Agriculture and Nutrition Resource Review

As required by the Global Food Security Act of 2016, this strategy presents an integrate whole-of-government strategy and agency-specific implementation plans. This strategy reflects the unique skills, resources, and lessons learned from U.S. federal departments and agencies that contribute to global food security, as well as input from partners throughout the private sector, academic institutions, and civil society. It charts a course for the U.S. Government to contribute to the achievement of global food security and the range of Sustainable Development Goals, together with partners across the globe.

This report champions a vision for a food-secure 2030 by building on the momentum of the passage of the Global Food Security Act, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the success of the World Humanitarian Summit. The vision is that 2030 will be a world free from hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.

Open agriculture and nutrition data can play a role in solving the global challenges of food insecurity, health crises, climate change, and poverty. This requires changes in legal, social, and technological norms. This report reviews four possible governance strategies for ownership of open agricultural and nutrition data.

Poor diet is the number one risk factor driving the world’s disease burden. This evidence-based report is designed to help policymakers make their food systems more supportive of high quality diets. Using modelling and trend analysis, it generates a new understanding of diets and food systems, and how they could change by 2030, examining several issues using a food systems approach.

A 4-year longitudinal investigation reveals that a Heifer International intervention in Nepal was associated with significantly improved child anthropometry (related to the duration of intervention exposure) and child health. Heifer promotes livestock introduction and related training for community development and poverty alleviation. The study concludes that Heifer activities represent a viable nutrition-sensitive intervention, but these impacts take time to manifest and be sustained.

Drawing examples from a multi-country project, this paper discusses the benefits of joining biodiversity with agriculture and nutrition efforts. Steps and actions taken in Brazil, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Turkey provide suggestions for how to create enabling environments to mainstream biodiversity into global initiatives and national programs and policies on food and nutrition security. 

This study assessed the mean fruit and vegetable intake by relative cost for study participants in 18 countries ranging from low- to high-income levels. Consumption of fruit and vegetables is low worldwide, but particularly in low-income countries, and is associated with low availability. Policies worldwide should enhance the availability and affordability of fruits and vegetables.

Most existing studies linking dietary diversity with farm production diversity build on household-level indicators calculated from seven day food consumption recalls. This study revisits this association using 24-hour dietary recall data, testing robustness of results by comparing household- and individual-level estimates. The report also analyzes the role of other factors that may influence dietary diversity, such as market access and agricultural technology.

Bangladesh achieved rapid growth in rice productivity at a relatively late stage in Asia's Green Revolution, as well as unheralded progress against undernutrition. This paper identifies the different impacts that productivity growth in a food staple(s) might have on child nutrition outcomes, with a particular focus on changes in diets at the household and child level. It then applies this framework to a descriptive overview of the evolution of Bangladesh's food system in recent decades.

This webinar, hosted by the Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) activity, shares how four Feed the Future projects in Sub-Saharan Africa have contributed to systemic change. These examples include activities in dairy standards, contract farming and equipment leasing, agricultural input and output markets, and farmer aggregation models. 

In this event, Sir Gordon Conway emphasized that sustainable intensification offers a practical pathway towards the goal of producing more food while ensuring that the natural resource base, on which agriculture depends, is sustained and improved for future generations. He explored Sustainable Intensification through three mutually reinforcing pillars – Ecological Intensification, Genetic Intensification, and Socio-Economic Intensification.

The roundtable brought together African leaders in agriculture and health to discuss opportunities for the agricultural community to achieve nutrition security through healthy diets. It aimed for renewed policy commitment to achieve positive linkages between agriculture and nutrition, and to shape national and regional food systems that will reinforce these linkages in a sustainable way. The event also built on the current political momentum arising from the recently endorsed UN Decade of Action on Nutrition and the African Leaders for Nutrition initiative.

This upcoming symposium in Zambia will share past experiences, human-centered design, and innovations in gender and nutrition issues in extension. It aims to provide nutrition specialists, extensionists, and people working in organizations addressing these issues with ideas, skills, access to resources and tools, and connections to build on their ideas.

Appropriate indicators for measuring nutrition impacts in agriculture is a topic that has received much discussion. This call featured several recent publications supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, including the “Nutrition Indicators in Agriculture Projects: Current Measurement, Priorities, and Gaps.”

The UN Standing Committee on Nutrition is supporting accelerated action for nutrition over the Decade of Nutrition through an inclusive and participatory process, by initiating an online discussion to collect ideas from different actors working on nutrition. This online exchange is open to appropriate stakeholders to engage and connect, asking about their expectations, which critical activities should be included in the work program, how commitments should be accelerated, and how other relevant forums can contribute.