Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

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    • One of the areas that is often neglected in designing agricultural policies and strategies relates to the environmental and natural resource sustainability considerations. However, to achieve this it is important ot understand what factors contribute the policy processes and how one can steer the process in the right direction. Our recent paper in Nigeria provides some insights. I attach the link here for the participants to access this. Comments are welcome.

      http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/131345

    • We are working in few farming systems in Karnatak State of India and in sub-Saharan Africa to see how the farming system can be modified to contribute to achieve food and nutrition security. We look at how the changes in the cropping patterns and introducing new innovations can help in making the farming system more sustainable and at the same time contribute to food and nutrition security.

      One of the problems in linking research and policy in the context of sustainable agricultural system - is that there is confusion even among the researchers on the terminology - some talk about farming system, others talk about agricultural system, and some others talk about food systems. Informed people do not correct this interchangeability in the same discussion, including this forum (see the title of this forum and the third question: can we stick to one concept and define it in the beginning of this forum to make the discussion meaningful- just a suggestion to the facilitators). The extension professionals are confused let alone the policy makers who have little knowledge on agriculture and nutrition. Let us first stick to one - farming, agricultural, or food system. Then let us define sustainable farming system - against which we can compare what is happening in our study area context. This will be useful for this discussion.

      Resilience is highly connected to the farming systems under frequent shocks. Not all farming system face such shocks. So jumping on resilience straight from the objectives of food security and nutrition through sustainable farming system would be rather illogical in a set of beginning questions for this discussion. Resilience is a contextual question depending on the nature of shocks and the nature of food security it affects - and where. In the south Asian context resilience can come from increasing water use efficiency for the farming systems - a quick win but not fully taken seriously due to institutional rigidity. Where as in Southern Africa - fight against frequent droughts require resilience strategy that should go hand in hand with crop diversification and building productive assets after shocks. Weak institutional capacity and poor governance remain major challenges in building resilience in Africa.

      We should also remind ourselves that the farming system research for improving nutrition is not new - a paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s which died out slowly, as we brought in the livelihood approach to food security and nutrition in the 2000s which again died out as we are bringing in the resilience approach - in the 2010s. Shifting paradigms is itself a problem in the research and development community. There is no guarantee that the current resilience paradigm will not die out as well in few years if the fundamentals of taking these approaches to scale are not addressed. We should discuss this further.