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Emerging Issue: Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Extension Services
- 1. MEAS Symposium 2015 June 3, 2015 “Leading Issues in Agriculture Extension Service - Part II” Emerging Issue: Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Extension Services Valerie Rhoe Davis Senior Technical Advisor, Agriculture – Gender & Nutrition Catholic Relief Services
- 3. Nutrition-Sensitive AES & Ag-Nutrition Pathways 3 • Agriculture Production-Nutrition Pathway: increasing high- quality food availability and access (nutrient-rich & safe through own production • Agriculture Income-Nutrition Pathway: income from agriculture wages / commodity sales being used to purchase more nutrient- rich foods or services or products that support nutrition (health services, WASH services, etc) • Women’s Empowerment-Nutrition • Agriculture affects women’s social status and empowerment • Agriculture affects women’s time • Agriculture affects (and be affected by) women’s health and nutritional status
- 4. Crop diversification (nutrient- dense/ Biofortification) Livestock rearing practices Seed/ Crop storage Small-scale irrigation Food safety Nutrition-Sensitive Lens
- 5. Food Quantity & Quality matters - Aflatoxin Control Pre & Post-harvest techniques Ag Production-Nut Pathway CRS is supporting the use of PICs in 12 countries; consider the nutritional gains….PICS Team Purdue- D.Baributsa CRS using PICs in 12 countries; So lets consider the nutritional gains….
- 6. 6 Animal - Human health interaction… Thinking outside of our box – what can EAS promote to improve human health along with livestock rearing practices? Ag Production-Nut Pathway
- 7. Ag Income-Nut Pathway Not just ↑ income; influencing its use for nutrition-related behaviors. Coupling Agriculture Extension with Nutrition Messages & Female Empowerment 7 Interventions that improve couples communication within the household such as CRS’ Faithful House Approach (Burundi) or USAID Zambia Mawa’s Area Association approach, we’ve noticed more equitable decision & joint planning on the use of income earned
- 8. THANK YOU
- 9. Disclaimer This presentation was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. The contents are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
Editor's Notes
- Thank you John Good Morning! I’m going to take the next few minutes to bring to the forefront the emerging issue of encouraging and supporting the development of nutrition-sensitive agriculture extension services. Who in this room is aware of or have been following the conversation, the research, and practitioners experience around integrating agriculture and nutrition (raise your hand)……….. This helps me understand the level of knowledge in the room This emphasis of looking at how agriculture can improve nutrition outcomes or how agriculture has been around for quite some time, but it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Then in early 2011, IFPRI’s Vision 2020 program held the conference “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health” in New Delhi, India which catalyzed and pushed this movement forward and since this conference, there has been a growing emphasis on understanding this linkage and designing agriculture programs including extension with a nutrition-lens.
- If you would look at agriculture using a nutrition-lens instead of an agriculture-only lens, it would shape the way we design projects, the way we develop research questions, the way we identify technology to be developed and promote, and yes even the way extension services are carried out.
- Over the past 5 or so years, there’s been work done initially by IFPRI in India to start understanding how agriculture could effect nutrition outcomes and through this work a conceptual framework was developed that laid out a set of Ag-Nutrition Pathways along with what evidence existed or did not exist, which there is quite a lot of gaps. These pathways have evolved over time, but in essence the 3 broad pathways have remain the same. How agriculture production can contribute to nutrition, how farm households can use agriculture income for improving nutrition outcomes either through the purchase of more nutrient-rich foods or purchases that support nutrition such as health care, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) services, and how agriculture effects women’s empowerment in 3 different areas.
