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Two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health, economic, and social disruptions caused by this global crisis continue to evolve. The impacts of the pandemic are likely to endure for years to come, with poor, marginalized, and vulnerable groups the most affected. In COVID-19 & Global Food Security: Two Years Later, the editors bring together contributions from new IFPRI research, blogs, and the CGIAR COVID-19 Hub to examine the pandemic’s effects on poverty, food security, nutrition, and health around the world. This volume presents key lessons learned on food security and food system resilience in 2020 and 2021 and assesses the effectiveness of policy responses to the crisis. Looking forward, the authors consider how the pandemic experience can inform both recovery and longer-term efforts to build more resilient food systems.
Currently 868 million people are undernourished and 195 million children under five years of age are stunted. At the same time, over 1 billion people are overweight and obese in both the developed and developing world. Diseases previously associated with affluence, such as cancer, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, are on the rise. Food system-based approaches to addressing these problems that could enhance food availability and diet quality through local production and agricultural biodiversity often fall outside the traditional scope of nutrition, and have been under-researched. As a consequence, there remains insufficient evidence to support well-defined, scalable agricultural biodiver...
This book critically assesses the role of agrobiodiversity in school gardens and its contribution to diversifying diets, promoting healthy eating habits and improving nutrition among schoolchildren as well as other benefits relating to climate change adaptation, ecoliteracy and greening school spaces. Many schoolchildren suffer from various forms of malnutrition and it is important to address their nutritional status given the effects it has on their health, cognition, and subsequently their educational achievement. Schools are recognized as excellent platforms for promoting lifelong healthy eating and improving long-term, sustainable nutrition security required for optimum educational outco...
The challenge of addressing food security is not simply a matter of ensuring that all people have enough food—or energy (calories)—to live a healthy life. A much more daunting problem is to ensure that poor people have access to nutritious1 and high-quality diets. Typically, poor households subsist on monotonous staple-based diets; they lack access to nutritious foods, such as fruits, vegetables, animal source foods (fish, meat, eggs, and dairy products), or wild foods of high nutrient content. Lack of diversity in the diet is strongly associated with inadequate intake and risks of deficiencies of essential micronutrients (Ruel 2003; Leakey 1999; Arimond et al. 2010). The resulting deficiencies have farreaching health and nutrition consequences, both in the short and the long term. Economic constraints, lack of knowledge and information, and related lack of demand for nutritious foods are critical factors that limit poor populations’ access to such foods.
Food systems are changing rapidly in low- and middle-income countries. These countries seek food-based solutions for better nutrition and health of all people while addressing challenges of sustainability, inequity, and malnutrition. The CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) works to develop evidence to support policies and actions for healthier food systems. A4NH is a consortium of seven managing partners, led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). This report summarizes 2019 research results from A4NH, across five research flagships, and highlights the partnerships through which research has led to outcomes in five focus and more than two dozen other partner countries.
India, a country with high concentrations of poor and malnourished people, long promoted a cereal-centric diet composed of subsidized staple commodities such as rice and wheat to feed its population of more than a billion. Today, however, dietary patterns are changing. Policy makers, researchers, and health activists are looking for ways to fight hunger and malnutrition in the country. As they shift their focus from calorie intake to nutrition, neglected foods such as pulses (the dried, edible seeds of legumes) are gaining attention. Pulses for Nutrition in India: Changing Patterns from Farm to Fork explores the numerous benefits of a diet that incorporates pulses. Pulses, including pigeonpe...
IFPRI’s Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division (PHND) and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) have conducted research since 2003 on the critical links between nutrition, health, and agriculture. This evaluation considers the impact of the work carried out through 2016, looking at the research strategy, engagement, capacity building, and impact on programs and policies and global dialogue. Findings suggest that the Diet Quality and Health of the Poor program has been successful in developing and sharing valuable research, knowledge, and data, and has brought new issues and approaches to partners and stakeholders. Through a range of projects, the program has effectively engaged with stakeholders, partners, and governments to support capacity enhancement and to help shape national interventions to improve nutrition.
We use data from 52 countries on child stunting, poverty, determinants of food security, environmental health, and quality of maternal and child care to carry out a cluster analysis of country typologies. The purpose is to identify where agriculture-led interventions might address binding constraints to progress in improving nutrition outcomes and to identify how existing research on the links between agriculture and nutrition in particular country contexts may or may not be representative.
In recent years, the world has seen unprecedented attention and political commitment to addressing malnutrition. Milestones such as the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, the Lancet Maternal and Child Nutrition Series, and the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) have marked the rapid rise of nutrition on the global policy and research agenda. These developments reverse years of relative neglect for nutrition. Undernutrition is a global challenge with huge social and economic costs. It kills millions of young children annually, stunts growth, erodes child development, reduces the amount of schooling children attain, and increases the likelihood of their being poor as adults, if they survive. Stunting persists through a lifetime and beyond—underweight mothers are more likely to give birth to underweight children, perpetuating undernutrition across generations. Undernutrition reduces global gross domestic product by US$1.4–$2.1 trillion a year—the size of the total economy of Africa south of the Sahara.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended local, national, and global food systems, and put the Sustainable Development Goals further out of reach. But lessons from the world’s response to the pandemic can help address future shocks and contribute to food system change. In the 2021 Global Food Policy Report, IFPRI researchers and other food policy experts explore the impacts of the pandemic and government policy responses, particularly for the poor and disadvantaged, and consider what this means for transforming our food systems to be healthy, resilient, efficient, sustainable, and inclusive. Chapters in the report look at balancing health and economic policies, promoting healthy diets and nutr...