Reshaping Agriculture and Nutrition Linkages for Food and Nutrition Security

Abstract

Over the past century or so, agricultural development has been based on a paradigm of increasing productivity and maximizing the production of cereals. The ramping up of cereal production in the Green Revolution, saved countless lives in India and increased the economic and agricultural growth. At the same time, agricultural intensification has led to a concentration on grain production and neglected nutrient-dense crops like pulses, oil seeds, fruits and vegetables. A look at the current health and nutrition situation suggests agriculture can make an even greater contribution to health and nutrition. Indeed, leveraging agriculture for health and nutrition has the potential to speed progress towards meeting food security of India along with nutrition security. Indian agriculture, already provide billions of people with diverse, healthy diets, yet more needs to be done. Millions of people suffer from serious vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The economic cost of micronutrient deficiencies is estimated to be 2.4–10.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in many developing countries. Most people would say agriculture is about growing food; they are right. Agricultural performance, is measured in terms of production, for example, yield or grain production. The purpose of agriculture, however, does not stop there. At a deeper level, the purpose of agriculture is not just to grow crops and livestock for food and raw materials, but to grow healthy, well-nourished people. Farmers’ most important tasks is to produce food of sufficient quantity (that is, enough calories) and quality (with the vitamins and minerals needed by the human body) to feed all of the people sustainably so that they can lead healthy, productive lives. This is effectively one of the goals of agriculture, agricultural production is an important means for most people to get the food and essential nutrients they need. Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) Sponsored Short Course on Reshaping Agriculture and Nutrition Linkages for Food and Nutrition Security is being organized at ICAR - Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (ICAR - CRIDA), Hyderabad during 17-26, November 2016. This publication is an outcome of compilation of lecture notes/book chapters of above short course and deals with the importance of current trends in Food Grains Production, Agri food value chain markets, agriculture policies and pathways contributing to nutrition and health, policy imperatives for enhancing agricultural growth for ensuring nutritional security, food based approaches to combating micronutrient deficiencies, impact of diversification in agriculture, nutritional quality of organically grown food crops, opportunities for setting up of food processing industries of CFTRI technologies, macro, micro nutrient and toxic heavy metals interrelationship in soils, plants and human nutrition, scope of insect farming and entomophagy, primary and secondary processing of food grains for value addition, plant breeding cereals and legumes for high nutrition with climate resilience - ICRISAT experiences, enhancing potential of animal agriculture for food and nutritional security in India; tradeoffs and strategies, importance of horticultural crops for nutrition, role of natural anti-oxidants to manage oxidative stress in food crops, changing climatic conditions on uptake, utilization of major nutrients and effect on nutrient quality of food crops, bioinformatics in agriculture, food and nutrition etc., We profusely thank Dr. Narendra Singh Rathore, DDG (Education), ICAR and Dr. M.B. Chetti, ADG (HRD), ICAR for their kind encouragement by supporting in organizing this short course, we are highly thankful to Dr. K. Alagusundaram, DDG (Natural Resource Management)/Addl Charge, ICAR for his guidance and support. As editors of this book, we would like to thank all the authors for their efforts and cooperation in bringing out this book in time. We also thank all the participants of this short course for their time and interest. We thank all the staff of ICAR - CRIDA who helped directly or indirectly in organizing this short course successfully. We firmly believe that this publication will be highly useful, in one way or other, for researchers, academicians, extention workers, policy makers, planners, officials in development institutions and students.