- These 3 pathways should be part of our conceptual thinking as we look at supporting nutrition-sensitive agriculture extension services. We don’t have time to have this conversation now, but what if we looked at only 1 element of a pathway---the ag production element---what would we see? We would likely see an increased emphasis on crop diversification, not only diversification into different staple and cash crops, but a strong focus on nutrient-rich crops like beans, vegetables, fruit trees, and biofortified crops…. We would also likely see a strong focus on safety around crop production and the mitigation of toxin and livestock rearing practices, which we will delve into both a minute. With this more nutrition-sensitive view of production what knowledge, skills, technologies would extension agents need, what resources do they need, what platforms would be needed to deliver nutrition-sensitive ag extension services are just a few of the questions we need to explore
- Lets look at 2 examples. There is growing body of evidence that is linking aflatoxins and stunting. We all know what aflatoxins are? In my most simplistic explanation is a fungi that affects many of the core crops that our farmers in grow – maize and ground nut being 2 those crops. However, there are pre and post-harvest technologies and techniques that can be used to mitigate the growth of aflatoxin. The real benefit is when you find a ag practice or technology that not only addresses the nutrition issue, in this case aflatoxins, but also agriculture issue. So for example, CRS has programming in 12 countries that in various forms support the use of Purdue Improved Cowpea Storage (PICS) bags for mitigating insect infestation in a number of crops, but last year Purdue published 3 articles that raised the potential benefits of using PICS in mitigating aflatoxin growth. If we, I mean CRS, is already using PICS in a number of countries for agriculture purposes, can we explore how we bring in the nutrition considerations that PICS could address…If the growing evidence continues to support these initial findings, then what does this mean for ag extension services…what knowledge would extension agents need, how would they support their farmers in adopting such type of pre-and post-harvest practices/ technologies; how much emphasis do we need to place on nutrition in the transfer of this knowledge as the technology has an ag purpose?
- The 2nd example will have us focusing that nutrition-lens on livestock production and rearing practices. This lens will help identify issues and constraints we haven’t considered in the past that ag extension services could provide knowledge, techniques, and technologies to address. In particularly, issues on animal-human health interaction. Has anyone here heard about environmental enteropathy? Again my very simple explanation is that environmental enteropathy is caused by chronic exposure of children to bacterial pathogens in their environment from human and animal feces, particularly chicken fecal matter. In many of the communities where ag extension services is delivered, the children are sitting on the ground and like any child they are placing their fingers into their month and thereby ingesting the dirt which is full of chicken feces. The end result is that their bodies’ are unable to absorb nutrients so even if they are eating the right type and quantity of food they can’t absorb the nutrients that moms and dads are feeding them. There is growing evidence in linking environmental enteropathy to stunting. Our WASH and nutrition colleagues are tackling this issue, but its also an ag issues related to animal rearing practices that ag extension agents can address. If we take a nutrition-sensitive ag extension approach what are the practices and technologies that we can promote to address this issue. Are their practices that not only addresses this nutrition issue but also increases production and income…creating a win-win for all. I’m going to show a picture of an idea not to say that CRS is using this practice, but I’ve included it here so we can start thinking outside of our box…thinking about nutrition sensitive practices…to be honest with you, after having a similar discussion with a several groups using this picture, ideas began to flow so I hope that even a crazy idea like this will help us to start thinking about how ag extension services can support nutrition through ag practices.
- Before I end this morning and as a precursor for this afternoon’s panel on “Harnessing the Power of Extension to Transform Gender Roles and Improve Household and Community Nutrition Outcomes” , I will talk briefly around the ag income pathway. By .placing a nutrition and gender-lens on agriculture income, it is shifting our approach and messages that field agents are bring to male and female farmers. With a nutrition and gender-lens, agriculture is no longer just concern about increasing income, but the use of that income for nutrition-related purchases and behavior adoptions. How do we couple agricutlure extension with female empowerment and nutrition messaging to influence intra-HH decisions on the use of agriculture income for improving nutrition outcomes? Many implementing partners are trying different approaches and methods to get at this issue. For CRS, we are experimenting with a number of approaches. One that actually came from CRS’ health programming is the Faithful House Appraoch…the operations research around this approach has shown secondary effects on improving intra-household decision-making power around the use if income. The 2nd approach, referred to as Area Association, is being testing in Zambia through the USAID Mawa project. I’ll discuss the Area Association approach in this afternoon’s session.
- So with that brief introduction to this emerging issue, I look forward to our discussions during this symposium