Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

Good point to discuss and learn.

The first is that when the Ministry f Agriculture publish the annual food security, the focus is only on creal with some point on tubers while in the country, there some vegetale and animals productions as well as forest products.

For me it means that all the curricula of agriculture eductaion focus more in cereals and tubers production. The impacts of this curricula in the field is so clear. In Burkina Faso and Togo where we operate also, it's common to see the AGricuture Extension Agents and the Ingenieur with limited knowledge on agriculture deversification and nutrition. So the agriculture colleges or institutions should review theirs curricula by including nutrition understanding in the common language, the crop diversification and the combination of differents food to improve nutrition status, the strategy to promote nutrition sensitive agriculture in the field and according the agro ecological ou climatic zone. This curruluca should clearly show the link between agriculture (crop, animal, forest, fish productions) and nutrition improvement.

For me the purpose is to change the mindset or the social considerations of the communities around agriculture and nutrition and to show the close interdependance of nutrition to agriculture. To do that, the development workers need to have a basic knowledge and skills on the links between agriculture and nutrition and also the local behaviours on some food consumption like meats, eggs, forest products, etc..

In the projects we implemented in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo, the projects managers realised that the Agricultural Extension Agents are very weak on nutrition promotion while they lead the farmers training on agriculture in a projects with food security and nutrion. We due to link with Health Services to support with nutrition aspects but they are also weak in Agriculture so they don't know how to encourage farmers to produce diversified agriculture production and the aim to improve their nutrition. So we found that it's better to train the Technician on nutrion sensitive agriculture and now we have some good achievements in the field.

This exampek is to show if these agents have had the knowledge from colleges, it would improve their work in the field.

Many thanks

Georges

Bajo mi punto de vista es muy importante integrar los Campus Agricolas con los Campus de Nutrición e incluso de Salud Pública y Ciencias Medioambientales, y eventualmente también los de Tecnologías culinarias y gastronomicas, de modo que la docencia y la investigación universitaria tienda a integrar estas tres grandes areas de forma paulatina. Ello redundaría en un afianciamiento de la sostenibilidad alimentaria sustentada bajo los pilares de la salud pública, el desarrollo económico y rural, el impacto medioambiental y la cultura alimentaria. En el marco de los modelos alimentarios sostenibles sin duda esto supondría un elemento fundamental y en la Universitat Politécnica de Cataluña existen tímidas iniciativas en este aspecto, si bien el Campus de Ingenieria Agrícola de la UPC en Castelldefels todavía no ha establecido conexiones estables con el Campus de Alimentación de Torribera de la Universitat de Barcelona.

The focused questions can be described as, how can we transform the whole food system to be more sustainable by a combination of sustainable production and sustainable.

The Organic Food System Programme (OFSP), will actively contribute to solve the focused question by using the organic food system as a model and living laboratory. The Organic Food System Programme (OFSP) will bring a shift from focus on the agricultural production system, to focus on the whole food chain from primary production until the farm gate and further on to sustainable dietary patterns, thereby linking production and consumption.

The OFSP will bring together scientists, initiatives and stakeholders on international, national, regional and local levels building enabling environments facilitating the involvement and processes to work on  the central question how to make food systems more sustainable. One of the identified work areas is “Education and training” wherein tasks are f.e.  organization of lectures, modules and courses for Universities on sustainable food systems, sustainable agriculture with focus on nutrition and diets as well as conduction of seminars in local regions for stakeholders and consumer organizations. OFSP partners represent agriculture as well as nutrition departments from Universities in Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

This results in a wide range of best practise examples of how to integrate nutrition into the curricula of agriculture education on international, national and regional level with focus on sustainable food systems.

Best regards,

Johannes Kahl

 It is utmost important that curricula/syllabi at all level of education from primary through secondary and tertiary level (s) are sensitized to and harmonized with the need to adress climate change(CC)  through informed policy & action.

At  the University level  the CC related contents needs to be integrated in to both research & course work in a holistic manner. Be it studies related to environmental sciences, health & nutrition,agricultural & forestry, veterinary & life sciences, energy-related disciplines, economics & international trade,  business, gender, conflict  and strategic studies one finds relevance of CC in all these and disciplines beyond these.

When it comes to subdisciplines like epidemiological sciences, natural resource management & biodiversity, Clean Technology & Green Economics etc. more insightful contents are needed to inform these sub-disciplines.

Unfortunately, the body of emperical evidence around  impact of CC on specific gegraphical locales  is either lacking or is sketchy in nature.Lot more therefore, is needed in terms of investment in CC research for collective good.Research studies at graduate & postgraduate level can have dedicated CC related research programs. In this way a core human resource can be developed that can lead the change management under CC at global, regional & national level(s).

Thanks to Mebit for introducing this crucial issue and to the contributors for their ideas and experiences.

