Farming Matters - Reclaiming nutrition
Nutrition has become one of the buzz words of the year, like resilience, and landscapes. What they have in common is that they refer to complex situations, where economic and political forces override the needs and aspirations of rural and urban communities. However, the nutrition challenge remains clear, with a billion hungry people on this planet and another two billion overweight. Persistent hunger and undernutrition are inexcusable in a world of plenty. But the question is: who should act and how?
This issue includes examples of ‘how’, by regenerating food cultures and traditional farming methods, and calling for a rights-based approach to food and nutrition. We see in these stories, a move away from monocultures and towards multifunctional, climate resilient agroecological systems. Driven by nutrition and economic concerns, family farmers are diversifying their crops and developing local markets which provide both rural and urban communities with a better variety of food on their plates.