Food security, forecasting
1. If you were designing an agricultural investment program, what are the top 5 things you would do to maximize its impact on nutrition?
• Scrutinize the appropriateness of current agricultural development ideas vis a vis improving nutrition. The rural community had endowed with rich and diverse sources of foods. If analyzed properly, traditional food habits and diversity were able to provide adequate nutrition and nutrient content of those foods were comparable to the modern recommendations. Many interventions have been adopted to improve agricultural production but impact of bizarre development ideas has resulted less availability quality foods, loss of important plant genetic resources and less diversity of food in many regions. Participatory approaches in agricultural development planning would make better outcome than top down approaches.
• Promotion of appropriate farming systems to improve local availability of food in regions where chronic malnutrition prevails.
The recent statistics indicate increase in proportion of population with malnutrition. The prevalence of high levels of malnutrition in rural areas, particularly among agricultural households, indicates that there are constraints in availability, affordability and accessibility to adequate nutrition. These constraints are brought about by differences in many factors such as institutional setup, infrastructure, socio-economic characteristics, and quality of resource base. Decrease in nutritional status in rural areas needs special attention in development planning. Investments on R&D and increase in adaptive research, allocation of resources to promote local production of food would improve the local availability and accessibility of food. Promotion of diversity in farming systems in non-food production agricultural region would be a challenge as workers may not have property rights for lands to invest on food production. Therefore, innovations are required in such regions to promote appropriate farming systems to cater for nutrition of residential labor force and their families.
Support for local innovations and scaling up of identified innovations would provide fast track approach to expedite agriculture work for nutrition.
• Investments in supply chain development and capacity development programs to improving household nutrition.
Improvement in both economic and agricultural indicators, both at macro and micro levels, has been witnessed during the past few decades. Despite these developments, nutritional indicators of children and adults show deterioration in many regions. It indicates the influence of other factors on nutrition of households. The changes in socio-economic environment may have induced households to demand more non-food than food and thus, considerable portion of household’s income has to be allocated to non-food items. Further, household’s dependency on formal market for food and nutrition has been increased overtime. Therefore, investments in improvement of efficiency of food supply chains, promotion/development of food markets at micro level and concerted effort to improve household’s knowledge on proper nutrition would be imperative investments in promotion of agriculture working for nutrition. Improved efficiency of markets and knowledgeable households would stimulate demand and supply forces. The services of extension officers could be enhanced to pass the messages of nutrition for the benefit of farmer community as well as consumers.
• Conservation and popularization of traditional food crops/trees to increase local availability and diversity of food.
Traditional knowledge and practices had been in place to protect and sustain agriculture work for nutrition for many decades. The value of these resources has not been given adequate attention in agricultural policies and interventions that were undertaken to increase food production. Consequently, many agricultural areas have transferred from high crop/food diversity to low food diversity regions. Degradation of natural resources (soil, water and plant genetic resources), deterioration of local knowledge on nutritive foods are also evident in these agricultural regions.
The recent advances in agriculture have improved food availability but the capacity of these advances to work for nutritional equity is limited by many economic and non-economic factors. The climate and geographical heterogeneity of different agricultural sub regions may not provide single solution to the theme. Regional specific policies that rely on local knowledge and promotion of traditional knowledge/crops related to nutrition would support agriculture working for nutrition. Promotion of participatory approaches in natural resource conservation, increase public investments in conservation of food-plant genetic materials, maintenance of food supply abilities of different land classes (eg. seasonal and perennial crop lands), adoption of strategic policies to avoid causes of degradation of diverse food sources, strategic interventions in private land use on non-agricultural purposes are imperative for agriculture to work for nutrition.
• Coordination of production/supply programs to reduce seasonality of supply
Seasonality of food supply may act as a constraint to promote agriculture work for nutrition. There is a need of technological breakthrough for off-seasonal agricultural production or utilization of natural climate differences to maintain food supply levels. Further, innovations and incentives are necessary to reduce severe seasonal fluctuation of supply and prices. It would be a difficult task to coordinate large number of small scale farmers in production decision but, use of ICT would provide cost effective solution to implement supply management programs. Diversification of farm income sources and institutional development to stabilize farm prices are required for stabilization of farm income.
• Promote home gardening and protected agriculture to increase supply during off-season.
Home gardening provides numerous health benefits through nutrition and recreation. Home gardener’s effort should be facilitated with educational programs and availability of inputs. The small gardens could be developed into agricultural gardens that are working for nutrition.
2. To support the design and implementation of this program, where would you like to see more research done, and why?
i. More R&D on locally available plant genetic resources to improve nutrition and use of traditional knowledge related to nutrition.
ii. Use of perennial tree food crops to supplements seasonal crop production and off-seasonal food supply. The capacity of tree crops in nutrition has not fully utilized and tree crops can provide year round food supply.
iii. Use of different land classes to supplement food demands. More attention has been given to increase seasonal crops in low lands. The importance of highlands in food production has not given adequate attention and high lands are being converted to non-agricultural purposes.
iv. Institutional impacts , particularly laws and regulation, and changes in land markets could prevent land use for agriculture in suburbs of urban centers. The land masses around urban centers could remain idle due to non-agricultural interests, property right issues, economics of crop production and poor market development. Utilization of these land masses close to the urban markets needs R&D investments, policy changes and support of many institutions.
