Over the past three years GFAR has been advocating for better nutrition and sustainable agriculture. This included sponsorship of a specific workshop co-hosted with the EAT Stockholm Food Forum following on from the Rome ICN2 in 2014, which examined the metrics require to integrate nutrition and sustainable productivity and lead towards new measures of sustainable consumption that can drive more sustainable and nutritious production. The Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) established across colleges of London University is a leading centre in this regard. Mark Holderness, Executive Secretary at GFAR met recently with the Chair of the LCIRAH Management Committee, Prof. Jeff Waage on this topic.

 

“We agreed on the need to move beyond productivity measures to include the nutrition dimension” said Mark Holderness, adding that “this would be an action that can have profound implications for the values associated with agricultural systems”.

 

Through DFID sponsorship, LCIRAH is supporting competitive grants on developing novel metrics to measure agriculture’s impacts on nutrition. In the Innovative Metrics and Methods for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA) research partnership a theme of interest to LCIRAH is how to put a nutritional value on productivity. The concept is to explore how to create a metric to describe potential nutritional value of a field or landscape. As Dr. Holderness points out “the food environment is very important here: whether food is available, accessible, affordable and appealing. Such measures can be used to compare dietary recommendations with what a country is actually producing - and take measures to adjust this.

 

LCIRAH also provides the Secretariat for the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, which is also looking at data measurement and metrics. There is a clearly-seen need to link agricultural and social protection to nutrition. The Global Panel will be looking at these links and to the SDG on agriculture. They will be producing a policy brief on what constitutes a healthy diet.

 

At GFAR we strongly support to creating a space to collectively engage around sustainable diets, especially in regard to the SDGs and as follow-on from the Global Nutrition Report. We will provide a ready access briefing point for a range of key documents on nutrition, to inform the broader GFAR constituencies on what is now going on in this area. We are doing this by linking with the ag2nut community of practice, a global network of nearly 650 professionals from 49 countries working on issues pertaining to the intersection of agriculture and nutrition. The group is informal, and designed to facilitate information sharing and networking.  We encourage you to join this community.

 

Picture credit: UNSCN