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A food systems approach to aquaculture: Re-orienting farming systems for improved nutritional outcomes
1. A food systems approach to
aquaculture: re-orienting farming
systems for improved nutritional
outcomes
Dr. Patrick Dugan
WorldFish
2. Why is the health community becoming
interested in Agriculture?
• 165 million children suffer from stunted growth globally, most
in LMICs
• A paper in the Lancet reviewed all evidence related to direct
interventions to prevent child malnutrition.
• 10 interventions were identified as “evidence based” and
worthy of scale up.
• Scaling up these interventions to 90% coverage in the top 34
countries of stunting burden only reduces stunting by 20%...
• What more is needed?
Bhutta, The Lancet, 2013
3. Increasing income alone has only mild to moderate
associations with child nutritional status
Ruel, 2013
4. Pathways from Ag to Nutrition
https://www.spring-
nutrition.org/sites/default/files/publications/briefs/spring_understanding
5. Dietary diversity, socioeconomic status,
and risk of micronutrient deficiencies
Source: Semba Journal of Nutrition,
2012; 142: 143S-156S
6. Dietary diversity in many settings is limited
Percent of children 6-24 months with minimum dietary diversity*
fed >4 food groups (WHO rec)
Country % With minimum
dietary diversity*
Bangladesh 45.2
Ethiopia 7.1
Haiti 29.2
India 16.0
Kenya 28.7
Uganda 23.1
Zambia 18.9
*WHO’s Minimum dietary
diversity indicator >4
food groups or more of
seven food groups.
7. Dietary diversity is associated with better
child growth
Source: Arimond and Ruel, Journal of
Nutrition, 2004; 134:2579-85
Dietary diversity tertiles by country
Child height
for age
8. And is important for the prevention of
deaths from chronic disease
Ezzati M, Riboli E. N Engl J Med
2013;369:954-964.
9. Ag. Policies need to better reflect the diets
that we will result in healthy populations.
“There is a growing disconnect between agricultural policy and
contemporary nutritional challenges. It has been slow to respond
to the persistent problem [nutritional deficiencies]. Agricultural
policy is still heavily biased towards staple grain productivity
improvement…while the diet diversity needs of the middle class
as well as the poor are not adequately addressed.”
-Prabhu Pingali
Source: Pingali, Food security, 2015,
7:583-591
11. Findings from the paper
• Farm production diversity was positively associated with
dietary diversity in some situations…but not all.
• Smallholder access to agricultural markets and off-farm
employment positively associated with household dietary
diversity
• Clearly the relationship is complicated and more research is
needed.
• Greater agriculture diversity does not necessarily mean that
every individual farm should increase production diversity.
12. Aquatic agricultural settings offer unique
opportunities for diversification of systems
•Aquatic environments amenable to production of many
diverse foods
•Fish is a key food produced in such settings
• Nutrient-rich, with many bioavailable nutrients not
found in other parts of the diet (zinc, iron, vit. A)
• Low carbon emissions associated with production
than livestock.
•Complex dynamics between ecosystems and agricultural
production
13. What opportunities exist to modify aquaculture
farming design to improve nutrition?
Photo by Holly Holmes
14. Opportunity 1: Homestead pond
polyculture with micronutrient rich small
fish
Photo by Holly Holmes
15.
16. Opportunity 2: Pond connected to rice field;
polyculture with micronutrient rich small fish
17. Opportunity 3: Gill net for empowering women
in aquaculture system
Photo by Holly Holmes
18. Opportunity 3: Gill net for empowering women
in aquaculture system
• Developed in response to need for woman-friendly ability to
harvest fish- especially mola
• Mola are small micronutrient rich fish and require frequent
harvesting. Traditionally harvesting a male-dominated activity
yet men often are away in the fields.
• Underlying principle: if women harvest themselves they are
more likely to consume/feed to children.
• Gill net: allows women to operate from bank of water body.
Different nets were tried, this worked the best
• Early trials with gill net found it to be user friendly and well
accepted: further research needed to determine impact on
consumption.
Photo by Holly Holmes
19. Opportunity 3: Gill net for empowering women
in aquaculture system
Photo by Hossain, Mohammed Zakir
20. Opportunity 3: Gill net for empowering women
in aquaculture system
Photo by Hossain, Mohammed Zakir
21. Opportunity 4: Pond dike farming as an
integrated aquaculture-agriculture system
Photo by Holly Holmes
22. Opportunity 4: Pond dike farming as an
integrated aquaculture-agriculture system
• Integration of on-farm activities for improved diversification of
production and thus diets of rural households
• WorldFish promotes
• the cultivation of vitamin A rich vegetables (e.g. orange
sweet potato) on pond dykes
• The combination of vegetables promoting the
consumption over a longer period of time
• Multifunctional farming systems results in:
• increased availability of non-staple foods that provide
complementary nutrients to those from fish and greater
dietary diversity, year-round (Islam et al. 2011).
• More efficient and sustainable use of natural resources
• Surplus production can be sold to increase household
income.
