Ensuring accessto animal-source foods

Tom Randolph

Science Forum 2013

Nutrition and health outcomes: targets for agricultural research, Bonn, Germany, 23‒25 September 2013

Our challenge

Protect and enhance adequate access of both rural and urban poor to a particularly valuable nutritional resource in their diet: animal-source foods

• Demand growing faster than capacity to supply

• Aspects of both food and nutritional security

• Change from traditional CGIAR focus on livestock for livelihoods

• Conclusion: Not simply a production or nutrition issue

Requires a multidimensional food systems approach

Our reasoning

Small-scale systems can

‘grow’ to ensure access

• Improve supply response through Intensification & professionalization

• Win-Win! Increase access to animal-source food + smooth transition for inclusive rural economic growth

Food & Nutrition Security

• Access to an appropriately diverse diet

Critical role of animal-source

foods

• Nutrient-dense• Improves availability of

nutrients from plant-based foods

Poor rely on local

production

• Smallholder farms + informal marketing systems, especially in rural areas

• Often competitive vis-à-vis larger-scale, industrial, formal systems

Limited success in supporting smallholder supply response

Africa

Latin Americ

a

South

Asia

Industrial

ized Co...

0.060.08

0.03

0.17

0.06

0.11

0.04

0.2

Meat (kg output/kg biomass/yr)

19802005

4111021

517

4226

397

1380904

6350Milk (kg/cow/yr)

19802005

Promoting ‘smarter’ pro-poor animal-source food systems• Producing and delivering more, good quality food

• Serving the poor and targeting the nutritionally challenged

• Ensuring it can be sustained and adaptive

• Managing potential trade-offs: environmental, resource use, role in diet, health risks

Value chain approach

– Harness market incentives to promote uptake...– While identifying opportunities to enhance nutritional

benefits as broad food-based intervention

Premise for CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish

Research for development and impact that:

• Puts together and pilots an integrated intervention across the targeted value chain

• While conducting longer-term research on more fundamental productivity constraints

• Works together with development partners from the start so they can take intervention to scale

• Focuses on only a few selected value chains

Focus, focus, focus! Working in 8 target value chains accountability

PIGS

AQUACULTURE

SHEEP & GOATS

DAIRY

Status• Partnership of 4 CGIAR Centers

• Officially started January 1st, 2012

• Activities and momentum achieved in 4 value chains

Will it work?Can livestock & aquaculture interventions improve nutrition security?

Series of literature reviews (Webb, 2012) have concluded:• Projects rarely have explicit food or nutrition security

objectives• Among those, very few appropriately designed

impact studies • Weak evidence, but suggests positive benefits,

especially if accompanied by nutrition education

Nutrition influenced through several pathways

Mapping the links for a smallholder dairying household

Randolph et al. (2007)

Animalsowned

Humannutritional

(growth) status

Human healthstatus

+

+

Probability ofzoonotic disease

Animalproduction

Food cropproduction

Food crop sales

Animal &product sales

+

+ +

+

-

HHIncome

+

+

Dietaryintake

+

Level of care/feedingbehavior

+

Labor allocatedto livestock

+

-

Labor demands on(female) caregiver

Total labordemands

+

+

Healthinputs

+

Food croppurchases

ASF purchases

HH cropconsumption

HH ASFconsumption

+

+

+

+

+

Chronicdisease risk +

-

Land allocationto feed

Traction, nutrientcycling

+-

+

+

+

+

+

Environmental toxinconcentration

-

+

test

test

Food-bornediseases

+

-

Watercontamination

+

-

Evaluating a major dairy projectEast Africa Dairy Development Project (Heifer Project Int’l)• Objective: double dairy income in 179,000 households• Also improving nutrition?

Qualitative study by ILRI and Emory University• Project areas in Western Kenya, June-August 2010• Test hypotheses about 4 main pathways• 27 focus groups: men, women, mothers with young

children• 94 randomly sampled households, stratified:o No milko Emerging (<6l)o Advanced (>6l)

Direct consumption pathway• Milk consumption increased with intensification

• Children <5 in advanced hhs received more milk than children in emerging or no milk

• Children 12-18 mo in advanced hhs receiving 2x than in emerging or no milk: 1.14 vs 0.50 cups a day

• Children 18-24 mo: 2.17 vs 1.25 cups. • Reference child went without milk at least 1 time in the

preceding 30 days in 3 of 10 hhs in ‘no milk’ vs 1 of 10 emerging hhs vs no household in advanced

Income-mediated pathway• Effects less clear

• Dairy income increased but total hh income marginally• Women lose some direct control of dairy income

(controlled by HH head in 44% of advanced vs 33% in emerging), but offset by more joint decision-making (28% vs 14%)

• Improvements in dietary diversity score across categories, but ability to control for income was limited

“MILK BELONGS TO THE WOMAN AND THE MONEY BELONGS TO THE MAN”- MALE FARMER, EMERGING GROUP, CHEBORGE

“MEAT IS A MUST WHEN WE GET PAID [FROM THE DAIRY].”- MALE FARMER, EMERGING GROUP, KIPKELION

Soundbites

FROM THE FOCUS GROUP DISCUSSIONS:

Childcare pathway• Increased workload for women in emerging category

meant a significant share of daytime childcare entrusted to pre-teen siblings (25%)

• Transition dynamic : workload decreased among advanced hhs, as did daytime childcare by siblings

• Cessation of breastfeeding and introduction of other foods advances across intensification categories role for nutrition education

Health pathway• Inconclusive: samples too small and other

measurement challenges to detect differences in disease incidence as measure of exposure to risk of zoonoses

• Similarly, data on health expenditures too limited to evaluate offsetting effect

Summing up…• It’s complicated, and that was just for on-farm…

• Teasing out clear net benefits will require large samples and extensive surveys, and even then…

• Consider challenges at community or regional level when extending to other actors in the value chain

From our perspective• Major progress:

o Systematic conceptualization of food systems to understand the links between agriculture and nutrition

• Major gaps:o Framework for considering

role of different food commodities in achieving appropriate diet accessible to the poor

Implications for policy to influence land use and investment

• Innovative approaches:o Systems approach / scenario analysis to putting

nutritional objectives into a food systems context, and how different food systems contribute to an appropriate diet

Acknowledgements

• Int’l Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi– Isabelle Baltenweck– Delia Grace– Jemimah Njuki– Thomas Randolph

• Emory University, Atlanta– Aimee Girard-Webb (faculty, HDGH, Nutrition)– Craig Hadley (faculty, Anthropology, HDGH)– Peter Little (faculty, Anthropology, Development Studies)– Claire Null (faculty, HDGH, Economics)– Usha Ramakrishnan (faculty, HDGH, Nutrition)– Shreyas Sreenath (student, Economics)– Amanda Watkins (student, Nursing)– Amanda Wyatt (student, Hubert Dept of Global Health, HDGH)– Anna Yearous-Algozin (student, Nursing)– Kathryn Yount (faculty HDGH, Sociology)

• University of Nairobi, Nairobi– Prof. Erastus Kang’ethe

• Egerton University, Njoro– Samwel Mbugua

• East Africa Dairy Development Project

• The Global Health Institute, Emory University

• The Halle Institute, Emory University

• Program in Development Studies, Emory University

Collaborators (alphabetical order) Funding

CGIAR is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for a food secure future. The CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish aims to increase the productivity of small-scale livestock and fish systems in sustainable ways, making meat, milk and fish more available and affordable across the developing world.

CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish

livestockfish.cgiar.org