evidence in the nutrition sector in order to accelerate progress toward shared nutrition goals.

The Realigning Agriculture to Improve Nutrition (RAIN) project aimed to design, implement and evaluate a model of multi-sectoral integration of interventions to reduce the prevalence of chronic malnutrition in Mumbwa district, in the Central Province of Zambia. A key component of the project was to document evidence of both impact and process for application in other contexts and at scale, through a rigorous evaluation design. RAIN targeted children during the critical period from conception through 24 months of age, roughly equivalent to the first 1,000 days of life, with integrated agriculture, nutrition and health community based interventions. This report includes review of the impact and lessons learned of the project.

Nutrition training of health and agriculture workers is critical to reduce child undernutrition. This manual, available in English and Amharic, equips health and agriculture workers at the community level with knowledge and awareness of the nutrition component of agriculture-nutrition interventions. It also describes the types of interventions that promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture and how to integrate them into daily activities. This manual is intended to build health and agricultural workers’ communication skills to counsel farmers on nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions.

The Global Nutrition Report is an annual review of the state of the world’s nutrition. It is a multi-partner initiative that holds a mirror up to the community’s successes and failures at meeting intergovernmental nutrition targets. It documents progress on commitments made on the global stage, and it recommends actions to accelerate that progress. 

The livestock sector is an important part of the development of agriculture and food systems. It drives major economic, social, and environmental changes in food systems worldwide, and provides an entry point for understanding the issues around sustainable agricultural development as a whole. This report is focused on livestock because of the importance and complexity of its roles and contribution to sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition. It lays out a conceptual framework and a typology of livestock farming systems, describes the main drivers and trends of agricultural development, identifies challenges, and proposes pathways and responses to address those challenges.

Young children remain the most vulnerable population to food insecurity--low birthweight and stunting continue to be among the most visible effects of malnutrition. Helen Keller International (HKI) implemented an Enhanced Homestead Food Production program to increase access to and availability of diverse diets. This paper reviews the evolution and impact of HKI’s Enhanced Homestead Food Production (EHFP) programme and identifies core components of the model that address the underlying determinants of stunting.

This research examines correlations between socioeconomic status of women, anemia prevalence, and potential sources of iron in household diets in Afghanistan. It also explores whether ownership of agricultural assets (particularly livestock) and their use in food production have a role in alleviating anemia, especially where local markets may be inadequate. The analysis suggests that there is a link between ownership and home consumption of sheep and lower risk for anemia.

In 2011, one in every four children under 5 years of age worldwide was stunted. The realization that most stunting cannot be explained by poor diet or by diarrhea, nor completely reversed by optimized diet and reduced diarrhea has led to the hypothesis that a primary underlying cause of stunting is subclinical gut disease. This paper suggests that a package of baby-WASH interventions that interrupt specific pathways through which infection occurs in the first two years of a child's life may be central to global stunting reduction efforts.