Augment agriculture for nutritional safety

CHENNAI: Effective leveraging of agriculture is key to ensuring food and nutrition security, and this can be achieved by taking steps that favour small scale farmers. This was a mong the key points made by a panel of experts at a public forum on ‘Challenges to Ensuring Food and Nutrition Security’ held at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation on Monday.The panel of eminent speakers also discussed a number of other paradigms relating to the subject, ranging from public policy, sanitation, water, direct cash transfers, employment guarantee schemes, agricultural production, sustainability and inequality.“It has been pointed out by some quarters that there is growing interest in large scale agriculture. Small scale agriculture is maximum and widespread, and can be boosted by linking to markets and easy availability of credit,” said Bhavani Shankar, of the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.He stressed the need for a safety net for those susceptible to undernutrition, which could insulate them from shocks that could worsen the status of their nutrition.Close to this view was that of Haris Gazdar, director of the Collective for Social Science Research at Karachi. “There are two aspects to fragility in the South Asian context. One is fragile environment. This could be anything from weather to local ecosystems to economic situations. The other is the fragility of institutions that are meant to insulate from such eventualities,” he said, adding that governments must come forward to create robust institutions to ensure robust environment to support nutrition and food security.Mahabub Hossain, executive director of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, underlined the need to concentrate on increasing the production of demand-inelastic staple food. He said Bangladesh had managed to raise growth in rice production to three per cent per annum while reducing population growth to two per cent per annum. This had led to a reduction in the growth of demand for staple foods.Stuart Gillespie, CEO of the LANSA consortium (Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia), and Madhura Swaminathan of the Sociological research Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata were the other panelists in the forum, which was moderated by M S Swaminathan.