Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

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    • Dear Facilitators,

      Thanks for brining this extremely important and timely issue for discuusion. With the growing need for feeding more people around the world,coupled with effect of climate change and natural disasters, agriculture sector is becoming extremely important to address food security and nutrition issues accross the world. Though the theoretical relationship between agriculture, food security and nutrition is well recognized by the development community, the linkages between these 3 are often weak or even do not exist in practice. There are several reasons why agriculture fails to demonstrate optimum benefits to improve nutrition. I am trying to highlight some of those below with possible soulutions:

      (1) First of all there is a huge communitation gap between academicians, researchers and practitioners. There are ample of evidences that demonstrate the positive relationship betgween agruiculture, food security and nutrition, but very few attempt has made to translate those into practice, making sure that those knowledge are being used during, design implementation and monitoring evaluation of ariculture projects/programs. In many many cases, practitioners are not even aware of the body of knowledge available in this sector or the various pathways that can link agricuture to improve nutrition.

      (2) In many cases agriculture projects are heavily focused on increasing production and productivity while totally ignoring the social and cultural factors that prevent some vlunerable and marginaliged groups (especially women and children) to be fully benefitted from increased production and productivity

      (3) Due to lack of awareness or in some cases lack of political committememt, agricultiure projects often are not designed with a nutrtion objective in mind. In some cases even if it does have a nutrition objective, due to limited understanding about the relationship between agriculture and nutrition and/or the overall complexity and undrerlying causes of malnutrtion, the proejct fails to take a holistic approach, that in turn fails to significanlty contribute to nutrition. On top of these, due to lack of proper handling, processing,and storage,in many cases the nutritive value of crops, vegetables, milk or milk products are diminished or lost.

      (4) The monitoring and evaluation system of agriculture projects/program often do not have appropriate or adequate indicators to capture and demonstrate projects's contribution to food security and nutrition.

      So some of my suggestions would be to include:

      (1) Strenghten collaborations, communications and coordinations between researchers and practitioner, policy makers in agriculture, food and nutrition sectors

      (2) Design agriculture projects with nutrition objectives and include some essential direct nutrition interventions such as nutrition education with especial focus on infant and young child feeding, promoting appropriate health hygiene and nutrition behaviour and practices, production of vitamin and minerals rich crops and vegetables, etc either through adding direct interventions or by linking agriculture projects with existing government or others health and nutrition projects/programs

      (3) Design and implement monitoring and evaluation system of agriculture projects to capture nutrtion benefits (include and operationalize appropriate food security and nutrition indicators)

      (4) Take into consideration of social and cultural factors, address issues around social exclusions/discriminations, and promote women empowerment to achieve sustainable and larger impact especially on women and child nutrition.