nutrition security

This article elaborates on how including behavioral economics can influence consumer choices. While the article is focused on the developed world, the authors argue that the lessons learned might be directly applicable to developing countries. Traditional approaches have treated food consumers as if they were making deliberate and calculated food decisions, leading to policies that provide more detailed health information, pricing incentives and direct prohibitions. However, this is often not the case. »

This article explores the myths and realities surrounding the relationship between environmental sustainability, food security, and nutrition. According to the authors, policymakers and researchers alike often make inaccurate assumptions about technological innovations, gender, biofuels, and smallholder farming. Such sustainable food security and nutrition “myths” pose a significant challenge to the effective design and promotion of more environmentally-friendly agricultural and food systems. »

This paper by the Global Food Security journal explores the extent to which government-run cash transfer programs in four sub-Saharan countries affect food security and nutritional outcomes. These programs include Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, Kenya’s Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, Lesotho’s Child Grants Program and Zambia’s Child Grant model of the Social Cash Transfer program. »

This report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) examines the ways in which livestock and animal-sourced foods contribute to better nutrition. A case study of a Feed the Future dairy program in Rwanda is presented to understand how Feed the Future livestock programs can contribute to better outcomes for under nutrition. Using creative behavior change communications interventions, the Rwanda dairy program successfully built nutrition strategies into existing activities in addition to developing new activities. »

This opinion article argues that it is time for a new research agenda on food that shifts the focus from feeding people towards nourishing them. They argue that malnutrition is not a problem that can be overcome through growth or development since even as economies expand, the quality of diets does not improve. Therefore the authors set out a new global research agenda for nutrition focused on ten research priorities. »

This article tests whether new technologies and institutions have brought structural shifts in the relationship between economic development to diet-related disorders (the nutrition transition), food production and distribution (agricultural transformation) and governments’ agricultural price policies that alter the relative cost of food (the development paradox). It combines food availability and dietary intake data and asks how future dietary patterns might be steered toward healthier outcomes as national incomes grow. »