Nutrition and biodiversity

Nutrition and biodiversity converge to a common path leading to food security and sustainable development. They feature directly the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger; and ensure environmental sustainability. In combination, a nutrition and biodiversity initiative provides the very foundation for achieving these MDGs.

In order to be successful, strategies to address nutrition problems have to be systematic and multi-sectoral, and should be integrated into a general framework. Sustainable improvement in nutritional well-being is achieved through a combination of evidence- and communitybased actions to address local causes of malnutrition; improvements in national and sectoral policies and programmes; support to civil society institutions to enable poor households to access or acquire sufficient food and utilize it most effectively; and enhancement of education and public information for dietary improvement. These approaches go beyond simple improvements in dietary energy availability, to overall improvements in nutrition security, particularly related to micronutrients.

Gathering wild foods, growing locally adapted varieties and eating from the local ecosystem continue to be part of civilizations and cultures and their potential value for food security and rural development is recognized. There is also growing acknowledgment of the need to adapt nutrition and health interventions to the diversity of needs of individuals and communities. If nutrient analysis and data dissemination of the various food species and intra-species diversity are systematically undertaken, national information systems for food and agriculture will be strengthened and can be used to form the basis for priority setting and national policy making.

For nutrition, this will mean introducing more compositional data on biodiversity in national food composition databases and tables; developing and using dietary assessment instruments that capture food intake at the species and variety/breed level; and allowing marketing and food labelling that encourage awareness of food plant varieties and food animal subspecies.

We need to increase the evidence base by filling our knowledge gaps with better inventories and more data, and accessible data, on composition and consumption. As we progress in this effort, information will be mainstreamed in all nutrition activities, and used effectively in community-based programmes and interventions.

Biodiversity and nutrition rationale

• Wild species and infraspecies biodiversity have key roles in global nutrition security.
• Different varieties of the same species have statistically different nutrient contents.
• Acquiring nutrient data on existing biodiversity needs to be a prerequisite for decision-making in GMO work.
• Nutrient content needs to be among criteria in cultivar promotion.
• Nutrient data for wild foods and cultivars need to be systematically generated, centrally compiled and widely disseminated.
• Biodiversity questions and/or prompts need to be included in food consumption surveys.
• Acquiring nutrient data and intake data for varieties is essential in order to understand the impact of biodiversity on food and nutrition security.