Dr. Bukar Ali USMAN, mni

New York, May 30 2012  6:05PM
Sustainable development will not be achieved unless hunger and malnutrition are eradicated, the United Nations food agency warned today in a new report.

“We cannot call development sustainable while this situation persists, while nearly one out of every seven men, women and children are left behind, victims of undernourishment,” said the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, in a news release.

In the report – entitled Towards the future we want: end hunger and make the transition to sustainable agricultural and food systems – prepared for the UN Sustainable Development Conference (Rio+20), which will be held in Brazil next month, FAO stresses the need to address the flaws in the current food system so that hundreds of millions of people in developing countries have the means to produce or purchase the food they need for their own consumption…

Read at :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131217170859.htm

Importance of Food as Key Provider of Vitamins and Nutrients

Dec. 17, 2013 — While dietary supplements can help some people meet their nutrition needs, eating a wide variety of nutrient-rich foods is the best way for most people to obtain the nutrients they need to be healthy and reduce their risk of chronic disease, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Two newly published studies in Annals of Internal Medicine, and an accompanying editorial, indicate there is no clear benefit for most healthy people to consume vitamin supplements.

“These findings support the evidence-based position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that the best nutrition-based strategy for promoting optimal health and reducing the risk of chronic disease is to wisely choose a wide variety of foods,” said registered dietitian nutritionist and Academy spokesperson Heather Mangieri. “By choosing nutrient-rich foods that provide the…

Training manual on household based pond aquaculture, homestead gardening and nutrition awareness

Currently many farming households face health and economic risks because of problems in malnutrition as a result of lack of knowledge and training, improved technologies and processes in farming. From the beginning of the CSISA-BD project, the World Fish Center has initiated introduction improved practices and technologies in rural farming to address malnutrition in farming households. In order to address the problem discussed, as a part of this project it has been felt there is a lack of skilled trainers and training materials. Based on field experience and existing training manuals, the WFC has developed training material and manuals on ‘Household Based Pond Aquaculture, Homestead Gardening and Nutrition Awareness with respect to the environment and socio-economic risks faced by fish farmers. These manuals have been developed for government and non-government training staff and fish farmers. During the project…

Taking a blood sample from a came (photo credit: Eric Fèvre).

‘African camels could hold important clues to controlling the potential spread of a respiratory disease transmitted by the animals.

‘For many years African camels have lived with the disease and the risk of it spreading to humans is still low. But more research is necessary to understand the disease better. This is even more important given the confirmation that the chains of transmission of the human Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection originated from contact with camels. MERS was first recognised in 2012.

Camels are an extremely important source of livelihood, nutrition and income in Africa. They are especially common in arid and semi-arid areas of the continent, particularly in East Africa. But having these animals around may not be risk-free for humans.

‘However, there have been no human cases of MERS diagnosed in Africa. This could be…

By Alice Marks

Skimming the eye across the colourful chart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is easy to spot a couple which are intrinsically and directly linked to agriculture, but a closer look reveals that they are in fact all linked to agriculture. A healthy global agricultural sector underpins and supports so many aims of the SDGs that its development will be important for their overall success. As sustainable agriculture is essential for sustainable food systems and livelihoods, here is a breakdown of how agriculture, farming and nutrition fit into the first 7 goals

1. No Poverty

Over 70% of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas, and rely heavily on agriculture for their survival and livelihoods. According to the World Bank, evidence shows that GDP growth generated in agriculture has large benefits for the poor, and is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty…

On the last day of the year, some insights on the year in agriculture in the US, research on farming and rural communities, and a look at the growing place of agricultural biotechnology in the food system.

As a planet, we all had a moment of hope as the Paris climate talks seemed to bring some possibility of action in the right direction but climate disruption is already impacting food production and food securityin many communities. A plan to combat climate change must include a plan for food production and the understanding that conservation and agriculture are not separate and opposing goals. Rather, initiatives that focus on both are optimal.

While it is encouraging to see the efforts to reduce food waste on the consumption side, much remains to be done on reducing postharvest losses which are particularly significant in developing economies: great reads on that

The Global Nutrition Report 2015: Actions and accountability to advance nutrition and sustainable development, has as a key theme the notion of tracking progress on tackling undernutrition as an important factor in holding donors, governments and other institutions to account. The data in the report itself plays a role in monitoring progress. At present, data allowing the monitoring of impact and reach of nutrition-specific interventions is limited. Lack of consensus on data, metrics and methods make monitoring difficult to undertake, analyse and compare, although improvements are being seen in actions to track nutrition.

