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From Harvest Plus to Harvest Driven:


How to Realise the Elusive Potential of Agriculture for Nutrition?
Lawrence Haddad1
Institute of Development Studies
UK
October 28, 2010

The potential for agriculture to accelerate improvements in nutrition is large. The standard
pathways are well known, but are they being accessed and are new pathways being
created? This short discussion piece touches on three questions: First, what are the
pathways between agriculture and nutrition? Second, is the potential being realised? Third,
what can be done to increase the realisation of the potential connections? The paper
concludes by arguing that we need to move from the era of thinking of improved nutrition
as an optional extra for agriculture to one where improved nutrition status of the
population is driven by agriculture as its main reason for being. Agriculture has never and
will never be the only or even the main driver of nutrition. First, agriculture is not the only
instrument or sector delivering food and income—other sectors provide key wealth creation
opportunities and social protection programmes are vital where markets are weak. Second,
food and income are not the only drivers of nutrition status: care, water and sanitation
quality, health services and the status of women are equally vital drivers. But nutrition
should be the main driver of agriculture. What else is agriculture for?

1. What are the pathways between agriculture and nutrition?

The standard pathways are well known (World Bank 2007, Haddad 2000):

(a) Greater farm productivity leads to greater farm income which can generate economy-
wide income growth. We know that income growth does improve dietary diversity but
that in terms of anthropometry of infants (a key nutrition outcome) it is a rather
underpowered and hit and miss driver.

(b) Lower food prices as supply and efficiency of production increase. Lower food prices
generate de facto income increases and lead to improvements in nutrition as in link (a).
If the price declines are in fruits and vegetables and fish/livestock/dairy, then there will
be additional nutrition impacts as the prices of key micronutrients decline.

(c) More nutritious production for own consumption. We also know that there is not a
complete separation of what is eaten from what is grown. If on farm income generation
is more geared towards high nutrition value crops then we can assume more of these
will be consumed from own production.

1
My thanks to Howdy Bouis who 25 years after being my PhD adviser is still giving me excellent comments on
papers. All errors (as in 1985) are mine.

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(d) As (c), but with more general consumption effects. Biofortification comes in strongly
here as a way of potentially increasing the supply of key micronutrients without
compromising (and even possibly increasing) the supply of macronutrients.

(e) Empowering women to enhance nutrition impacts of (a)–(d). Greater control by women
at all stages in the agriculture-nutrition chain will tend to reflect their preferences and
priorities more and this tends to enhance nutrition outcomes.

What are the key policy levers?

In terms of generating poverty reduction we know the work of Fan and others (e.g. Fan and
Zhang 2008) that agricultural research, development and investment is important, but we
don’t know enough about how the portfolio in terms of crops and attributes affects diet and
nutrition. We also know that investment in agricultural infrastructure is vital for poverty
reduction, but which types are most potent for nutrition and when: irrigation, processing
facilities, cold chains, or communications? We know that there is a gap between
microfinance and the formal banking system when it comes to small enterprises such as
farms, but how important is this finance gap for smoothing consumption across shocks?
There is a lot we don’t know about the choices we make in agricultural research,
development and investment and the impacts they have on nutrition.

In terms of influencing demand for certain types of foods and nutrients and how well they
are utilized, we have nutrition knowledge campaigns which are shown to be effective when
in combination with other non-nutrition interventions (Leroy et. al. 2009). We know that
empowering women via political quotas, via enhancing asset and income control and in
terms of legislation that enhances their agency, if it enhances their own nutrition status, will
on average be good for family nutrition (Birner et al. 2010).

In terms of influencing the supply of certain types of foods and nutrients biofortification
seems promising (HarvestPlus Orange Flesh Sweet Potato in Uganda and Mozambique 2010)
although we should not globalise about its cost effectiveness in all contexts and for all crops.
A national Homestead Food Production (Ianotti et. al. 2009) programme in Bangladesh has
“convincing evidence of impact on household production, improved diet quality, and intake
of micronutrient-rich foods, although its contribution to reducing the prevalence of
deficiencies in vitamin A, iron or zinc has yet to be determined.

But how do we make sure these multiple pathways are actually travelled?

2. Is this potential being realised?

Clearly the potential is there. Is it being realised? For several reasons, this is a difficult
question to answer.

First, the impact evaluations of agriculture that are outcome focused at the human
wellbeing level, let alone nutrition focused, are hard to find. The CGIAR’s own Standing
Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) lists impact evaluations done throughout the CGIAR.

