Despite significant improvements over recent decades, rates of undernutrition remain high in South Asia, with adverse impacts on morbidity and mortality. Overweight/obesity, among children and adults, is now an additional and major public health concern. While agriculture has the potential to improve nutrition through several pathways, this potential is currently not being realised in the region.
The Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) research consortium (2012–2018) set out to improve understanding about how agriculture and related food policies and programs in South Asia (specifically in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan) can be better conceptualised and implemented in order to enhance impacts on nutrition outcomes, especially those of young children and adolescent girls.
This paper provides a snapshot of the agriculture-nutrition nexus in the region, outlines the pathways through which agriculture can influence nutrition outcomes, elaborates on the objectives of the LANSA research consortium within this context, and highlights the core findings of the six papers that form the body of this Special Issue. The paper ends with five key lessons that have emerged from this research, during this decade.
Table of contents
Leveraging agriculture for nutrition in South Asia: What do we know, and what have we learned?
Stuart Gillespie, Nigel Poole, Mara van den Bold, R.V. Bhavani and Prakash Shetty
Nutrition and the governance of agri-food systems in South Asia: A systematic review
Stuart Gillespie, Mara van den Bold and Judith Hodge
Agricultural inputs and nutrition in South Asia
Bhavani Shankar, Nigel Poole and Frances A. Bird
Interventions in agriculture for nutrition outcomes: A systematic review focused on South Asia
Frances A. Bird, Aliza Pradhan, R.V. Bhavani and Alan D. Dangour
Women’s agricultural work and nutrition in South Asia: From pathways to a cross-disciplinary, grounded analytical framework
Nitya Rao, Haris Gazdar, Devanshi Chanchani and Marium Ibrahim
Principles of innovation to build nutrition-sensitive food systems in South Asia
Dominic Glover and Nigel Poole
How do the state’s organisational capacities at the micro- and macro-levels influence agriculture-nutrition linkages in fragile contexts?
Jaideep Gupte and Richard Longhurst
Authors