Approaches to tackling undernutrition need to be multi-sectoral, which makes tracking both nutrition spending and progress towards targets difficult. As the Global Nutrition Report 2015 states, countries make progress when actions from multiple levels converge and reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. Nutrition-sensitive approaches, which seek to both reach a direct nutrition goal as well…

Infographic on antibiotic resistance and what steps the agriculture sector can take to tackle this global challenge (credit: World Health Organization).

The Lancet yesterday (18 Nov 2015) published a new series titled Antimicrobials: sustainable access and effectiveness in recognition of the World Health Organization’s inaugural World Antibiotic Awareness Week, 16 to 22 November 2015.

The theme of the global campaign, Antibiotics: Handle with Care, reflects the overarching message that antibiotics are a precious resource and should be preserved. They should be used to treat bacterial infections, only when prescribed by a certified health professional. Antibiotics should never be shared and the full course of treatment should be completed – not saved for the future.

The five papers in the Lancet Series cover access to effective antimicrobials as a global challenge, understanding the mechanisms and the drivers of antimicrobial resistance, maximizing access to achieve appropriate human antimicrobial use in low- and…

By Katrin Glatzel

When you think of clean water and hygienic toilets, it’s not usually concerns about nutrition that come to mind first. Well, you might want to reconsider.

Poor sanitation, limited hygiene practices and unsafe water sources expose billions of people, particularly children and other vulnerable groups, to a wide range of preventable diseases and consequently high mortality rates in many countries. According to UNWater and the World Health Organisation, two and a half billion people do not have access to basic sanitation and 783 million people have no access to clean water.

Diseases and Diarrhoea lead to preventable child deaths

Credit: UN, Albert Gonzalez Farran

As a result, around four million people die from waterborne diseases every year; just over two million of these deaths are due to diarrhoea and one million of those are children under the age of five. Despite that these young children suffer…

How many of us are motivated by fear every single day? We’d like to think that we’re lucky enough to live in a society where we don’t feel afraid. In contrast to inhabitants of many war-torn regions we are unlikely to be shot as we drive to work; when we’re sick we have the luxury of modern medical attention (Obamacare not withstanding); and we can buy almost any food we fancy, at any time of year and feel safe in our food choices… or can we?

Food safety is an underlying assumption of dietary choice within the USA. We buy food based on three major factors: taste, price and nutrition. Safety isn’t a defining factor in choosing between the cheese quesadilla, the chef’s salad or the T-bone steak because most of us have rarely experienced significant negative health effects as a consequence of food choice (aside from the annual…

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has prognosticated a possible economic recession in 2016. This possible worst outcome of the present slump is something I am sure President Muhammadu Buhari would do everything to prevent. No president wants to be known in history as a ‘Recession President.’ However, this undesirable economic situation can sometimes become a reality, even in spite of the best efforts… Read more on http://www.africa-newsroom.com/press/financing-development-under-president-buhari-the-role-of-pan-african-development-finance-institutions-dfis?lang=en

Did you read my former posting on this blog ?

UNICEF CHIEF URGES ACTION TO STOP UNFOLDING CRISIS FOR CHILDREN IN THE SAHEL.

Yes?  Then you know that UNICEF’s Executive Director Anthony Lake “called today on the global community to take action to prevent one million children in the Sahel region of West and Central Africa from becoming severely malnourished.“

He said : “We must begin at once to fill the pipeline with life-sustaining supplies to the region before it is too late.” and “underscored the urgency to act before the ‘lean season’ when food runs out due to inadequate rain or poor harvests, which can start as early as March in some of the countries across the Sahelian belt.“

I fully agree that UNICEF and its partners must be prepared to get sufficient amounts of ready-to-use therapeutic foods to treat severe acute malnutrition. …

Image courtesy of [rakratchada torsap] at FreeDigitalPhotos.net Tackling undernutrition is, as the full extent of malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies becomes apparent, critical for human wellbeing and development. In the past we have tended to focus, with limited success, on ensuring people have enough to eat, on making the world “food secure” and on fighting hunger but now we are beginning to understand that if we are to lead healthy, productive lives, it is also about having enough to eat of the right mix of nutrients. And unlike hunger, often viewed as a more common problem in developing countries, poor nutrition, whether through famine or feasting, can be universal.

