Key messages from Learning Event No. 8: "How we can reshape food access and consumption patterns to ensure nutritional needs while fostering healthy and sustainable eating habits worldwide?", at the 2012 Agriculture and Rural Development Day in Rio de Janiero.

1. How can we reshape food access and
consumption patterns to ensure nutritional
needs while fostering healthy and sustainable
eating habits worldwide?
Rapporteur: Catherine Zanev, WFP

2. Key messages
• Please give up to three bullets on key messages from your Learning Event
1. Make access to nutritious food the number one priority, through two key
measures: 1. Empowering small farmers to produce enough healthy food for
their communities and strengthening local markets; 2. Provide the most
vulnerable with the foundation to move towards sustainable livelihoods and
long-term food security through food and cash-based safety nets.
1. Support inclusive, health-promoting and resilient agriculture and food
systems, such as organic and agro-ecological agriculture, and
sustainable diets, that are accessible to poor farmers and communities, while
protecting and conserving the natural resources and ecosystems on which
livelihoods, health and food security depend.
2. Shift to holistic planning and decision making for multi-stakeholder and
multi-sectoral policies that deliver co-benefits and meet nutrition, health,
environment and farmers’ needs and objectives.

3. Evidence of impact
• Please give up to three bullets on evidence of the impact of your case example – ideally this should be
quantitative data
1. Brazil’s social protection programme “Zero Hunger” dramatically reduced hunger by
ensuring access to food at a cost of about 1% of GDP. In comparison, in countries where
it has been assessed, the cost of hunger is estimated to range between 2 and 11 % of
GDP. Social protection also delivers broader sustainable development benefits. For
example, in sub-Saharan Africa girls’ enrolments in primary schools went up by 28%
through school feeding.
2. Health promoting agriculture and food policies that promote the production of fruits,
vegetables and legumes and low consumption of saturated fats from animal origin will
have a positive impact on health while reducing GHG emissions. Reducing 30%
consumption of livestock products would decrease the burden of ischemic heart disease
by about 15% in the UK and by about 16% in Sao Paulo while contributing to a 30%
reduction of emissions from the agriculture sector.
3. Organic agriculture can increase yields of African smallholder farmers by over 100%, and
also provides an alternative to the use of toxic synthetic pesticides. For example the
project PLAGSALUD in Central America promoted sustainable agriculture practices and
banned several pesticides, resulting in reduced health impacts of use of pesticides
(human intoxication rates went from 20% to 15%).

4. Going to scale
• Please give up to three bullets on messages on what is needed to take your case to scale e.g. What policy
change is required ? – What investment is needed ?– and who needs to take action?
• Decreasing under-nutrition while promoting healthy and sustainable food production
systems and consumption patterns and waste reduction will require strong multi-sectoral
and multi-stakeholders partnerships worldwide.
• Agriculture policies should create incentives to reward products and production methods
conducive to healthy diets. This requires setting up objectives and indicators that will be
jointly established and measured by the Agriculture and the Health sectors. Indicators of
sustainable agriculture, food and nutrition security should also include nutrition and health
outcomes, food access and dietary quality, and health impact assessments of food and
agriculture policies.
• A potential Sustainable Development Goal on food needs to focus on access to healthy,
nutritious and culturally and contextually appropriate food, not just calories produced, as
targets or indicators of success.