The Future of Family Farming: Providing Resources for Women and Young Farmers.
Homestead production or family farming is the primary source of energy and nutrients for subsistence households. Family farming also plays a role in biodiversity conservation, and can contribute to household income generation. Taking the example of rural Bangladesh, 75% of households reportedly have a home garden. Estimates show that a range of 25 fruit crops, 29 vegetables, and 12 spices can be cultivated, even in small home gardens of less than 50 square-metres. Usually controlled by women, income from home gardens is more likely to directly benefit women and children through education, health care and other spending.
However, in community contexts that face risks and challenges of land decline, increasing soil salinity and water logging as in the South of Bangladesh, home gardening needs to include enhanced resilience to land degradation, water scarcity, biosecurity (especially avian flu), and climate change. Integrated household farming interventions need to be adapted to sustainably contribute to improve dietary diversity and nutritional status and income, especially of subsistence and small women farmers.
From a futuristic perspective, there is for strengthening agriculture and nutrition entry points with a view to linking communities, women and young farmers to agricultural extension, nutrition behavior change and income generation resources. Agricultural intervention programmes should include explicit objectives of improving nutritional status with a focus on addressing child under nutrition.
- Resources and training support for extensive homestead gardening, fish, poultry and cattle farming which address access issues to nutritious local foods, need to be encouraged to ensure an adequate supply of protein and micronutrient rich foods (small livestock, fish, beans, leafy and yellow- orange vegetables and fruits among others). Training on agricultural practices and ensuring high-yielding variety seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and machinery at reasonable price could be helpful for this purpose.
- An emphasis on community based approaches providing better access to seeds, tools and materials; training of women farmers/households/agricultural extension workers on appropriate food preparation, food processing for nutrition, use of appropriate technologies, promotion of nutrition and health education and strengthening public private sector collaboration for value addition and income should be particularly implemented.
- Child stunting can addressed through building strengthened linkages between complementary feeding requirements/practices and agricultural production. The most sustainable, cost effective way to improve complementary feeding of children in poor rural households is by ensuring that nutritionally appropriate foods are available and utilized at household and community levels.
- Food based nutrition training tools and materials need to be used by the agriculture sector as part of capacity building and extension including sub national level training of trainers, farmer field schools and women- famer groups. For example, innovative nutrition materials, recipes and nutrient dense foods, fish-based products and food processing with a focus on improving diets and nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life need to be included in the training of women farmers and communities.
- To this end, there is need for strengthening the capacities of agriculture, livestock and fisheries service delivery structures and mechanisms at national and sub national levels, towards ensuring that nutrition sensitive interventions can be adequately planned, implemented and monitored for impact on nutrition status.
Lalita Bhattacharjee