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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Rethinking farm for better health by Shenggen Fan & M S Swaminathan

Rethinking farm for better health by Shenggen Fan & M S Swaminathan

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published Published on Feb 8, 2011   modified Modified on Feb 8, 2011

It is time for us to take a hard look at our agricultural system. We are not yet reliving the food crisis of 2007-08 , but food prices are surging, with global prices for wheat and maize rising by 75% and 60%, respectively, from June to December 2010. Meanwhile, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are going hungry.

The obvious solution to many of our food-related ills is to accelerate agricultural growth. But if we focus simply on boosting agricultural production, we may be setting our sights too low. New findings suggest that agriculture has the potential to do much more to improve people’s health and nutrition than we have generally recognised.

To begin with, we need smarter agricultural growth. Different patterns of agricultural growth have different consequences for human health and nutrition. We need to look at how current agricultural subsidies and investments affect farmers’ decisions about what to grow — and ultimately consumers’ health and nutrition.

Does growth in cereal crops have a bigger nutritional impact than increased production of fruits, vegetables, or eggs and dairy products? If people already consume diets heavy in rice or wheat, then a more diverse diet would do more to improve their nutrition status. Does growth in export crops help improve poor people’s incomes, health, and nutrition? Not if poor people don’t grow those crops — which they often don’t , given the expense and technical complexities of producing for the global market.

The agricultural growth that does most for poor people’s health and nutrition is the growth that takes place on poor people’s farms, and policies can do much more to encourage growth there.

We can also work to build an agricultural system that produces greater volumes of healthier foods. Some local and underutilised crops, like millet and moringa, offer great promise in this regard. Agricultural scientists have traditionally focused on making crops and livestock more productive and on reducing susceptibility to disease , but by incorporating nutrition as a goal, researchers and breeders could, over time, provide farmers with a wide range of healthier products.

Work has already begun on adding nutrients like iron, vitamin A and zinc to staple crops through biofortification . These efforts will allow consumers to consume more nutrients even if their diet patterns remain the same.

There are significant opportunities for improving health and nutrition during transport, storage, and processing. In India, inadequate and nonexistent storage facilities lead to the contamination and loss of around 10% of the food produced — a tragic level, given the energy and resources farmers have devoted to producing this food and the suffering of those who go hungry .

Building the infrastructure to safely transport and store food may sound mundane , but it is essential to the operation of the whole food system.

Food processing is one point where the nutritional quality of food can be enhanced through, for example, fortification. This represents an opportunity for the private sector to add value and increase profits while contributing to consumers’ nutrition — but only if consumers are willing to pay for more nutritious products.

Here is where the public sector can make a big difference by educating consumers about nutrition and promoting changes in behaviour that lead to better nutrition and health.

It is also time to look more carefully at other ways of using the food system to promote health. People with diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis often suffer from undernutrition; so providing them with food as well as drugs is essential.

Moreover, foods exist to treat any nutrient deficiency — the challenge is to ensure that the people who need such foods get access to them. Of course, nutrition and health interventions will still be necessary, but many such interventions would benefit from incorporating solutions linked to food and agriculture — the sector that is the main source of livelihood for the majority of the world’s poor.

Those of us who work in the fields of agriculture , nutrition, and health must begin by communicating with each other — something that has rarely occurred in the past. We need to consider concrete ways of working together to achieve our shared goals, examining the synergies and trade-offs between different development strategies.

And in the face of rising food prices and stubbornly high rates of hunger and malnutrition , we need to design a new paradigm for agricultural development, one in which agricultural growth is used not only to increase food production and reduce poverty, but also to enhance nutrition and health. After all, an agricultural system that does not do all it can to provide enough healthy food for all is at risk of missing the point.

(Fan is director general, International Food Policy Research Institute, and Swaminathan is Unesco Chair in Ecotechnology)

The Economic Times, 7 February, 2011, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/7440789.cms


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