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Making extension and advisory services nutrition-sensitive

The link between agriculture and human nutrition








  • provide diversified, safe and nutritious foods;
  • improve rural incomes and resilience, and thus enhance access to healthy diets;
  • make foods that contribute to healthy diets available and accessible at national and sub-national levels.
To this end, we must build the capacities of farmers, agriculture extensionists, consumers and others, encourage innovation, investments and enabling policies, and address gender issues. Nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) uses a food-based approach to agricultural development to make the global food system produce better nutritional outcomes.



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    Document
    The Role of Forests, Trees and Wild Biodiversity for Nutrition-Sensitive Food Systems and Landscapes 2013
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    Many contend that in order to overcome the world’s nutrition problems, nutrition must become a crosscutting issue, with concrete commitment and attention from a wide range of disciplines. From this assertion has grown the promotion of nutrition-sensitive approaches to economic growth, development, agriculture and food systems (nutrition-specific interventions target malnutrition directly, whereas nutrition-sensitive interventions target the causes of malnutrition by integrating nutrition into po licies and programs in diverse sectors). There have been repeated calls for the international community to prioritize identification ways to leverage agriculture (and agricultural landscapes) to enhance nutrition (and health). Land use change is an often overlooked driver of change in diets, nutrition and food security, especially for rural communities. The synergies between food systems approaches to food security and nutrition and landscape approaches to integrated biodiversity and forest cons ervation should be explored and built on. Forests and trees support food security and nutrition in a number of ways. Forests and wild biodiversity provide nutritionally important foods (including fruits, vegetables, bush meat, fish and insects), that contribute to the diversity and nutritional quality of diets of people living in heterogeneous landscapes. Forests and trees provide fuelwood, an essential and often overlooked component of the food systems in rural areas across the globe. Forests a nd tree products make invaluable contributions to the income of people living in and around them, often providing the only means of accessing the cash economy, thus enabling access to nutritious foods through purchasing. Forests also sustain resilience: forest products are often consumed more frequently in times of food scarcity and can provide livelihood safety nets. When they reach markets, forest and tree products can contribute to the nutrition-sensitivity of global food systems (approximate ly 53% of the fruit available for consumption globally is produced by trees), especially when market chains are supported and developed in a nutrition-sensitive manner. Biodiversity, forests and trees outside forests also provide an array of ecosystem services essential for the sustainability and nutriton-senstivity of agricultural systems (e.g. pollination, water provisioning, genetic resources). A better understanding of the importance of these relationships, and the spatial scales at which th ey function, is needed to ensure they are not overlooked in policy and practice.
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    Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
    Nutrition-sensitive Farmer Field Schools in Kenya’s Kalobeyei settlement
    Strengthening the capacity of refugees and host communities to produce, process and consume nutritious food in Turkana County
    2020
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    Agriculture is the main livelihood for the majority of Kenyans, contributing 26 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In rural areas, more than 70 percent of informal employment comes from agriculture. However, in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs), recurring droughts and erratic weather patterns have resulted in low productivity, food shortages and price increases, presenting significant roadblocks to nutrition. Despite progress in recent years, one in every four children under five years old (26 percent of children) in Kenya is impacted by chronic malnutrition, while acute child malnutrition rates remain high in the ASALs. Displacement and conflict have further exacerbated malnutrition and food insecurity. Kenya is host to 494 585 refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from South Sudan and Somalia. Among those, 186 000 live in Turkana County, for the most part divided between Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei settlement. Interventions focusing solely on increasing agricultural production have not necessarily translated to improved nutrition or diet. Against that backdrop, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has promoted nutrition-sensitive Farmer Field Schools (FFS) providing community-facilitated training sessions on crop production and livestock, with additional one‑month nutrition modules on producing, processing, preserving and culinary preparation of foods with a high-nutrient content.
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    Project
    Promoting Nutrition-Sensitive Food Systems through a Multistakeholder Approach - GCP/GLO/712/JPN 2020
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    Eliminating malnutrition in all its forms is imperative to breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. To ensure that food systems support healthy diets and better nutrition, it is necessary to strengthen the knowledge base and capacities of key stakeholders. With funding from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) of Japan, FAO is implementing a project in Ghana, Kenya and Viet Nam, with the overall goal of developing the capacities of relevant academic institutions and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in these countries to promote and adopt nutrition-sensitive approaches that contribute to making food systems conducive to healthy diets. The three expected Outputs can be summarized as follows: (i) to improve capacities of nutrition- and food science-oriented universities to transfer skills and competencies on nutrition-sensitive food systems and value chains; (ii) to scale up the capacities of SMEs to adopt nutrition-sensitive business approaches and practices through multistakeholder collaboration, including the private sector, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), and academia; and (iii) to develop an e-learning course targeting SMEs for the improvement of knowledge and skills on nutritionsensitive food systems, which will be disseminated in the targeted countries and worldwide.

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