In 2008, when The Lancet published their Series on Maternal and Child Undernutrition, global policymakers began to take notice and the Scaling-Up Nutrition movement was born. Today this momentum is continuing and the new Sustainable Development Goals focus more on nutrition…

This Friday (30^th October) marks the 6^th annual Africa Day for Food and Nutrition Security (ADFNS). This year the day will be commemorated in Kampala, Uganda, where, at the 15^th Ordinary Session of the African Union Summit in 2010 it was first declared. Since then the day has been commemorated in Malawi, Ethiopia, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In 2014 at the 23^rd session of the AU summit, African Heads of State committed to ending hunger by 2025 and reducing stunting to 10% in the same period. This commitment is one of seven forming the Malabo Declaration. ADFNS provides an opportunity to reaffirm this goal and report on progress that has been made in reaching this commitment, among other objectives. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation 2015 State of Food Insecurity in the World report asserts that, as projected for 2014-2016, the…

According to ILRI’s Nadhem Mtimet, livestock provides around 60% of gross domestic product (GDP) in Somaliland and the sector employs over 70% of the population. Livestock producers, he says, are very market-oriented, and the country exports around three million small ruminants each year to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East.

Ensuring high quality and disease-free animals for export is thus critical to the development of the Somalia’s northern states of Somaliland and Puntland. There is also a growing need to balance the production of more animals with the sustainable management of the dry areas in which the animals are reared. Staff of the IGAD Sheikh Technical Veterinary School (ISTVS) and Reference Centre already see the need for more action and research on issues around soil and land degradation, dryland management and adaptation to climate change. It is not enough to just produce more animals, they…

By Katy Wilson

According to the recently released 2015 Global Hunger Index from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), hunger levels remain “serious” or “alarming” in 52 of 117 countries, despite many countries having reduced their hunger scores by at least half since 2000, including Brazil, Azerbaijan and Mongolia. The highest levels of hunger were recorded in Central African Republic, Chad and Zambia. Several new studies and reports suggest that failure to meet countries’ food needs requires the transformation of our food systems and a shift to sustainable farming.

Global Harvest Initiative’s 6^th annual Global Agricultural Productivity Report (2015 GAP report), released last week states that for the second year in a row the rate of global agricultural productivity growth (1.72%) falls short of the level needed to feed an estimated 9.7 billion people by 2050 (1.75%). Regionally, the rate of agricultural productivity growth is particularly…

As an outcome of the Rio+20 conference in 2012, countries agreed to embark on the process of developing the Sustainable Development Goals to carry on the work of the Millennium Development Goals. Set to be adopted at a UN high-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly in September this year, the SDGs have come under recent criticism.

15 years ago, 189 UN members adopted the Millennium Declaration and the 8 Millennium Development Goals, comprising of 18 quantified targets and 48 statistical indicators (later expanded to 21 targets and 60 indicators). The MDG Report 2014 discusses progress so far in achieving the MDGs. The SDGs aim to continue the economic, social and environmental vision the MDGs first set out to achieve but the proposed SDGs number 17 in total with 169 targets and an estimated 300 or so indicators. In a blog post last year we discuss the 17 proposed…

On the 19^th July after 7 days of discussions, the UN General Assembly’s Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed an outcome document containing 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets. The OWG, which comprises of 30 representatives from the five UN regional groups nominated by UN Member States, and the commitment to create the SDGs came out of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. The OWG’s primary responsibility has been to create the proposed SDGs and this proposal will be submitted to the UN General Assembly for consideration at its 68th session on the 24^th September 2014.

Taking place at the UN headquarters in New York, OWG 13, chaired by Macharia Kamau of Kenya and Csaba Kőrösi of Hungary, was extended by a day due to overnight negotiations. In particular discussions around the issues…

“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of history’s cliff”. This was a sentence uttered by former vice-president of the US, Al Gore at the recent Hunger Nutrition Climate Justice conference in Dublin in reference to the impact of climate change on global food security, poverty, inequality and resource scarcity. Thinking about this statement, one might think it means we are blindly stumbling towards our inevitable demise but it is not because we are blind to the challenges we face nor to the solutions rather it is our unresponsiveness in addressing them which Al Gore was referring to.

While the former vice-president often delivers a rousing speech around the dangers of climate change, his speech this time was targeted to a broader development agenda. We are not only witnessing extreme levels of hunger, malnutrition and widespread poverty but any progress we have made towards eradicating these injustices will be lost if…

By Katrin Glatzel

As climate negotiators and delegates from nearly 200 countries gather in the beautiful city of Bonn for a last time before the international climate negotiations take place in Paris in early December, much is at stake. Not only do we hope to reach an agreement that will put our world on course to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, we also need to reach an agreement that makes the poorest of the poor more resilient to weather extremes in the coming years.  This is a tall order. And as if it wasn’t already enough, we also need to overcome poverty and hunger. “Good news” is that these two challenges go hand in hand.

©UNICEF Ethiopia

The two biggest challenges we are confronted with this century is managing climate change and ending poverty and hunger. As Lord Stern recently put it: if we fail at one…

Terry Marsden revisits the opinion paper he wrote earlier this month on a common food policy and reflects on the ‘new structures question’. If you would like to comment on this please join us in our discussion on #commonfoodpolicy on Twitter or Facebook.

