IYAFA: Interview with Shakuntala Thilsted, global lead for nutrition and public health at WorldFish

One of the pillars of IYAFA’s Global action plan is on food security and nutrition. How do you think the International Year contributes to acknowledging, strengthening, and promoting the contribution of small-scale fisheries and aquaculture to healthy diets?

The most important link between small-scale fisheries and healthy diets comes from the engagement of women in the sector. Women’s contribution to consumption and to all phases of the small-scale value chain is extremely high, even if in most cases it is invisible, because data on small-scale fisheries and aquaculture is uncapable of demonstrating their true importance to sector. Therefore, it is impossible to talk about healthy food systems without highlighting the role of women. The first step towards achieving healthy diets starts by understanding and adapting household consumption, and, in every part of the world, women are the main household member responsible for buying, cleaning, preparing meals, while often they are the last to eat. Much more can be done in terms of informing consumers about what is and what is not healthy and on ensuring access and affordability of healthy foods.

Diets have always changed, and changes happen for many reasons, so food consumption is always evolving, the first step towards a healthier diet is getting people understand the benefits from a diverse and healthy diet. After that we need to ensure that healthy diets are affordable, accessible, but mainly desired by the population. I believe that engaging the families is one of the best entry point you can find, you can explain to parents, to grandmothers, and to communities the importance of aquatic foods for children’s development, in both physical and cognitive terms, people will accept it. Everyone wants to support their child to be healthy and smart, so this is an important to promoting aquatic foods in regions where their consumption is not usual or is not high. Schools and governments have an important role to play in child growth as well, not only parents.

In recent years, more studies are being conducted that demonstrate how nutritious aquatic foods are for humans, how can we ensure that research connects to policy and programs supporting the consumption of foods produced by small-scale producers, to guarantee that benefits extend beyond food and nutrition security but also to equitable livelihoods?

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a game changer in this matter. All organizations and agencies are calling for entry points through government programmes, I can cite school feeding and mother and child programmes as good examples. In these cases, the government can be the main actor in insuring that these programmes include nutritious and diverse foods, including aquatic foods, where they are appropriate, for example in the great lakes in Africa and in the wetlands of Asia. Nevertheless, governments cannot do it all by themselves, the government needs support and I believe public-private partnerships are essential for that. Governments need to have high-quality products that can be included in these programmes and that are accepted by the communities. The private sector needs to be engaged in providing the products, which need to be affordable, safe, regulated, but also approved, funded, and supported by governments.

As a successful example of partnership, I can mention the pilot programme led by WorldFish and USAID in Odisha (India). The programme promoted the inclusion of small fish powder in hot cooked meal for 3-6-year-old children and dried small fish for pregnant and lactating Women and 14-18-year-old adolescent girls. The pilot has been implemented in 50 Anganwadi Centers of Kaptipada block, Mayurbhanj district during 2021 and based on the feedback and acceptance received from the community, as well as enhanced understanding on nutritional outcomes from aquatic foods collected from the pilot, this nutrition-sensitive approach can be adopted and scaled to ameliorate the nutrition scenarios across Odisha.

What recommended actions should be reflected in the IYAFA outcome document in order to increase small-scale aquatic food consumption?

Small-scale producers are extremely relevant. To include aquatic foods in healthy diets and nutrition programmes, you need to have a stable aquatic food supply from small-scale fishers and fish farmers. What is important to understand is that we need to bring them together in groups to be able to provide a constant and stable aquatic foods supply at scale. That doesn’t mean we need large-scale producers, what is needed are mechanisms for small-scale producers to come together and aggregate supply. When small-scale producers come together and have incentives that support their activities, we see benefits in every aspect - better incomes, better livelihoods and working conditions and consequently more balanced and diverse diets for the whole community. To achieve that, we need active governments, who can guarantee support to small-scale producers, information for the communities about healthy aquatic foods in order to stimulate demand, and mechanisms for ensuring that aquatic foods are affordable and accessible to all, leaving no one behind.

Biography

Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted is the Global Lead for Nutrition and Public Health at WorldFish, a One CGIAR entity. She was awarded the 2021 World Food Prize for her ground-breaking research, critical insights, and landmark innovations in developing holistic, nutrition-sensitive approaches to aquatic food systems. She was awarded the 2021 ArrellGlobal Food Innovation Award for research innovation. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and Vice Chair of the UN Food Systems Summit 2021: Action Track 4 - Advance Equitable Livelihoods, and also a Food Systems Champion. In 2022, Shakuntala was appointed co-chair of the EAT-Lancet 2.0 Commission. Shakuntala holds a PhD from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University,Denmark. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.