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Table 1 shows that out of the 761 listed by the CGIAR as having been published from 1995-
2008, only 83 listed impact focusing on welfare indicators such as income or
nutrition/health status.

Table 1: CGIAR Impact Assessment Studies

Impact evaluations focusing Impact evaluations focusing All Impact


on income as an outcome on (income or Evaluations
variable nutrition/health) as an
outcome variable
2008 0 0
2007 1 2
2006 4 4
2005 0 0
2004 4 5
2003 5 6
Total 1995-2008 67 83 761
As of August 2009 http://impact.cgiar.org/

Neither the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) nor the International Initiative on Impact Evaluation
(3ie) have undertaken or commissioned many agricultural project impact studies. As of mid
2009 the project database search at the Poverty Action Lab website shows 25 health
evaluations, 38 in education, only 5 in agriculture (and these are all in Kenya) i. And only 2 of
18 funded applications in round 1 of 3ie (the International Institute for Impact Evaluation)
funding were awarded to agriculture projects (irrigation, low cost farm equipment)
compared to 6 in health. Presumably this reflected some combination of low submissions
(perhaps due to the size of funding chunks available) and lack of quality of submissions ii.

Second, the aggregate data on the impacts between agricultural growth and income or
nutrition are inconclusive. Cross-country econometric work (Ligon and Sadoulet, 2008)
reported in the 2008 World Development Report shows that a 1% gain in GDP originating in
agriculture generates a 6 % increase in overall income for the poorest 10% of the
population. This compares with a 4% increase in overall income for the next poorest, and 3%
for the subsequent decile. In stark contrast, GDP growth originating in non-agriculture
sectors generates zero growth for the poorest 10% of the population, a 1% increase in
income for the next 10% and a 2% increase thereafter. A more recent empirical study by
Christiansen et al. (2010) comes to similar conclusions. Using cross country econometric
evidence they report “Irrespective of the setting, a one percent increase in agricultural per
capita GDP was found to reduce the total $1-day poverty gap squared by at least 5 times
more than a one percent increase in GDP per capita outside agriculture”p 30. For a large set
of countries within a cross-country regression framework, Loayza and Raddatz (2009) found
that growth in labour intensive sectors was the most poverty reducing. Cross-country
regressions simply represent average associations between variables. It is useful to contrast
their results with careful large country time series studies. IFor Brazil Ferreira et. al. (2006)
found that growth in the service industries was the most poverty reducing for the 1985-
2004 period. For India, Datt and Ravallion (2010) found that pre-1991, rural growth was
more poverty reducing than urban growth, but for the post 1991 period the reverse held
true.

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In one of the few recent careful cross-country studies on agricultural growth and nutrition
(as opposed to income) Heady (2010) found:

“sectoral growth effects do not seem to explain much of the variation in aggregate growth of
nutrition outcomes, at least in the short run. We did find long run (levels) evidence of a much
larger elasticity between malnutrition and agricultural growth relative to nonagricultural
growth, but this pattern disappeared in shorter run episodes, except for adult BMI” p.31.

So the evidence seems to point to positive impacts of agricultural growth on the income
of the poor, but is a little less clear when it comes to nutrition outcomes.

Third, the literature reviews that have been conducted are good quality in general, but not
systematic in terms of protocols for inclusion and exclusion, grouping around outcomes and
interventions. The Del Carpio et al. (2009) meta-evaluation of the general impacts of
agricultural interventions provides a good example of the kind of study that is needed in
agriculture-nutrition. Figure 1 below describes the selection of studies for inclusion in their
meta-study.

Figure 1: del Carpio et al’s (2009) protocol for their systematic review of the
impact of agricultural innovations

Note: IE=impact evaluation

The following table summarises Del Carpio et. al.’s results which show input technologies to
have the lowest percentage of non-positive impacts, something that bodes well for
biofortification (although biofortification relies on these other interventions too).

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Table 2: Relationship between interventions and agricultural outcomes

Fourth, we don’t yet know enough about the impacts of biofortification on nutrition.
Hopefully this conference will give us more results on the science and the efficacy, and
possibly even effectiveness, but most likely we will have to be patient. The Meenakshi et. al.
(2009) ex-ante study reviews the evidence along the theory of change of biofortification and
uses these assessments to construct optimistic and pessimistic assessments of costs per
DALY averted and then compares these to supplementation and fortification interventions.
Biofortification comes out relatively well under the optimistic scenarios -- but not under the
pessimistic ones. I have already mentioned the HarvestPlus Orange Flesh Sweet Potato
study (2010) and the positive impacts on farmer uptake and dietary intake and it will be
interesting to see the impacts on serum retinol and health related outcomes.

