“Nutrition is the natural bridge between agriculture and health.” —Namanga Ngongi, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)


entrepreneurs. Private companies can engage people in communities—even poor communi- ties—as producers by empowering smallholder farmers to increase the quantity and quality of their production. They can engage community members as consumers by expanding access to high-quality products and running educational campaigns on nutrition and health. And they can engage them as entrepreneurs along the value chain by providing market information, access to financial services, and solutions to overcoming infrastructure gaps.16


institutions to work together. It is also impor- tant to devise incentives to get them to do so and to devote the time and resources necessary to work across sectors.


New and existing institutions can exclude some vulnerable people, such as the rural poor, minorities, and indigenous populations, so it is crucial to ensure that the most vulnerable have a voice by including the beneficiaries of programs in decisionmaking. Women are frequently among those excluded, so it is important to look care- fully at how policies and programs affect women.


Getting the Message Out Communicating how agriculture, nutrition, and health are linked is a crucial task, because the links are not always obvious or intuitive for policymakers or program decisionmakers. For instance, it is crucial to translate the results of evaluations so that they can be easily understood both by senior decisionmakers in development agencies and government institutions, as well as by program managers in the field. Although nutrition outcomes, for example, may seem self-explanatory to nutrition specialists, people who work in agriculture often do not understand the implications of such outcomes for their own work.17


Governance and Inclusion Levers Bringing agriculture to bear on improving nutri- tion and health requires government leadership at all levels—from national to provincial to local. But political leaders do not always understand that establishing good health and nutrition goes far beyond improving human well-being and has enormous implications for economic develop- ment. Consequently, getting leaders interested in leveraging agriculture for nutrition and health can require advocacy and capacity strengthen- ing at all levels. The importance of nutrition, in particular, is still not well understood in many places, so it may be helpful to draw on the tools of marketing to “brand” nutrition so that it gains increased prominence and to recruit passionate individuals, or policy “champions,” to promote nutrition policies and programs.


Changes in policies and programs are not enough to get people in different ministries and


Finally, it takes time to change, so programs need to be designed with this in mind.


Are there specific ways to use governance and inclusion levers to better align the goals of the agriculture, nutrition, and health sectors? One option is to make cash transfers to farmers conditional on improving the integrity of ecosys- tems and the health of crops, to pay farmers for ecosystem services, and to invest in infrastruc- ture for healthy food systems. Another is to use public food procurement—a policy tool available to all levels of government in all countries—to push toward healthy agrifood systems. Food pro- curement for schools, hospitals, and government offices, for example, could help build regional markets for healthy, sustainable foods.


Science and Technology Levers Over the years almost all agricultural research has been directed toward increasing production


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