Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia
Nutrition
How to design agriculture and food-related policies, programmes and interventions to improve nutrition.
Nutrition
In much of South Asia, women make up a majority of the agricultural workforce, but what effect does working in agriculture have on the nutrition of these women and their children?
Nutrition
Harnessing the farm-to-market value chain to deliver nutritious foods to those who need it most
The Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) research programme consortium aims to enhance the impact of agriculture on maternal and child nutrition in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
Nearly half the children in South Asian are chronically undernourished (stunted) and despite agriculture being the main livelihood for nearly half the population in the region, its potential for reducing undernutrition has not yet been realised.
The LANSA international research partnership focused on policies, interventions and strategies that can enhance agriculture to improve the nutritional status of children in South Asia.
This collection of LANSA publications describes our innovative research to discover how agriculture and food-related policies, programmes and interventions can be better designed to improve nutrition.
Image credit: Harvested Bell Peppers | IFPRI-IMAGES | Flickr | CC BY NC ND 2.0
In this collection
Showing 31-40 of 100 results
Women’s empowerment mitigates the negative effects of low production diversity on maternal and child nutrition in Nepal
Taylor and Francis Group, 2015We use household survey data from Nepal to investigate relationships between women’s empowerment in agriculture and production diversity on maternal and child dietary diversity and anthropometric outcomes.Production diversity is positively associated with maternal and child dietary diversity, and weight-for-height z-scores. Women’s group membership, control over income, reduced workload, and overall empowerment are positively associated with better maternal nutrition....Household dairy production and child growth: evidence from Bangladesh
Elsevier, 2018Research from richer countries finds that dairy consumption has strong positive associations with linear growth in children, but surprisingly little evidence exists for developing countries where diets are far less diversified. One exception is a recent economics literature using the notion of incomplete markets to estimate the impacts of cattle ownership on children’s milk consumption and growth outcomes in Eastern Africa....Fragile environment, seasonality and undernutrition in Bangladesh
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, 2018Undernutrition among mothers and children remains one of the main public health challenges of the 21st century, particularly in low and middle-income countries. The causes of malnutrition are directly related to inadequate dietary intake as well as disease, though many factors contribute to the indirect causes. While most nutrition interventions are delivered through the health sector, non-health interventions can also be crucial.Availability of, and access to, sufficient nutritious food produced in the agricultural sector at the national and household level are among such factors....Convergence on Nutrition in Agricultural Systems of Innovation: Concepts and Methods, with Examples from Pakistan
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, 2014The paper first briefly sketches the origins of the system of innovation (SoI) concept and the need it was seen to fulfil in agriculture. It then illustrates the different ways it has been employed as a framework to explain how change in agricultural practices and outcomes happens and is sustained. At its heart is “innovation”, which can be understood both as an outcome – a new or improved product, process or organizational form (Niosi et al., 1993) – and as the process by which innovations are generated. The SoI concept focuses on the systemic nature of that process....Crop Diversity, Dietary Diversity and Nutritional Outcome in Rural Bangladesh: Evidences from VDSA Panel Household Surveys
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, 2018Does crop diversity contribute toward dietary diversity and nutritional status of rural households in Bangladesh? The present study tries to answer this question. It has analysed panel household survey data collected from 500 households by ICRISAT and IRRI (2010/11 to 2014/15) under the Village Dynamics in South Asia (VDSA) project to examine the relationship between crop diversity, dietary diversity and nutritional status....Supplementary Nutrition Programme under ICDS: Case Study of Telangana and Tamil Nadu
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, 2018Government food distribution programmes have the potential to reduce malnutrition at scale. The Supplementary Nutrition Programme (SNP) under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in India presents a unique example of a state-led food distribution initiative to address malnutrition....How Can Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy Actors Work Together to Enhance the External Food Environment for Fruit and Vegetables? A Qualitative Policy Analysis in India
Food Policy, 2018The benefits of fruit and vegetables are well established, particularly their role in preventing general micronutrient-deficiencies and chronic diseases. However, global food systems are not delivering diverse and high quality diets: healthy food is unavailable and too expensive for many. Creating food environments that foster consumer access to fruit and vegetables will require coordinated policy action across sectors, mostly outside of the health sector....Analysing Pakistan’s Modern Dairy Value-Chain Innovation
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, 2018Interventions in agri-food value chains are thought to potentially make important contributions towards enhancing agriculture’s role in nutrition. Some frameworks have begun to identify sets of requirements for pro-nutrition value chains. Pakistan’s dairy sector has been the focus of a business-driven innovation which introduced ultra-high temperature treated (UHT) milk in aseptic packaging. This was expected to relieve existing constraints in production and distribution, raise incomes for producers, and increase the supply of an affordable nutrient-dense food to consumers....Effect of Agricultural Seasons on Energy Intake: Evidence from Two Agro-Ecologically Different Rural Districts of India
Food and Nutrition Bulletin (FNB), 2018Seasonality is recognised as a constraint to agricultural production and food and nutrition security of rural households. It alters the energy intake from different groups of foods based on the availability. These variations in energy intake affect the nutritional status of the population. Eight villages in Wardha district of Maharashtra state and eleven villages in Koraput district of Odisha state were purposefully selected for the study....Animal Sourced Foods and Child Nutrition in South Asia: Policy Priorities
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia, 2018Although some South Asian countries have recently made impressive progress against undernutrition, indicators of maternal and child nutrition remain extremely poor across South Asia. These exceptionally high rates of undernutrition are caused by many underlying factors such as poverty, poor education, and limited access to health, family planning and WASH services. Yet one neglected dimension of South Asia’s undernutrition problem is low intake of animal sourced foods (ASFs)....