Agriculture for Nutrition: Getting Policies Right

Abstract

The past fifty years have been a period of extraordinary food crop productivity growth, despite rising populations and increasing land scarcity, largely due to the Green Revolution. Despite these massive gains in productivity, malnutrition has persisted for close to a billion people in the developing world. In the specific domain of food systems and agricultural interventions, there is still a great deal of work to orient policy driven by nutritional goals, with a focus on rural women and children. We propose that a better understanding of the connection between a country’s stage of economic transition the process of structural transformation and population-level nutrition outcomes is essential for contextualizing agriculture policies capable of improving a countries unique nutrition challenges. We introduce a typology of agricultural systems that reflect the particular stage of structural transformation of a country and discuss the necessary agricultural initiatives that can potentially reduce undernutrition and micronutrient malnutrition.