Food inequality and the malnutrition that results from it are two significant challenges the global community faces in its journey to a healthy population. To combat these challenges, governments must focus on providing the high-quality, nutritious food people need to grow and thrive.
Nutrition-led agriculture is a strategy that considers a crop’s nutritional value as a primary factor in determining whether farmers cultivate it. This approach has a positive effect on food security and public health as a whole.
What Is Nutrition-Led Agriculture?
Many factors help to determine the type of crop a farmer cultivates, from supply and demand to risk, costs, land availability and local needs. In nutrition-led agriculture, the primary factors determining what farmers grow are the crops’ health benefits and nutritional values. The core principles of nutrition-led agriculture are:
- Sustainability: Using sustainable agriculture practices that keep soil healthy and balanced is crucial to maintaining the production level of nutrient-dense foods.
- Crop selection: Farmers must choose crops high in essential nutrients, like minerals, healthy fats, proteins and vitamins.
- Nutritional diversity: Nutrition-led agriculture focuses on consumers’ health, so it’s important to grow a range of crops to meet diverse nutritional needs.
- Community education and involvement: The community involves itself through education programs, helping to plan agricultural practices to ensure crops meet their dietary needs and cultural preferences.
- Evaluation: Continuous monitoring and evaluation are essential to measure sustainability and the impact of crops on local health outcomes.
- Food system integration: For practices to be sustainable and their effects measurable, every actor within the food system must be aware of the mission for sustainability and nutrition. Farmers, policymakers, health professionals and logistics companies must work together.
- Resilience and adaptation: Collaboration and a commitment to growing a diverse set of crops suitable for the local climate will help food systems remain stable through economic hardships, decreasing dependence on imports.
By applying these core principles, farmers can produce sustainable quantities and better-quality food for their communities. A wider variety of foods will also be available in the local markets, helping create a balanced, nutrient-rich diet.
The Importance of Food Security
In recent years, around 2.33 billion people have faced food insecurity globally, creating a human rights crisis. Four pillars hold up food security. These pillars are:
- Availability, meaning there is enough food for the population
- Access, meaning people have the physical and financial means to obtain food
- Utilization, meaning people can prepare and consume food safely
- Stability, meaning all pillars are consistent and unaffected by societal and economic fluctuations
Nutrition-led agriculture plays a key role in improving food security.
Sustainable agricultural practices — such as growing diverse crops, using soil-conscious farming methods, and educating people about why these goals are critical — play a major role in improving food accessibility, availability and stability. Education empowers people to utilize food properly. All these elements work together to increase food security and nutrition in communities that employ these agricultural practices.
The Role of Agriculture in Nutrition and Health
Farming methods and crops determine the quality and diversity of food available in an area, impacting the nutrients inhabitants receive. Nutrition-led agriculture focuses on the dietary needs of the people who consume crops. It also educates the population on what they need to be healthy, helping them fight malnutrition.
Many sustainable practices that factor into nutrition-led agriculture, like diverse planting and soil nutrient management, also contribute to biofortification, which boosts the nutrients in the plant. For example, adding zinc or iron fertilizers to the soil can increase the content of these minerals in the final crop harvest.
Strategies for Success in Nutrition-Led Agriculture
The success of nutrition-led agriculture depends on the utilization of sustainable practices, such as crop rotation and organic farming, to keep the soil producing for generations. Biofortification is also crucial.
However, it’s not enough to create the crops themselves. To maintain food security, the entire food system needs to focus on access and affordability.
Challenges in Implementing Nutrition-Led Agriculture
Implementing nutrition-led agriculture requires support from all sectors of the food system. Government and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) must create educational programs about nutritional needs and inform people about the benefits of this agricultural focus.
Policy gaps and bureaucratic red tape are often challenges to implementation. It’s vital to identify and eliminate policies that create delays or discourage people from trying. Replacement policies should include incentives for the adoption of nutrition-led agriculture, such as tax breaks and governmental assistance. These policy changes will also help address concerns about resource limitations.
The Future of Nutrition-Led Agriculture
Advances in technology are making the future of nutrition-led agriculture bright. Recent innovations include precision farming, a management strategy that utilizes digital crop data to help decision-making processes, and vertical farming, in which farmers grow plants in stacks. Both strategies create much more flexibility in a farm’s location. Instead of far outside the city, local market vegetables can come from a building down the street.
Global initiatives for sustainability and ending food insecurity support nutrition-led agriculture as a viable method for meeting these goals.
Support Nutrition-Led Agriculture
Nutrition-led agriculture embodies the sustainable practices, educational needs and resilience that vulnerable communities across the globe need to maintain food security and create better health outcomes. Everybody can do their part to support nutrition-led agriculture practices, whether governments create policies, organizations provide education, or individuals make nutritional decisions for themselves and their families. Learn how you can get involved today.
