This infographic has been prepared by GAIN based on the blog Keeping food flowing within African food systems by busting policy myths penned by GAIN's Executive Director Lawrence Haddad commenting on the paper "Essential non-essentials": COVID-19 policy missteps in Nigeria rooted in persistent myths about African food supply chains.
Poor people in the global South eat diets with few nutrient-dense foods, putting children and adults alike at risk of malnutrition. Strategies to improve their diets will look different depending on whether current access to such foods is mostly via home production or via purchase and on whether poor families actually want to consume more of specific nutrient-dense food groups.
To operationalize the great food system transformation and ensure its sustainability, five areas of research and action require more attention: economic and structural costs; political economy; diversity of cultural norms; equity and social justice; and governance and decision support tools.
Animal-source foods (ASF; meat, poultry, fish, dairy, and eggs) have attracted considerable attention for both their role in diets and their environmental impacts - and their production also plays an important role in livelihoods, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The Food Systems Dashboard brings together extant data from public and private sources to help decision makers understand their food systems, identify their levers of change and decide which ones need to be pulled. The Global Burden of Disease study showed that unhealthy diets contribute to 11 million deaths per year.
How should the CGIAR's research programme be focused to make it as impactful as possible given the changes being faced by the world's population over the next 10 years? This viewpoint suggests a firm emphasis on research needed to unlock the potential of food systems to deliver improved nutrition, environmental sustainability and stronger livelihoods, with a focus on the tradeoffs and synergies therein.
The need for evidence to inform nutrition program design and implementation has long been recognized, yet the generation and use of evidence for program decision making has lagged. The purpose of this study was to assess the strengths and areas for improvement of current population-based and targeted fortification programs.
Lawrence Haddad, Corinna Hawkes and colleagues propose ten ways to shift the focus from feeding people to nourishing them. The purpose of this paper was to set out a new global research agenda for nutrition. It is aimed mainly at researchers, funders and governments, but has important messages for all stakeholders.
