FOOD: Is it easy to grow what is good for you?
NEW DELHI, 14 February 2011 (IRIN): The debates at a three-day International Conference in New Delhi on Leveraging Agriculture (give landbruget et lift/skub fremad) for Improving Nutrition and Health were peppered (krydret) with phrases like “think multi-sectorally”, “inter-sectorally”, and “break down the silos”.
Participants pointed out that “nutrition and agriculture talk to each other, and so do nutrition and health”, but “health has never told agriculture what it needs,” because the links between the three sectors seemed to have broken down.
Veteran health, agriculture and nutrition experts – and there were quite a few of them among the estimated 1.000 government officials, academics, aid workers, donors and private sector representatives who attended – remarked that these discussions were at least three decades old.
Symptoms of the breakdown (i linket mellem sundhed, landbrug og ernæring) surfaced in 2007-08, when the world was jolted by the food price crisis, said David Nabarro, the UN Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition.
The crisis, sparked by various factors that influenced both the supply and demand side of food availability, pushed at least a billion people into hunger.
The fact is, “agriculture, health and nutrition are tightly wedded,” said John Hoddinott, a senior researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank and organizer of the conference.
Agriculture is the primary source of calories and nutrients worldwide, and in developing countries is often the major source of personal income, as most people are either subsistence farmers or farm labourers.
The links between nutrition and health are obvious (indlysende). “Health status is… affected by the consumption of goods that directly improve or worsen health. Nutritional status affects health – for example, severe vitamin A deficiencies (mangel på a-vitaminer) lead to blindness,” wrote Hoddinott, who developed a framework conceptualizing the links.
Women take centre stage
(Danskeren) Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a professor at Cornell University and a 2001 Food Prize laureate, while trying to distil the talk into what needed to be addressed, emphasized “access to food, especially for the poor, often the smallholder farmer (småbønder) or labourer, who in most cases is a woman”.
Women’s health was a central feature in most of the debates.
Various speakers pointed out that a woman’s well-being shaped the future of her children, especially her daughters, the mothers of the next generation.
The future prosperity of the country often also rested on the shoulders of women, as agriculture not only created economic growth, but children who ate well often went on to earn better incomes.
Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, in the UK, cited research showing that women usually got the short end of the stick (forbigås) when subsidized farming inputs were made available, and suggested experimenting with gender-based quotas.
However, encouraging women to participate in farming meant they would have to spend more time in the field away from their children, which called for innovative solutions and commitment from government and civil society, said Meera Shekhar, a leading health and nutrition specialist at the World Bank, adding: – We need to build a movement.
Jay Naidoo, a former minister in South African president Nelson Mandela’s cabinet, said the initiative should be led by civil society and grassroots organizations, whose voice he found lacking at the conference.
Home grown initiatives
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