How can value chains be shaped to improve nutrition?
Thanks for the timely topic, my contribution focuses on challenges related to awareness creation at various levels; policy makers, private sector, research, producers and consumers, on the benefits of a value chain.
I start my contribution on awareness creation with a question, when and where did so many people get the idea that one should throw away an old cloth each time they get a new one?
Awareness creation on production:
- Reason for food production. Like never before, we now have malnourished farmers. Did people misinterpret the message of treating agriculture as a business (agribusiness) to mean that they produce just for the market, forgetting that their family members need a balanced diet first.
- The need for new messages on the cost-effectiveness of cultivating a variety of food crops. There is a new trend whereby families opt to monocrop with the hope that returns from sales will be used to purchase other necessary food items to meet a balanced diet.
- What and how to grow? Calls for increased collaboration among policy makers, private sector, research and (rural) farmers to achieve a need-based production. For example, are the available seeds relevant to the climatic conditions and food needs of the community or market?
- Considering that women make the majority of farmers in rural areas, is the technology, e.g. machinery for land cultivation, harvesting and processing matched to the needs and capability of women or men?
Processing
- Awareness creation on the benefits of processing, especially to give the harvest a longer shelf life.
- How to process, start from known to the unknowns. The introduction of processing technologies has resulted in mass abandonment of traditional food processing methods, for unaffordable technologies. The challenge here is how to introduce a technology without making people feel that their previous practices are inferior, to be abandoned.
- For example, I have come across women who have formed groups to grow vegetables and tomatoes for the market. Since most of their production is seasonal, based on rain, at harvest time there are thousands of them with a similar produce, forcing many to sell at very low prices, because, unlike the other group they heard of, they do not have a solar vegetable dryer. When asked how they preserved extra produce in the past, many say they have been told that the indigenous method of kitchen or direct sun drying are not hygienic enough. How do such farmers process and store the extra harvest for household consumption or to market at off-season?
- In the recent past I have noticed that whenever our youth talk about their involvement in agriculture; most are asking questions related to support to enable them to package their produce for profitable markets.
- The need for expansion of school curricular to include all stages of value chain and food systems – otherwise we will continue to hear youth who have graduated from agricultural institutions still asking on what to do with their bumper harvest - critical, especially in rain-fed agriculture where bumper harvests go to waste.
Distribution and marketing
- The issue has been elaborated on in past sessions to include formation of cooperatives, use of information and communication technologies to learn on new markets, etc.
- The challenge is how to manage the issue of selling local at a lower price, Vs selling outside, mainly through middlemen at a comparably higher price – one of the reasons most of the nutrition-filled food is shipped, out of reach to rural consumers and the urban poor.
Consumption
- Awareness creation, especially as more and more people migration to urban centers. What food choices are they making? Are many migrants equating a higher income to over-processed and readily available meals?
- In cases where men migrate, leaving women in rural areas, do the men have enough food skills to prepare and consume balanced diets?
Thanks.
Eileen Omosa