BY DEANNA OLNEY,BESS CASWELL, RENUKA SILVA AND MALIKA FERNANDO Poor quality diets are the leading cause of disease worldwide and a primary cause of all forms of malnutrition. Improving diets could save one in five lives annually. However, the extent and nature of the problem varies across contexts and population groups. More than 100 countries use or are developing food-based dietary guidelines
BY LAWRENCE HADDAD, TON HAVERKORT AND NAMUKOLO COVIC Over the holiday period the nutrition community—and the world—lost a powerful champion: Dr. Ferew Lemma. Dr. Ferew was the Senior Adviser on Nutrition to the Ethiopian Minister of Health for the past 10 years. The first time we met Dr. Ferew over 10 years ago, he was deeply disappointed over some recently
BY ANISHA MOHAN South Asia is one of the regions of the world most vulnerable to climate change impacts. Agriculture, which much of South Asia’s population depends on for a living, is particularly vulnerable; estimates show that 10%-50% of the region’s crop production could be lost by the end of the century due to global warming. Aiming to develop evidence-based strategies
BY BJORN VAN CAMPENHOUT,ELS LECOUTERE AND DAVID SPIELMAN During the past several years, we have been working intently on a field experiment with smallholder farmers in Uganda randomly assigned to get access to information in the form of short engaging videos. Because women and men are both involved in farming in the typical Ugandan farm household, we took a particular interest in the gender
BY SWATI MALHOTRA,FUTOSHI YAMAUCHI AND HIROYUKI TAKESHIMA As many developing countries face enormous food system challenges such as the double burden of malnutrition, with both undernutrition and obesity on the rise, Japan’s rare nutrition success story—it has achieved zero hunger and is also unaffected by rising overweight—offers a positive example to the world. It owes this success partly to a
BY KIBROM ABAY, HOSAM IBRAHIM, CLEMENS BREISINGER AND ALI ABDELHADI Global overweight and obesity rates have almost tripled since 1975 and are expected to continue rising over the next few decades (Shekar & Popkin, 2020). This trend is alarmingly steeper in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared to high-income countries, where the same rates are gradually declining (Ng et al., 2014, Shekar
BY JABOURY GHAZOUL At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, 26 countries pledged to introduce new policies to foster more sustainable and less polluting agriculture. “Nature-based climate solutions” were hyped as a means to make “food and farming sexy.” All of this is in the abstract. “Agriculture” itself is an abstraction that glosses over the diverse and complex realities of farming. International
BY SWATI MALHOTRA Over the last few years, global food systems have been disrupted by conflict, economic shocks, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing global food insecurity and malnutrition. A Jan. 19 policy seminar examined the implications of fragile agrifood systems and the findings of FAO’s The State of Food and Agriculture 2021 (SOFA) report. The report analyzes the vulnerabilities of food supply chains