Overall then, weak and poorly organised evidence makes it hard to assess whether the
potential for agriculture to increase its impact on nutrition is being realised. My hunch
would be that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the potential.

3. What can be done to increase the realisation of this potential?

So what needs to be done to increase this potential? For example, how do we make the
optimistic assumptions around biofortification’s theory of change a reality? While technical
ideas around how to dovetail nutrition and agriculture are necessary, they are not sufficient.
What is needed to make the agriculture and nutrition innovations work together is
institutional innovation to facilitate and generate political pressure.

Fundamentally, getting agriculture and nutrition together is a political problem. But how
can the political pressure for agriculture and nutrition to work together be generated and
sustained?

a. Map nutrition outcomes in real time

New methods for monitoring nutrition outcomes are needed. Real time monitoring of
nutrition outcomes makes nutrition harder to ignore and can guide action to reduce
malnutrition. Mindful of the past successes and failures of nutrition monitoring and what it

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takes to sustain them in terms of organizational incentives to collect and use nutrition-
relevant data we need to work with the web 2.0 community (e.g. Frontline SMS iii) to
identify, develop and test new monitoring possibilities afforded by mobile technologies and
cloud computing (see Bhawsar 2009 for a review of several areas where pilots are taking
place). If effective these methodologies will be particularly valuable in fragile contexts
where events change rapidly and unpredictably and where conventional data systems are
extremely weak. Fresh streams of nutrition data will keep the issue in the public mind and
put pressure on agriculture to act.

b. Capitalise on the increasing need to demonstrate impact in MDG terms

More and more donors are emphasising impacts of intervention on outcomes rather than
only inputs and outputs. The impacts have to be framed within the MDGs and therefore
have to be able to show impact at the human level. I was just involved in a donor review of
multilateral organisations, and this was a key criterion. I imagine that donors will make it
become so for the CGIAR and NARs. This creates an opportunity for advocates of closer
links between agriculture and nutrition within the donor community: insist on agricultural
projects and programmes being evaluated in terms of nutrition outcomes. There will be
push-back along the lines of: the causality chain is too long, attribution is too difficult, and
we don’t have the skills. All of these are challenges of course but they are not
insurmountable. The IFPRI commercialisation of agriculture studies from the 1980s showed
that it can be done and shared some methods on how to do it (Von Braun and Kennedy
1994). We certainly need donors to invest more in measuring nutrition status methods
reliably and quickly (especially for micronutrient status), but difficulty of measurement is
not, in my opinion, a valid excuse for stopping measurement halfway along the agriculture-
nutrition chain.

c. Develop diagnostic tools to help identify the points of greatest leverage of agriculture on
nutrition

We have heard many policymakers complain that because nutrition is such a multi-sector
issue, they lack guidance on how to prioritise and sequence action so that it addresses
binding constraints in the context within which they work. This is precisely the dilemma
faced by Ministries of Finance in stimulating economic growth. Practical work undertaken by
the economic growth diagnostics community (e.g. Hausmann et. al. 2008) shows the way
forwards for nutrition. We need processes and tools to develop typologies for action and
then ways of deciding how to sequence and prioritise them in ways that are sensitive to
capacity and political opportunities.

One simple typology for action is highlighted in Table 2 which has two critical axes over
which to map the landscape: (1) whether food output and input markets are functioning
well or not and (2) whether women are disempowered and excluded from decision-making.

If markets are functioning well, then what is grown does not have to be closely matched to
what is eaten (production and consumption are separable). Here the task is to maximise
farm income in a sustainable way and influence diet choices. If markets are really thin, then
what is eaten is much more dependent on what is grown and the task is to directly influence
the upstream and downstream agricultural investment choices. If male-female power

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relations are really skewed against women, then their preferences are discounted and their
entrepreneurship is denied. Where women are relatively empowered, the task is to
influence them as decision makers. Where they are not empowered, the task is to get them
into decision making positions.

Within each cell in Table 2 are suggestions for key elements of a strategy. The actual
strategy developed will be determined by the context—nutritional needs, agricultural
possibilities, political space, capacities at the organisation and institutional levels, fragility of
context (conflict and environmental). My guess is that much of sub-Saharan Africa is in the
top left hand corner.