I am glad Mebit mentioned the issue of agricultural extension services. He writes "agricultural graduates are employed by government organisations to deliver extension services to the community..." and "agricultural professionals with basic nutrition knowledge working with the community (family farms) will be responsible to promote nutrition sensitive agriculture with other agricultural extension services".

I believe the FAO developed approach of "Farmer Field Schools" could used to promote nutrition sensitive agriculture in the farming community.

The schools were very successful in promoting "Integrated pest management" as shown by an independent evaluation (van den Berg, Wageningen University, 2004). There have been a few pilot experiences led by FAO introducing the promotion of dietary diversity for improved nutrition in FFS, but they have not been upscaled. Unfortunately FAO did not pursue integration of nutrition aspects in the FFS initiative.

I strongly believe the FFS approach woul be a valuable tool for promoting nutrition sensitive agriculture at the farming community level and I definitely think future agricultural professionals should be trained to become Farmer Field Schools facilitators for promoting nutrition sensitive argiculture.

For those interested, the approach is described in a manual (not applied to nutrition alas !) available on the FAO website. 

Marie Claude Dop, nutrition researcher, IRD, France

[email protected]

Dear members,

During the course of our online discussion, I have seen that many critical issues have been raised to be considered when integrating nutrition within the curricula of agriculture education. From all discussion ideas, I understand that almost all participants agreed that integrating nutrition in to the curricula of agriculture education is of paramount importance. The issue mostly raised is the modality on how to integrate it.

I would like also to acknowledge those of you who raised issues to be considered while integrating nutrition in to curricula of agriculture. Some of the ideas forwarded with questions need further clarification. I would like to forward my opinion on the following issues:

1. To what extent will changes in curricula have an influence on agricultural practices, especially in rural Africa where agriculture is mostly small-scale and family oriented? This issue is raised intentionally to reflect the idea that incorporation of nutrition sensitive agriculture in Africa is more effective if we integrate into curriculum at all levels of informal and formal education. Partially I agree with this idea. Partially because if we incorporate nutrition at all level it will be more effective, but this does not mean that agricultural graduates from higher institutions equipped with nutrition competency will be more practical only in societies with large-scale agricultural production. How many agricultural graduates in Africa are employed for large scale agricultural production? As far as I know (from Ethiopian experience) almost all agricultural graduates are employed for government organizations to deliver extension services to the community with family farms. But the extension service provided by agricultural professionals is focused only to improve agricultural production and productivity. Albeit improving productivity (increase availability) is one of the four pillars for food security, it does not give guarantee for nutrition security. That is why we are saying promotion of nutrition sensitive agriculture is crucial. Therefore, agricultural professional with basic nutrition knowledge working with the community (family farms) will be responsible to promote nutrition sensitive agriculture with other agricultural extension services. This can be effective like other agricultural extension system implemented in developing countries.

2. How relevant is the inclusion of nutrition-sensitive agriculture in the curricula of colleges and universities, especially in countries where extension services have been privatized? I would like to reflect my idea on this issue by forwarding a question: Do you mean that there is a country in which agricultural extension system is fully privatized? If yes, what does the national nutrition strategy of that country say? Whenever we are talking about integration of nutrition in to the curricula of agriculture education basically we should consider the nutrition strategy of the country. The other most important point we should consider is that when we proposed this issue as a discussion point this does not mean that we will have uniform nutrition competencies to be integrated in to the curricula of agriculture education all over the world.

In agriculture private farms, are we appreciating mono-cropping only for their economic returns? I recommend all members to read the attached document “Value chain for nutrition”.

I also understand that in countries like India, there is experience of integrating nutrition in to curricula of agriculture. It would be good if those of you who do have such experiences could share them based on each leading questions before the closure of the discussion.

Thank you,

Mebit

Buenos días,

Como experiencia familiar no basta la información que se le transmita al sector educación, tiene que haber una verdadera sensibilización a los que dirigen las labores agrícolas, en todos los ámbitos como por ejemplo desde el agricultor dueño de la parcela hasta políticos de las comunidades.

Es una buena iniciativa el mejorar estos aprendizajes pero también va de la mano con financiamiento para sus pruebas pilotos que comiencen hacer estas personas capacitadas y un buen asesoramiento en todo el proceso de las pruebas para que no haya deficiencia y no se pierda el interés de mejorar la agricultura.

Following the rising health consciousness among urban population and increased necessity of creating awareness about balanced nutrition among large proportion of rural population of world, there exists great necessity of including nutrition related topics into curricula of not only agricultural education institutions but also into other basic sciences curricula. On the present day the issue of global food security has recently emerged as an important societal concern.  Factors such as the prospect of necessity to feed an additional two billion people in the next two or three decades, the presence today of nearly 870 million people who are chronically hungry and malnourished, and the recent social unrest associated with food price increases; all have contributed to awakening of interest in the issues like sustainable agriculture, nutrition security and reduction of postharvest losses.