Since my first intervention calling for a radical reorganisation of the CAP, both in terms of individual responses and further reading, I am increasingly struck by the significant weight of evidence calling for more policy integration around food. This includes various EU Foresight reports. In debating these proposed changes and policy needs it is perhaps important not to rush into concerns about changes in actual policy instruments and structures, but first to more fundamentally consider and debate some of the principles which lie behind a ‘new deal for food’ in Europe. One key area is to re-position rural development concerns right at the heart of the debate…

The Global Hunger Index is out, and while it shows the level of hunger in developing countries has fallen by 27% since 2000, it also highlights the disturbing link between armed conflict and severe hunger. With the current displacement of thousands of migrants fleeing warzones in Africa and the Near East, a global approach to ending hunger is urgently needed – one which includes the rehabilitation and revitalizing of national agricultural systems, says Thomas Price, Senior Programme Officer at the GFAR Secretariat.

In 2014, to mark 40 years of international research, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is facilitating a series of events that highlight the ways in which livestock research advances the global development agenda, specifically for sustainable food and nutritional security, economic well-being and healthy lives.

Under the theme ‘Livestock-based options for sustainable food and nutritional security and healthy lives’ the ILRI side event at the the Tropentag 2014 International Conference will highlight products of livestock research contributing to the global development agenda, from generating research products (performing) to targeting research investments and policymaking (informing) to reshaping whole livestock production systems (transforming).

The side event is from 1400-1530 on 18 September – see full details.

Participants will include ILRI partners and alumni from Germany and the wider European community.

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This week, ILRI staff are participating in the Tropentag 2014 International Conference in Prague (17-19 September 2014). There is…

By Katrin Glatzel

With just over two months left till a new international climate change agreement is being finalised in Paris, the Montpellier Panel is launching a new report today, “The Farms of Change: African Smallholders Responding to an Uncertain Climate Future”, which addresses some of the key challenges to climate-proof Africa’s smallholder farmers.

As we all know, two of the greatest challenges of the 21^st century are the increasing demands for food, water and energy from a growing population and – climate change. Agriculture and smallholders are central to both, perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. Africa is already battling against the impacts of climate change and smallholder farmers are amongst the most vulnerable with the least capacity to adapt. Rising temperatures signal more extreme weather events that will put lives and livelihoods at greater risk, increasing smallholders’ vulnerability to drought, famine and disease. And whilst…

By Katrin Glatzel

It is not uncommon that young people don’t want to follow in their parents’ footsteps, especially if it means a low income, food insecurity and back-breaking work.

For the agriculture sector in Africa, this is a big challenge. With over half of the population working in agriculture, the average African farmer is now between 50 and 60 years old. At the same time, the need for greater agricultural production is acute. In order to feed the projected population of 2050, global food production will need to increase by around 60%.

Africa is uniquely positioned to meet this challenge. An estimated 60% of the world’s undeveloped arable land is in Africa, there is great potential for increased irrigation and crop productivity, and a rapidly increasing population of young people are ready to transform their continent.

However, to the majority of young people, the idea of working in agriculture…

Smallholder farmers in Uganda (photo credit: John Recha/CCAFS).

How do men and women livestock keepers understand or perceive resource ownership? What implications have these perceptions on food security in smallholder settings? These questions formed the basis of a study in three value chain countries in which the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish is working.

Resource ownership provides a means of empowerment for smallholder households and productive resources are essential to the livelihoods and food security of the world’s rural poor. Further, gender-equal ownership of resources is considered key to increasing agricultural productivity, equity and food security. For example, this brief notes that ownership of assets increases the bargaining power of women and their authority within the household and the community. However, there has not been much research about local understandings of ownership particularly in the Global South and research is also lacking on how concepts of ownership affect food…

A woman milking a cow in Tanga, Tanzania (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu)

Written by Alessandra Galie
One of the main goals of gender research in the CGIAR research program on Livestock and Fish is improved nutrition. This is also one of the 4 pillars of the program’s gender strategy and one of the 3 system level outcomes of the CGIAR. Good nutrition in the first 1000 days of a child’s life and for lactating mothers is particularly important for the child’s cerebral and physical development. Good nutrition is therefore considered the basis to improve livelihoods and general well-being. Because higher levels of gender inequality are associated with higher levels of both acute and chronic under nutrition (FAO 2012), gender research in research program focuses on enhancing the empowerment of women livestock keepers and consumers.

Animal source foods (ASF) have been shown to offer enormous potential for nutrition in developing countries…