By Katharine Kreis, Director, Strategic Initiatives, and Peiman Milani, Project Director, Nutrition Innovation, PATH

As the global climate changes, how do we ensure sustainable and resilient food value chains? Two PATH experts look to the future.

Climate change, demographic and epidemiologic shifts, resource scarcity, and increasing access to technology and information are rapidly changing priorities and approaches to addressing global health and development around the globe. The newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as a clarion call as we look for more integrated ways to work together as a global community, holding all nations accountable by addressing some of the largest problems afflicting people around the world.
 
Nutrition Is a Growing Problem
 
A few years ago, The Lancet produced a seminal series on the burgeoning problems associated with undernutrition and obesity in women and children, especially those living in low- and middle-income countries.
 
Besides recognizing that nutrition is a complex topic, the authors called out thirteen proven “nutrition-specific” interventions that could address everything from immediate causes of undernutrition (such as inadequate dietary intake) to underlying causes (such as feeding practices and access to food). 
 
And yet, even if we could scale up the top ten nutrition-specific interventions in the countries with the highest burdens, current estimates indicate that childhood mortality would only be reduced by 15 to 20 percent and stunting by only about 20 to 25 percent.
 
At PATH we asked ourselves what was missing. These projected impact numbers were unacceptable. What could we do to ensure better outcomes for these children? 
 
It’s a little like cooking a balanced meal.



Taking a step back to look at these issues comprehensively, we knew, as did our colleagues, that interventions and innovations that worked together with disciplines such as agriculture and WASH (water, air, sanitation and hygiene) could help turn the dial on childhood mortality and stunting.
 
The central axis for these integrated interventions is the food system. Food value chains are critical to the availability and quality of diets and are primarily controlled by the private sector—whether smallholder farmers or big agribusiness. Building resilience into food systems so they better resist and bounce back from shocks—climate-related and otherwise—requires a multi-pronged approach that touches all nodes of the value chain and the chain as a system.
 
In this context, one area of particular interest for PATH is the chain linking livestock to animal-source foods and amino-acids, given the important role the latter plays in child linear growth. New approaches must be explored to ensure the sustainable and resilient supply and distribution of animal-source foods to underserved populations, including the development of new vaccines for livestock, improvements in feed, and the leveraging of underutilized animal-source foods such as eggs, edible insects, and small rodents.



Towards Resilient and Nutrition-Sensitive Food Systems
 
To ensure these resilient and nutrition-sensitive food systems ultimately deliver health, socioeconomic, and environmental impact, we need innovation in three inter-related and particularly promising areas:

• Technologies to improve nutrition, food safety, and generate income                                                                                                                      

• Nutrition intelligence: data, analytics and knowledge
   

 

• Expanded delivery channels for nutrition impact
   
  ​Access to nutritious foods, clean water, and sanitation impact key nutrition outcomes. Equally important, however, are education and behavior modifications such as keeping girls in secondary school, spacing births, preventing malaria during pregnancy, and addressing household air pollution, to name a few. Underutilized touchpoints with the population, such as early childhood development efforts, certain safety net systems, and other healthcare platforms must be leveraged to improve nutrition status, whether through access to nutritious foods or to information and education.

 
Taking into account the multitude of challenges and risks to food systems brought about by global forces (which are gathering momentum), we can rise to this challenge of our time through innovation that emerges from cross-sector, cross-discipline, and cross-geography partnerships and has the SDGs as its North Star. Nothing short of that will do for our and future generations.