3. What can our institutions do to help country governments commit to action around your recommendations, and to help ensure implementation will be effective?
1. Support in identification of best solution that is adaptable to regional needs and promote institutional partnership to achieve nutritional objectives
The lack of high correlation between economic growth and nutrition indicates the need of alternative measures for agriculture to work for nutrition. In such a situation, policies and research could play an important role in promoting agriculture to work for nutrition. Statistics are available on regions with severe malnutrition problems. The necessary conditions to overcome this problem are; action plan, targeted R&D investments, promotion of financial and institutional commitments to achieve the targets. Informal education could be promoted to enhance nutrition and transfer of local knowledge to practice. Policy directives and budgetary commitments have to be focused more on conservation of diverse food sources and promotion of cultivation.
Kamal Karunagoda
Three crops in forests, trees on farms and agro-forestry systems provide an important source of food for households in rural areas. Different types of vegetables, fruits, berries, yams, leafy vegetables, spices, bee honey, honey produced from plant saps and many other types of foods and beverages come from these sources. Characteristics of these food sources are widely varied among different agro-ecological regions and these differences could be utilized to improve food diversity and food security of households. The other advantages are low input nature of production and the produce is mostly organic by default.
The tree crops help to improve households’ coping capacity to food insecurity that may arise due to seasonality crop production or crop failure. I have witnessed the capacity of these tree crops to supplement food during the period of food shortages. The households enjoy the blessing of tree crops that provided many types of foods and beverages (coffee, cocoa, pepper, mangoes, bananas, papaya, custard apples, sapodilla, guavas, rambutan, oranges, avocado, limes, pineapples, coconuts, jack fruits, bread fruit, yams, chilli, ginger, turmeric, leafy vegetables form tree crops). There are many types of medicinal plants that serves the villagers’ needs free of any charge. The agro-forestry systems’ capacity and potentials have been witnessed for generations and it could be promoted and protected to improve food security of households.
Food diversity of rural households shows a declining trend during the period of past few decades and tree crops can be effectively utilize to improve food diversity of rural households. The regions with more access to tree crops in their food systems show less incidents of malnutrition than regions with mono-crops. Some products from these systems are being channeled to urban niche markets. However, due to low levels of supply and long marketing channels, prices of available products remain high and products are not affordable to the urban poor.
If valued properly, in terms of nutrition, environmental services or monetary value, it would reveal the value of the system as well as the luxury of consumption of these food products. Therefore, obtaining statistics related to production and consumption and valuation of total economic benefits of these resources would be a challenge.
Any agricultural development plan should recognize the important features and capacity of the tree crops to provide food for households vis a vis seasonal crops. In reality such measures are rare and therefore, prior evaluation is needed to identify the capacity tree crops in a given region to supplement food requirements of households. Once identified, the development plans should accommodate appropriate measures to conserve available systems and its supporting topography.
Land clearance for seasonal crops, construction of houses and removal of trees due to other socio-economic reasons are the main causes of system’s degradation. This situation has serious implications on food security and valuable plant genetic resources. A concerted effort is imperative for conservation and development of these resources. It requires implementation of prudent land development planning as well as land use planning system. These requirements have been identified but implementation is a challenge.
Tree crops provide many benefits but absence of reliable data may results low level of policy attention. Investments and incentives for conservation, promotion of cultivation and investments on innovations (research and development, conservation methods, etc) are imperative for the proper utilization and development of these resources. Conservation effort would require establishment of field gene banks and provision of incentives for conservation within the existing agro-forestry systems. Another alternative for conservation is replanting of manmade-non-food-timber forests with multipurpose timber-cum-food trees.
These production systems show signs of degradation, in terms of area, productivity and diversity. There are many reasons associated with this trend. Lands have fragmented into small units due to due to population pressure. Land fragmentation causes a severe threat to presence of tree crops in gardens. People may not like to see big trees around houses. There are many concerns such as danger of falling fruits, falling of trees due to strong winds and possible damage caused by expanding roots to the foundation of buildings, etc. So we need innovations for small to medium tress or improved supply of services such as services of arborists, to make trees fit into small gardens.
Indigenous knowledge is associated with tapping and processing of some products from tree crops. A disruption to the transfer of this traditional knowledge can be observed and it is associated mainly with the changes in socio-economic environment. Lack of such knowledge would make these resources idle and it may give a wrong economic signal to the owners of resources to invest resources in alternative uses. Inclusion of traditional knowledge in local educational and agricultural extension systems and simple innovations to overcome difficulties of traditional processing systems would facilitate effective utilization of resources and their conservation efforts. The benefits of these systems could also be transferred to urban centers through appropriate promotion of marketing and cultivation of tree crops as a part of urban agriculture.
Kamal Karunagoda
Agricultural Economist
Sri Lanka