Value Chains for nutrition

Currently, close to 1 billion people suffer from hunger and food insecurity, defined as not having enough calories to live a healthy life. While this number is staggering, the number of people with poor access to nutritious foods rich in essential micronutrients—such as fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, dairy products, and biofortified staple foods—is even more daunting. Deficiencies in micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron, and zinc affect the survival, health, development, and wellbeing of billions of people; low fruit and vegetable consumption is also associated with increased risk of chronic diseases. Increasing poor people’s consumption of nutritious foods is therefore essential to solving malnutrition in all its forms. Limited availability, economic constraints, lack of knowledge and information, and related lack of demand for nutritious foods are critical factors that limit poor people’s access to such foods. In theory, the agriculture sector could help address this problem by helping at-risk groups generate more income and by making nutritious foods more available, affordable, acceptable, and of higher quality. Agriculture-based development programs that aim to improve nutrition have tended to focus on agricultural production and consumption by producer households. Yet the links among what is produced on the farm, the consumer, and the income received by the producer do not stop at the farm gate. Far from it: food is stored, distributed, processed, retailed, prepared, and consumed in a range of ways that affect the availability, affordability, acceptability, and nutritional quality of foods for the consumer. If, then, the agriculture sector is to play a more important role in improving nutrition, there needs to be a greater focus on what happens between production and consumption. One way of addressing this issue is to adopt “value-chain” concepts, analysis, and approaches. Value-chain approaches are already used as development strategies to enhance the livelihoods of food producers, but they have, to date, rarely been used explicitly as a tool to achieve nutritional goals, and they have not been sensitive to nutritional concerns. This brief seeks to identify if, why, and how value-chain concepts could and should be applied to enhance the ability of agriculture to improve nutrition.