* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Hunger and poverty have been longstanding problems and recently the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the Foundation) has decided to take a new look at how to curtail the causes and effects of poor nutrition around the world.
A review of earlier publications and projects revealed that the Foundation’s partner organizations have demonstrated that food consumption and good nutrition, though related, are not synonymous. As a result, the Foundation has begun to link Agriculture Development to Nutrition through their project work and programs as a more effective way to combat hunger and malnutrition.
The position paper, entitled “Optimizing Nutrition Outcomes from Investments in Agriculture,” discusses how the Agricultural Development and Nutrition programs are working together to help smallholder farmers gain more access to nutritious food. The paper delineates four areas for complementary investments that will combine the two programs. These four areas focus on developments that increase nutrition from the molecular level up, including biofortification, nutrition education, mycotoxins, and policy and advocacy. These four areas will help fill-in current investment gaps and increase the benefits of the Foundation and its partner organizations.
The first area, biofortification, has been an area that the Foundation has worked with for years, enriching foods such as rice and cassava to improve the health of women and children. With the programmatic shift they will increasingly help develop enhanced varieties of staple foods such as cassava, maize, and rice to provide key nutrients for rural communities whose diets are sustained by non-processed foods.
Under nutrition education the Foundation has partnered with the local organization, Neighborhood House to help spread information and awarded the international organization BRAC for their work, which includes nutrition education. In the future the Foundation will be partnering with organizations that reach out to women farmers to help increase their productivity, which will translate to improved health and nutrition in their families.
The Foundation is also funding partners to study the effects of aflatoxins and other mycotoxins (toxic metabolites produced by fungi in or on foods or feed) on the nutrition of children. Mycotoxins, including aflatoxins, affect food crops around the world and have been shown to cause cancer, liver disease, and immune-system suppression in both humans and domestic animals. The Foundation invested in the Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa in 2011 to find low-cost solutions for the problem. Additionally, the Foundation funded a project with the International Food Policy Research Institute to reduce aflatoxin contamination in Kenya and Mali. In accordance with the partnering of the Agriculture Development and Nutrition programs, the Foundation will work with stakeholders and researchers to understand the effects of the problem on childhood growth and development and generate cost-effective interventions. The Foundation has shown dedication to Global Policy & Advocacy through the work of their team. Working with the Nutrition and Agriculture Development groups, the Foundation is seeking to improve institutions in different countries that would bolster the agriculture and nutrition sectors within their borders through policy and advocacy.
Going forward, the BMGF is seeking to understand the agriculture-nutrition pathway both for country-wide populations and households; improve nutritional outcomes along the agriculture value chain; and measure the nutritional impact of agricultural projects. In the summary of their literature review the Foundation’s position paper on the agriculture-nutrition connection illustrates the importance to women and children in particular:
Women are at the nexus of agriculture, nutrition, and health. As smallholder farmers and caretakers of children, women make daily food production and consumption decisions for their families. Women are much more likely than men to spend additional income on food and healthcare, so increasing women’s income is likely to have a proportionally greater impact on children’s health and nutrition than comparable increases in men’s income. Given the significant time constraints on women, interventions that affect women’s time allocation can help improve their own nutrition as well as that of their children.
Landesa’s observations from the field support the BMGF hypothesis that concentrating on women farmers and improving their ability to produce nutritious food and make consumption decisions is an effective way to reduce poverty and hunger. In addition, Landesa has found, and research shows, that women’s ownership of land has a positive impact on their families’ nutrition:
- In Nepal, children are less likely to be underweight
- In Nicaragua and Honduras, when the amount of land women own increases, their families spend more on food
- When women own a larger share of their household’s farmland, their families allocate a larger proportion of their budget to food
We welcome the BMGF focus on the relationship between women, agriculture, and nutrition and hope that their voice will help raise the profile of this critical but often overlooked connection.