In several countries already nutrition is part of curriculum in agriculture and allied branches. In India some of the courses such as home science, food science and nutrition extensively deal with almost all possible related topics of nutrition in detail, while other allied courses have basic topics of nutrition in the curriculum. With the rising concern for postharvest losses alleviation there is need to add topics related to “reduction of postharvest nutrient losses and food processing” into curricula.

Including these topics in curricula would ensure considerable difference with work capacity of agricultural workers in enhancing nutritional security by enlightening farmers, rural population and others, towards ways to fulfill essential nutrient requirements of their families from the available food resources. Already several International organizations are working towards the cause to educate about nutritional security and ways to achieve it. Hence we can hope that maximum institutions would find it relevant to include these topics into the curriculum.

I would like to quote my personal experience while working as extension worker. During graduation (B.Sc. Horticulture) we were briefly taught with some of the topics related to food security, source of nutrients, nutrition requirements of average person, malnutrition disorders, role of horticulture in ensuring food and nutrition security. When I started working as Horticulture Extension Officer I had a chance to implement the topics learnt, and encouraged villagers growing kitchen gardens with different vegetables and some fruit plants which could contribute to compensate the nutrition requirement of family and also ensure food safety...

Hence I feel integrating nutrition related topics, also including concepts related to reduction of postharvest nutrient losses and food processing into curricula of agriculture and allied courses would show a considerable impact on work ability of agricultural workers (extension workers) to promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture and also to achieve food and nutrition security.

.........................

Vijay Yadav Tokala

PhD (Fruit Science) Scholar (Punjab Agricultural University, India)

The Postharvest Education Foundation, USA (Trained as Postharvest Specialist)

e-mail: [email protected]

 

Nutrition through agro ecology is safe, low cost and low risk and accessable to producer communities at little or no cost and thus agro ecology must be the back bone of curriculums in schools and colleges if we ar to mitigate hunger, mal nutrition, poverty and climate change

ttp://www.globalresearch.ca/poisoned-food-poisoned-agriculture-getting-off-the-chemical-trea dmill/5485076

A peer-reviewed study published last year in the British Journal of Nutrition, a leading international journal of nutritional science, showed that organic crops and crop-based foods are between 18 to 69 percent higher in a number of key antioxidants such as polyphenolics than conventionally-grown crops. Numerous studies have linked antioxidants to a reduced risk of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases and certain cancers. The research team concluded that a switch to eating organic fruit, vegetable and cereals – and food made from them – would provide additional antioxidants equivalent to eating between one and two extra portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

Moreover, significantly lower levels of a range of toxic heavy metals were found in organic crops. For instance, cadmium is one of only three metal contaminants, along with lead and mercury, for which the European Commission has set maximum permitted contamination levels in food. It was found to be almost 50 percent lower in organic crops. Nitrogen concentrations were also found to be significantly lower in organic crops. Concentrations of total nitrogen were 10 percent, nitrate 30 percent and nitrite 87 percent lower in organic compared to conventional crops. The study also found that pesticide residues were four times more likely to be found in conventional crops than organic ones.

The research was the biggest of its kind ever undertaken. The international team of experts led by Newcastle University in the UK analysed 343 studies into the compositional differences between organic and conventional crops.

The findings contradict those of a 2009 UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) commissioned study which found there were no substantial differences or significant nutritional benefits from organic food. The FSA commissioned study based its conclusions on only 46 publications covering crops, meat and dairy, while the Newcastle University-led meta-analysis is based on data from 343 peer-reviewed publications on composition difference between organic and conventional crops.

There has been for a long time serious concerns about the health impacts of eating food that has been contaminated with petro-chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Over the past 60 years, agriculture has changed more than it did during the previous 12,000. And much of that change has come about due to the so-called ‘green revolution’, which has entailed soaking crops with petrochemicals. Coinciding with these changes has been the onset and proliferation of numerous diseases and allergies.

The global agritech/agribusiness sector is in effect poisoning our food and the environment with its pesticides, herbicides, GMOs and various other chemical inputs. Journalist Arthur Nelson has written that as many as 31 pesticides could have been banned in the EU because of potential health risks, if a blocked EU paper on hormone-mimicking chemicals had been acted upon.

Christina Sarich recently reported that there are currently 34,000 pesticides registered for use in the US. She states that drinking water it is often contaminated by pesticides and more babies are being born with preventable birth defects due to pesticide exposure. Chemicals are so prevalently used that they show up in breast milk of mothers.

Illnesses are on the rise too, including asthma, autism and learning disabilities, birth defects and reproductive dysfunction, diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and several types of cancer. Sarich says that their connection to pesticide exposure becomes more evident with every new study conducted.