23. Conclusions
• The importance of agricultural systems for human nutrition has
been neglected for too long
• Many reviews have noted the need for more rigorous evidence
about ‘what works’ in agriculture to reduce undernutrition: at
present all we have is a handful of rigorous studies
• Small modifications in farming design can have large impacts
on the performance of production systems, increasing
consumption and enhancing the potential benefits to nutritional
outcomes
• Greater investment is needed in research:
• Exploring different pro-nutrition farming systems models that
deliver the foods associated with good nutrition and health
outcomes
Stunted growth is more than just growth, it’s brain development.
We know that improving income helps to reduce stunting some…but that the association is quite weak.
A number of authors have put together conceptual frameworks to understand pathways between agricultural productivity and nutritional status that expand the traditional notion which focuses largely on income.
It’s clear that other pathways including WHAT is produced (production diversity) and who is involved in producing it (especially women), and how the money is spent (especially % on healthcare) all have important implications for the nutritionals status of children and women.
What we don’t understand well yet is how important each of these pathways is in different settings; the framework however provides a useul approach to thinking about and studying these relationships.
Dietary diversity is a concept of critical importance in the nutrition world and follows a predictable association with socioeconomic status in many countries which you can see here.
As income increases, households tend to diversify diets, often buying an increasing amount of animal source foods, vegetables, and processed foods.
This has positive implications: as a result of greater dietary diversity the risk of deficiencies of vitamins and minerals decreases.
Clearly it also has negative implications: greater consumption of sugar and other processed foods including sugar sweetened beverages can increase the risk of overweight and obesity.
In most low income countries dietary diversity is limited, especially in the diets of infants and young children.
Here you can see the results of 7 studies that examined the proportion of children who were fed according to WHO’s minimum dietary diversity indicator, which is the % of children who consume foods from four or more food groups in the past 24 hours. Given that WHO defines this as an indicator of the MINIMUM number of food groups, more work is needed to improve the diversity of child’s diets.
Poor dietary diversity has important implications for child development and human capital.
In multiple settings, it has been shown that the diversity of diets, especially of children and women is associated with risk of stunting and other indicators of undernutrition.
In this figure, the average height for age z score (representing child height) is presented by dietary diversity tertiles and an increase is observed in all 11 countries; greater dietary diversity is associated with greater child growth even after adjusting for wealth.
In the CG system we focus a great deal on trying to improve dietary diversity and this is a big reason why we are concerned about this indicator.
This slide is from the Global Burden of Disease Project and lists the top causes of dead globally related to behaviors and diet.
Low consumption of diets low in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish are important causes of death.
Diversifying diets has benefits for children but it also has important benefits for their parents and grandparents too.
Clearly, however, a lot of agriculture research and policy still focuses on staple grains. A number of recent publications have echoed the sentiment expressed here which calls for greater
This recent paper generated as it is one of the few explorations between diversity of production among smallholder farmers and their consumption. The authors examined this relationship with household data from four settings: Indonesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi.
How to harness the potential of agriculture and aquaculture to have nutritional benefits? Some examples are examples of ways to redesign farming systems in aquatic systems are given next.
Nutrient-rich small fish, such as Mola (Amblypharyngodon mola), were traditionally often caught on flooded paddy fields and open waters. Due to increasing pressure on natural stocks, such as through changing land-use techniques and overfishing, small fish stocks and thus the consumption of nutrient rich small fish has declined. The inclusion of Mola (‘mola’, Amblypharyngodon mola) in homestead pond polyculture systems in Bangladesh is an attempt to provide more nutrient-rich fish for consumption and sale. Usually, in polyculture systems, a number of different species of similar large size and with a long rearing time are cultivated. In Bangladesh, research has shown that the simultaneous cultivation of micronutrient-rich, small and large fish, mainly native carp species leads to an overall increase in total production of a higher nutritional quality, without use of additional inputs.
This results in a sustainable intensification: small fish breed in ponds and their harvest period is shorter than for large fish; multiple, frequent harvests are possible, thereby increasing access to critical nutrients, as well as providing regular additional income
To illustrate:
Data on different production systems in Bangladesh has been taken (n >2500) to (1st) identify the number of different species cultivated in different production systems. (2nd) The frequencies of species in each production system were taken to calculate a weighted, aggregated nutrient profile of production systems by (3rd) using nutrient profiles (per 100 gr edible parts) of different fish species. Results show, here exemplary illustrated by Zinc, Calcium, and Iron, that through the introduction of SIS into traditional polyculture systems the micro-nutrient output is significantly improved.
Benefits of carps and mola polyculture in ponds connected to rice fields:
• increased rice (10%) and straw (15%) yield
• two crops produced from the same land at the same time, with relatively low costs and labor
• no need for application of insecticides as the fish feed on insects and pests in the rice fields
• fish movement in the rice fields reduces the growth of weeds
• as rice field dry out during the winter months, they provide a healthy habitat for fish when they become flooded during the monsoon • most ponds connected to rice fields are close to homesteads, which is convenient for women who take care of them and for harvesting fish for home consumption.