The State of Food and Agriculture

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Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

How can we manage farmlands, forests, and rangelands to respond to the triple challenge of the Anthropocene-biodiversity loss, climate change, and unsustainable land use? When managed by using biodiversity-based techniques such as agroforestry, silvopasture, diversified farming, and ecosystem-based forest management, these socioeconomic systems can help maintain biodiversity and provide habitat connectivity, thereby complementing protected areas and providing greater resilience to climate change. Simultaneously, the use of these management techniques can improve yields and profitability more sustainably, enhancing livelihoods and food security. This approach to "working lands conservation" can create landscapes that work for nature and people. However, many socioeconomic challenges impede the uptake of biodiversity-based land management practices. Although improving voluntary incentives, market instruments, environmental regulations, and governance is essential to support working lands conservation, it is community action, social movements, and broad coalitions among citizens, businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies that have the power to transform how we manage land and protect the environment.

Landscapes that work for biodiversity and people

Many of the key problems in food systems are linked specifically to industrial agriculture: uniform crop monocultures relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, industrial feedlots (the infamous "CAFOs") using preventive antibiotics. This form of agriculture is generating negative outcomes on multiple fronts: widespread degradation of land, water and ecosystems; high GHG emissions; biodiversity losses; persistent hunger and micro-nutrient deficiencies alongside the rapid rise of obesity and diet-related diseases; and livelihood stresses for farmers around the world.

From uniformity to diversity: a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems

Nutrition-sensitive agriculture: What have we learned so far?

Undernutrition and micronutrient malnutrition remain problems of significant magnitude in large parts of the developing world. Improved nutrition requires not only better access to food for poor population segments, but also higher dietary quality and diversity. Because many of the poor and undernourished people are smallholder farmers, diversifying production on these smallholder farms is widely perceived as a useful approach to improve dietary diversity. However, empirical evidence on the link between production and consumption diversity is scarce. Here, this issue is addressed with household-level data from Indonesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi. Regression models show that on-farm production diversity is positively associated with dietary diversity in some situations, but not in all. When production diversity is already high, the association is not significant or even turns negative, because of foregone income benefits from specialization. Analysis of other factors reveals that market access has positive effects on dietary diversity, which are larger than those of increased production diversity. Market transactions also tend to reduce the role of farm diversity for household nutrition. These results suggest that increasing on-farm diversity is not always the most effective way to improve dietary diversity in smallholder households and should not be considered a goal in itself. Additional research is needed to better understand how agriculture and food systems can be made more nutrition-sensitive in particular situations.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/34/10657.full.pdf

Production diversity and dietary diversity in smallholder farm households

Review: Meta-analysis of the association between production diversity, diets, and nutrition in smallholder farm households

Many of the world's food-insecure and undernourished people are smallholder farmers in developing countries. This is especially true in Africa. There is an urgent need to make smallholder agriculture and food systems more nutrition-sensitive. African farm households are known to consume a sizeable part of what they produce at home. Less is known about how much subsistence agriculture actually contributes to household diets, and how this contribution changes seasonally. We use representative data from rural Ethiopia covering every month of one full year to address this knowledge gap. On average, subsistence production accounts for 58% of rural households' calorie consumption, that is, 42% of the calories consumed are from purchased foods. Some seasonal variation occurs. During the lean season, purchased foods account for more than half of all calories consumed. But even during the main harvest and post-harvest season, purchased foods contribute more than one-third to total calorie consumption. Markets are even more important for dietary quality. During all seasons, purchased foods play a much larger role for dietary diversity than subsistence production. These findings suggest that strengthening rural markets needs to be a key element in strategies to improve food security and dietary quality in the African small-farm sector.

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Rural food security, subsistence agriculture, and seasonality

Rising global demand for vegetable oil during the last few decades has led to a drastic increase in the land area under oil palm. Especially in Southeast Asia, the oil palm boom has contributed to ...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-resource-110119-024922

Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom

Recent research has analyzed whether higher levels of farm production diversity contribute to improved diets in smallholder farm households. We add to this literature by using and comparing different indicators, thus helping to better understand some of the underlying linkages. The analysis builds on data from Indonesia, Kenya, and Uganda. On the consumption side, we used 7-day food recall data to calculate various dietary indicators, such as dietary diversity scores, consumed quantities of fruits and vegetables, calories and micronutrients, and measures of nutritional adequacy. On the production side, we used a simple farm species count in addition to looking at the number of different food groups produced. Regression models showed that production diversity measured through simple species count is positively associated with most dietary indicators. However, when measuring production diversity in terms of the number of food groups produced, the association turns insignificant in many cases. Further analysis revealed that diverse subsistence production often contributes less to dietary diversity than cash income generated through market sales. If farm diversification responds to market incentives and builds on comparative advantage, it can contribute to improved income and nutrition. Yet, increasing the number of food groups produced on the farm independent of market incentives may foster subsistence, reduce income, and thus rather worsen dietary quality. The results suggest that improving the functioning of agricultural markets and smallholder market access are key strategies to enhance nutrition.

/pdf/farm-production-diversity-and-dietary-quality-linkages-and-2je32ksy0k.pdf

Kibrom T. Sibhatu

Papers

Production diversity and dietary diversity in smallholder farm households

Review: Meta-analysis of the association between production diversity, diets, and nutrition in smallholder farm households

Rural food security, subsistence agriculture, and seasonality

Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom

Farm production diversity and dietary quality: linkages and measurement issues