Many people have contributed much to this discussion and still have room for more suggestions. Congratulations to everyone for your invaluable piece. My contributions are as indicated under the questions below.
1. If you were designing an agricultural investment programme, what are the top 5 things you would do to maximize its impact on nutrition?
• Identify gaps and major agricultural related nutrition challenges in the specified area. For example in Ghana it has been realized that vitamin A and iron deficient aneamia are challenges in addition to Protein Energy Malnutrition in some areas. Based on the information gathered, I’ll develop programmes to ensure diversified agricultural commodities:
o Diversification of farm production to include high Vitamin A crops like orange flesh sweet potato, green leafy vegetables, oil palm production
o Encourage animal based that the poor can afford (small ruminants, poultry and fishery production) and other local sources of animal protein
o in addition, promote plant sources of protein like use of legumes, nuts
o and promotion of quality staples
• I will also build into the programme land tenure and land use planning issues to ensure security of land tenure and user rights issues so as to enable producers to sustainably manage land, improve soil fertility and other productive resources for continued production. As cities and towns expand, agricultural lands and production become extinct, so I would like to promote urban agriculture (crops, animals etc) and land use to ensure planners plan for agriculture and producers with expansion of towns and cities.
Education and awareness on changing environmental conditions including climate change will feature to cater for and prevent environmental degradation like:
o Overgrazing on land/ overfishing in water bodies including marine resources
o Deforestation
o Biodiversity loss
o Global warming
o Non-renewable resources
These activities on natural resource base if not well managed will lead to under-nutrition in our communities
• Nutrition education for communities on the uses of diversified diets for different age groups, work / occupational groups and sex/ gender groups. This should be accompanied by real practice of cooking demonstrations using locally available food sources (bearing in mind the multi-sectoral nature of nutrition to include water and sanitation, hygiene, gender, health, social protection etc)
o Identification of vulnerable groups (children and youth, females in reproductive stage like adolescence girls, pregnant and lactating mothers)
o Micro-nutrient based farming and encourage home gardening (close to the household so that basic commodities like fruits, vegetables, quality and quantity staples are available to the poor households easily)
o This method will also ensure food availability during off season, and provide incomes for the household/ family
• Provide credit for women to engage in agro- based activities from production to table (consumption)and also provide them with time and energy saving technologies that would support processing to provide long shelf lives and add value to agricultural commodities. This method will also reduce post harvest loss and make food available to households all year round
• Ensure quality levels of agricultural commodities especially grains and cereals are free from aflatoxins, and other harmful micro-organisms. Thus food safety is very important and has implication for food handling and storage, and health of consumers.
2. To support the design and implementation of this programme, where would you like to see more research done, and why?
• I’ll like to see research in two main areas as not much has been done in these areas and also to make food accessible to the poor and vulnerable
o Research to identify various nutrients from local food sources (vegetables, fruits and main staples) and its various uses in the diets of the people and how to prevent loses
o Research into Bio-fortification of staples used by poor and vulnerable groups (especially of micro-nutrients that are lacking in staples that are frequently used (e.g cereals like rice, roots and tubers like sweet potato, yams, cassava etc)
3. What can our institutions do to help country governments commit to action around your recommendations, and to help ensure implementation will be effective?
• First, I’ll ensure the buy-ins of the government Ministries, Departments and Agencies sector leads, together with civil society organizations, Development Partners and in some cases the private sector
• Encourage Food and Nutrition Policy development with relevant sector participation like Agriculture, Health, Education, Women and Children, Social Protection, WASH etc
• Advocate for nutrition specific budget allocation and
• Ensure that there is proper Coordination and harmonization of nutrition programmes and there is an institution/ organization that lead in nutrition programming. Such a lead organization should be under either the Presidency or its vice’s office
• Include and involve the most affected communities / people in nutrition programming and encourage their participation at all levels including conducting participatory M&E in implementation of nutrition activities.
Anna Antwi
Executive Director
GD Resources Centre
Ghana
Anna Antwi