Globally, poor quality diets are associated with 11 million premature adult deaths, while healthy diets are not affordable for over 3 billion people. Diets worldwide become increasingly homogenous, dominated by staple crops rich in energy but poor in micronutrients and other protective compounds. Everywhere in the world, people are not consuming enough nutrient-rich foods such as fruits, nuts and seeds, vegetables and whole grains. As a result, people often do not acquire adequate amounts of the full range of nutrients essential to human health, leading to hidden hunger, malnutrition and NCDs.
Current investments in food systems transformations to increase production, incomes and livelihoods are insufficient to improve low quality diets. The strategic shift at CGIAR to focus on food systems, challenges us to consider how our innovations also contribute to improved outcomes for consumer households in rural and urban areas. The role of the retail food environment is hereby crucial as it is one of the important drivers of food choices and consumption on the one hand and can be considered as the result of decisions all along production systems and value chains.
The session will address the following question: ‘How can our food systems produce enough diverse nutritious foods and make them available for consumers in rural and urban settings to have access to affordable, safe and nutritious food supporting healthy diets.
The 90 min session will start with short presentations on a) co-creating for diversity in a rural, fragile dryland context in Turkana, Kenya and b) an urban vulnerable settlement setting in Kisumu, Kenya; c) voucher distribution for access to healthy foods; d) informal dairy vendors, milk safety and child milk intake in Kenya; e) end-to-end solutions to increase fruit and vegetable intake and f) banana biodiversity for resilient agri-food systems after which a Q&A session will lead us into a guided discussion, where the value and challenges of co-creation and food environments as entry point for food systems transformation will be discussed. Participants will have a chance to reflect on their own work and identify relevant food environment research questions for their work. Finally, upon interest, opportunities for cross-center/cross mega program collaboration can be discussed.
