Forum Global sur la Sécurité Alimentaire et la NutritionFacilité par la División de l’économie du développement agricole
Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture

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I would like to share with you one of my recently published article.

Short-term determinants of malnutrition among children in Malawi

Food Security: Volume 4, Issue 4 (2012), Page 593-606

Maria Sassi

Abstract Short-term determinants of Severe Acute Malnutrition in children in Malawi during the period 2003 to 2009 were investigated in the three regions that compose Malawi – northern, central and southern – through an OLS approach and a first-order autocorrelation model. Explanatory variables were selected according to the definition of food security provided by the 1996 World Food Summit. Monthly changes in the number of children admitted to Nutrition and Rehabilitation Units was the impact variable adopted. The explanatory variables selected included a proxy of household income spent on food and the monthly variation in domestic price of maize, its trend, cyclical, seasonal and irregular components, informal cross-border imports in maize, urea price, non-food price index, and number of Nutrition and Rehabilitation Units. The study integrates recently developed studies on food insecurity in Malawi with regional and monthly perspectives. Results verify that child malnutrition is a chronic problem fuelled by transitory food insecurity, including seasonal and temporary features, with the common determinant being the market dependence of households on food purchases during the lean season. This impact is exacerbated by regional-specific explanatory variables: the variation in seasonal and irregular maize price components and the non-food price index in the central region, along with the cyclical maize price component and net cross-border maize imports in southern Malawi.

The paper is available electronically on SpringerLink:

http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s12...

One of the key challenges of the 21st century is developing ways of producing sufficient amounts of food while protecting both environmental quality and the economic well-being of rural communities. Over the last half century, conventional approaches to crop production have relied heavily on manufactured fertilizers and pesticides to increase yields, but they have also degraded water quality and posed threats to human health and wildlife. Consequently, attention is now being directed toward the development of crop production systems with improved resource use efficiencies and more benign effects on the environment. Less attention has been paid to developing better methods of pest management, especially for weeds. Here we explore the potential benefits of diversifying cropping systems as a means of controlling weed population dynamics while simultaneously enhancing other desirable agroecosystem processes. We focus on crop rotation, an approach to cropping system diversification whereby different species are placed in the same field at different times.

This report analyzes input indicators of public agricultural R&D for five South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It presents trends and challenges with regard to agricultural R&D investments and human resource capacity throughout the subregion, and provides recommendations for ways to address some of these challenges.

The analysis in this report draws largely from a set of country notes prepared by IFPRI’s Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) initiative using comprehensive datasets derived from primary surveys covering 2002–09. These new datasets have been linked with historical ASTI datasets for the subregion, allowing a more long-term analysis of public agricultural R&D investment and capacity trends.