Chapter 6 AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND HEALTH Connecting the Dots Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Heidi Fritschel, Zhenya Karelina, and Sivan Yosef, IFPRI T


he agriculture, nutrition, and health nexus came to prominence in 2011. With 1 billion people continuing to suffer from food


insecurity, and with vitamin and mineral deficiencies com- promising the nutrition and health of billions of people, the international development community began to ask how much more could agriculture do to improve human well- being if it explicitly included nutrition and health goals? What kind of changes could maximize agriculture’s con- tribution to human health and nutrition, and how could improved human health and nutrition contribute to a more productive and sustainable agricultural system?1


Although the agriculture, health, and nutrition sectors all seek to improve


human well-being, agriculture has rarely been explicitly deployed as a tool to address nutrition and health challenges. With agriculture moving higher on the global agenda, in part because of volatile food prices, there is growing rec- ognition that it is an opportune time to bring together the agriculture, nutri- tion, and health sectors and unleash the potential of agriculture—as a supplier of food, a source of income, and an engine for growth—to sustainably reduce malnutrition and ill-health for the world’s most vulnerable people (see Box 6).


CREATING MOMENTUM AND BUILDING ON IT


Early in the year, about 1,000 leaders and practitioners in the sectors related to agriculture, nutrition, and health came together at an international confer- ence called “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health,”


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