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Table 2: Organising and prioritising action to enhance agriculture’s impact on nutrition

Weak food markets Strong food markets


 Reduce general gender
 Reduce gender asymmetries with respect to asymmetries in power to:
decision making around agriculture—traits, o increase farm income and
crops, technology, information, time use, overall rural income
storage and consumption properties -- food oincrease nutrition impact of
production will map more closely into food farm income
Gender
exclusion consumption needs. Focus on institutions
that can help women articulate voice,  Use rights, legislation,
promote accountability to those voices, and representation at the basic level
be responsive to those voices and at the underlying and
immediate levels of nutrition
 Biofortification potentially vital to get more status determination to rebalance
micronutrients into local food supply male-female power relations
without significant challenging of gender
asymmetries in power  Biofortification potentially still
useful

 Ag extension and research more closely  Maximise farm income through


linked to linear growth promoting diets production of what is most
profitable—make sure risk
 Behaviour change on farm production to link mitigation and management
it more closely to linear growth promoting mechanisms are in place
No diets (e.g. dairy, F&V, livestock, aquaculture)
Gender  Undertake behaviour change on
Exclusion  Biofortification potentially very important diet and health where it has the
greatest leverage
 Ensure women involved in market
strengthening interventions  Biofortification potentially still
useful

d. Develop indicators to measure commitment to nutrition

Strategies guide policy, legislation, resource allocation and civil society action. But these
commitments can only be realized through implementation. How can fidelity to these
commitments be assessed? If they could, they would provide nutrition stakeholders with an
effective transparency and accountability tool. Work by IDS and Action Aid work to develop
food security commitment indices (Masset 2010) might have potential here. Obviously
working out the key components of such an index, establishing the most effective ways of
collecting credible data on commitments, and the most effective ways of communicating
the results are challenges. But if they can be met, the indices promise the ability to enhance
media attention on nutrition and agriculture.

e. Build the next generation of nutrition-agriculture champions

One common element of nutrition success stories is effective nutrition leadership.


Leadership seems to be necessary although not sufficient for sustained improvements in

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nutrition. Leadership is needed to build teams to secure the financial and political resources
to undertake and respond to nutrition monitoring, to develop and communicate nutrition
strategies and to be accountable for commitments to those strategies. How can nutrition
champions and leaders be developed? Mindful of related efforts in health (e.g. Lister 2007),
we need to begin analysing how leadership in nutrition works, how to generate more of it,
and how to embed it in agriculture. It is not a coincidence that so many involved in the
IPFRI commercialisation se studies came out of graduate programmes that emphasised
cross-sectoralism and cross-disciplinarity. With perhaps the exception of Cornell, training
people to think and analyse and act to connect nutrition and agriculture is a key missing
ingredient in today’s graduate programmes. Where is the next generation of Howdy Bouis’
going to come from?

Conclusion: From Harvest Plus to Harvest Driven?

I’m not sure how Harvest Plus got its name. It may have been an attempt to reassure the
agriculture community that in striving for additional nutritional impact there would be no
tradeoff with yield. Even if that was not the reason for Harvest Plus’ name, in my
experience this kind of thinking is prevalent in much of the agricultural establishment.
Agriculture, they say, is about food production, less about income generation, and certainly
nothing much to do with nutrition. It is, in fact, about all three. The first (food production)
is especially important in subsistence economies, the second (income generation) especially
important in semi-subsistence systems and beyond where markets work fairly well, and the
third (improved nutrition status) is the ultimate impact of agriculture. There will be
tradeoffs between these goals, but ultimately there has to be a convergence of
understanding and commitment that agriculture is essentially about reducing hunger and
malnutrition. We need to move from a situation where each outcome has its non-
overlapping constituency (I exaggerate, but not much) to a situation where each is seen as a
tactical route towards the strategic goal of improved nutrition and where context rather
than ideology and habit dictates tactics.

We need to move from the era of thinking as improved nutrition as an optional extra for
agriculture to one where nutrition is driven by agriculture as its key raison d’etre. We need
to move from Harvest Plus to Harvest Driven. This paper has offered some ideas for how to
do this.

References

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Bhawsar, R.D. 2009. Review of the Use of PDAs/Mobile Phone Approaches in Improving
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Regina Birner, Agnes R. Quisumbing, Nazneen Ahmed. 2010. Cross-Cutting Issues:


Governance and Gender, IFPRI and Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies Prepared
for the Bangladesh Food Security Investment Forum May 2010.

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Bonnard, P. 2000. Increasing the Nutritional Impacts of Agricultural Interventions. FANTA.

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i
www.povertyactionlab.org
ii
http://www.3ieimpact.org/page.php?pg=round1
iii
http://www.frontlinesms.com/

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