Sustainable Diets: Linking Agriculture, Health and the Environment

Human nutrition is an agriculture sector issue.  For the last half century or more, agriculture lost sight of nutrition and relinquished it to the health sector.  Nutrition in the minds of many was thus a clinical, medical, and pharmacological subject, and direct nutrition interventions were largely taking the form of supplements, fortificants, and ready-to-use therapeutic products.  Agriculture busied itself with the green revolution, with ever-increasing yield goals and dietary energy supply as its metric. Modest gains were made in decreasing the proportion of people who were undernourished (i.e., by dietary energy definition), but micronutrient deficiencies, overweight, obesity were all increasing at an alarming rate, in spite of all the health sectors' interventions.  The dogma of medicalized nutritionists was that the problems of malnutrition could not be solved with food. And the dogma of economists was that interventions based on healthy diets were the most expensive, and therefore least acceptable, of all the approaches. Meanwhile, the environment sector was fighting its own battles with agriculture. Biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, GHG emissions, contaminated soil, water and air – agriculture was often blamed. The remedies from the environment sector had their own consequence for nutrition, with conservation trumping food use.  Through the actions of a few, efforts were being made to link the sectors for providing sustainable solutions with a minimum of collateral damage, and “sustainable diets” with a code of conduct was proposed. This presentation will review the foundational work of Ellen Swallow on “human ecology”, the cross-cutting initiative on biodiversity for food and nutrition, the Zero Hunger Challenge with sustainable food systems at it center, sustainable agricultural intensification as “nutrition-driven agriculture within planetary boundaries”, food losses and waste, and sustainable diets as a multisectoral blueprint.  The solutions to many problems facing the world -- as the UN and its member states move from the era of the Millennium Development Goals to the post-2015 Development Agenda, still in the shadow of Rio+20 -- are healthy diets, from healthy agriculture, supporting healthy ecosystems. Agriculture needs to actively partner with the other sectors, and reclaim nutrition as one of its very important issues.