Important pollinating insects have been decimated by chemical herbicides and pesticides, which are also stripping the soil of nutrients. As a result, for example, there has been a 41.1 to 100 percent decrease in vitamin A in 6 foods: apple, banana, broccoli, onion, potato and tomato. Both onion and potato saw a 100 percent loss of vitamin A between 1951 and 1999.

In Punjab, India, pesticides have turned the state into a ‘cancer epicentre‘, and Indian soils are being depleted as a result of the application of ‘green revolution’ ideology and chemical inputs. India is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is become deficient in nutrients and fertility.

We can carry on down the route of chemical-intensive, poisonous agriculture, with our health and the environment continuing to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. Or we can shift to organic farming and investment in and reaffirmation of indigenous models of agriculture as advocated by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology (IAASTD) report.

In this respect, botanist Stuart Newton’s states:

“The answers to Indian agricultural productivity is not that of embracing the international, monopolistic, corporate-conglomerate promotion of chemically-dependent GM crops… India has to restore and nurture her depleted, abused soils and not harm them any further, with dubious chemical overload, which are endangering human and animal health.” (p24).

Newton provides insight into the importance of soils and their mineral compositions and links their depletion to the ‘green revolution’. In turn, these depleted soils cannot help but lead to mass malnourishment. This is quite revealing given that proponents of the ‘green revolution’ claim it helped reduced malnutrition. Newton favours a system of agroecology, a sound understanding of soil and the eradication of poisonous chemical inputs.

Over the past few years, there have been numerous high level reports from the UN and development agencies putting forward similar arguments and proposals in favour of small farmers and agroecology, but this has not been translated into real action on the ground where peasant farmers increasingly face marginalisation and oppression.

According to Vandana Shiva, for instance, the plundering of Indian agriculture by foreign corporations is resulting in a forced removal of farmers from the land and the destruction of traditional communities on a scale of which has not been witnessed anywhere before throughout history. On a global level, not least because peasant/smallholder farming is more productive than industrial farming and because it feeds most of the world, this is undermining the world’s ability for feeding itself. It is also leaving to denutrification: not only in terms of specific items containing less nutrients than before, as described above, but because people are being forced to rely on a narrower range of foodstuffs and crops as monocropping replaces a biodiverse system of agriculture.

The increasingly globalised industrial food system is failing to feed the world but is also responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises - not least hunger and poverty. This system – not forgetting the capitalism that underpins it - and the corporations and institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) that fuel it must be confronted, as must the wholly inappropriate and unsustainable urban-centric model of ‘development’ being forced through at the behest of these corporations in places like India.

Organic farmer and activist Bhaskar Save describes how this urban-centric model has served to uproot indigenous agriculture in India with devastating effect:

“The actual reason for pushing the ‘Green Revolution’ was the much narrower goal of increasing marketable surplus of a few relatively less perishable cereals to fuel the urban-industrial expansion favoured by the government. The new, parasitical way of farming… benefited only the industrialists, traders and the powers-that-be. The farmers’ costs rose massively and margins dipped. Combined with the eroding natural fertility of their land, they were left with little in their hands, if not mounting debts and dead soils… Self-reliant farming – with minimal or zero external inputs – was the way we actually farmed, very successfully, in the past. Barring periods of war and excessive colonial oppression, our farmers were largely self-sufficient, and even produced surpluses, though generally smaller quantities of many more items. These, particularly perishables, were tougher to supply urban markets. And so the nation’s farmers were steered to grow chemically cultivated monocultures of a few cash-crops like wheat, rice, or sugar, rather than their traditional polycultures that needed no purchased inputs.”

Even if proponents of the ‘green revolution’ choose to live in a fool’s paradise by ignoring the ecologically and environmentally unsustainable nature of the system they promote and merely mouth platitudes about organic being less productive, they might like to look at the results Bhaskar Save achieved on his farm. They might also like to consider this analysis which questions the apparent successes claimed by advocates of the ‘green revolution’. And they should certainly consider this report based on a 30-year study which concluded that organic yields match conventional yields and outperform conventional in years of drought. That report also showed that organic agriculture builds rather than deplete soil organic matter, making it a more sustainable system.

But why let science get in the way of propaganda? These proponents have already paved the way for extending the the corporate control of agriculture and the ‘green revolution’ with their GMOs and further chemical inputs – all underpinned of course by endless deceptions and neoliberal ideology wrapped up as fake concern for the poor.

Copyright © Colin Todhunter, Global Research, 2015

There are tremendous changes in the life style, family structure, and work ethos. Nutrition is one thing that could help immensely the present and future generations on this planet to continue making their contributions to the society and environment. Thorough understanding of what our bodies need, dependence on place and type of job, quality and safety, and methods of preparation/storage must become an integral part of primary and secondary education for all. This education can not be optional. Even practicals should be included in the course contents.