The 5^th Annual LCIRAH Conference - ‘Agri-health research: what have we learned and where to next?’ was held on June 3 and 4 at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London. The Conference was attended by over 250 delegates providing opportunity for researchers around the world to examine and reflect critically on what we have learned from agriculture, nutrition and health research in the last five years, and what the future research agenda needs to be.

The research areas covered included the following themes:women and child health outcomes; behaviour change and consumer acceptance; innovative metrics and tools; diversifying local agricultural production and diets; value chain approaches to nutrition and nutrition sensitive agriculture policy. Programme details, video and audio links, also abstracts are on LCIRAH website.

Among the three side events organised alongside the main Conference, I attended the one on June 2 – ‘Women’s time, agriculture and nutrition’ that included a presentation by Deborah Johnston on the intended and unintended nutritional consequences of agricultural practices and interventions. It was based on the findings of a systematic review of 89 published studies examining agricultural interventions and practices that impacted on time use by women as well as nutritional outcomes. The study concluded that in effect, agricultural interventions may actually increase time burdens while at the same time suggesting ways by which they are actually being managed. A draft of the IFPRI discussion paper based on this review is available for reading.

Other studies in the session included a presentation on the development of Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) developed as a Gender Monitoring Tool by USAID jointly with IFPRI and Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative. An interesting video tutorial on WEAI, and a very informative seminar held at FAO on WEAI in 2012 are worth watching.

There were two other presentations – one, a critique of the methodologies for time use studies from the Oxford Centre for Time Use Studies, and the other, an IFPRI / Harvest Plus paper on ‘Women’s work in Bangladesh’ focusing on invisible and unpaid work and the various activities that required multi–tasking by women. With the enormous changes – both economic and nutrition related – occurring in Bangladesh over the last two decades, I was a wee bit skeptical of the broad relevance of the conclusions made from these data sets that were a bit dated as they were collected in the mid-90s.

Outstanding conference presentations

The two day main Conference had some outstanding presentations! IFPRI’s Agnes Quisunbing’s Keynote address on June 5 - ‘Looking back to move forward: Gender in agriculture, health, and nutrition research’ in particular.I encourage you take a look at the historical account of the gender dimension in food security by someone who was so closely linked to this important development traced since 20 years ago when the foundations for a gender-sensitive food policy was laid.

The other outstanding presentations of the day included Adewale Oparinde’s (IFPRI), ‘Developing Country Consumers’ Acceptance of Biofortified Foods’ and Anna Herforth’s (SPRING) ‘The food environment, its effects on dietary consumption, and potential for measurement within agriculture-nutrition interventions’.

LCIRAH provided an excellent panel of speakers in an afternoon session titled, ‘Taking Stock of LCIRAH research on Agri-health’ highlighting achievements during the last five years of existence as an inter-disciplinary experiment - interesting highlights included brief presentations by Alan Dangour and Bhavani Shankar from LANSA – the latter displaying his quiet, self-effacing but humorous side!  Regrettably, neither the audio clip nor powerpoints are available – a pity!

The first day ended with the launch of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy, followed by a Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition session where Anna Lartey, Director of Nutrition of FAO made a brief presentation on ICN2 and its successful outcomes: The Rome Declaration and the Framework for Action. The message we were all left with at the end of DAY 1 was encapsulated in Anna Lartey’s words: “We are in an age of evidence based policy.”

DAY 2 keynote speaker was Anna Lartey who spoke on ‘Linking Agriculture with Nutrition within the SDG Goal 2’ making an excellent case for a dietary diversity indicatorand suggesting how a global dietary diversity indicator would facilitate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) for ‘improved nutrition’ by ensuring the mean micronutrient density adequacy (MMDA) of the diet.

There were two interesting sessions that day - Value Chains Approaches to Nutrition and Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Policy by LANSA colleagues - John Humphrey (IDS) and Derek Heady (IFPRI).

The final session before the closure of the Conference was a Panel Discussion on, ‘Where to in agri-health research?’ chaired by Jeff Waage, LCIRAH. The discussants included Charlotte Dufour (FAO), Rachel Lambert (DFID), John McDermott (CGIAR- A4NH), Lindiwe Sibanda (FANRPAN), and Shelly Sundberg (BMGF). This turned turned out to be a foresight exercise addressing the direction for researchers in this nascent, newly emerging multi and inter-disciplinary area of science and policy to confront its future – ‘WHERE NEXT?’

The insightful session that followed benefited enormously from the range of backgrounds, knowledge and experience the panellists brought to the discussion which revolved around addressing two core questions that needed responses: firstly, ‘what are the distinctive and real advances in agriculture, nutrition and health?’ and secondly, ‘what do we do next, what have we not done or done well enough and what are the challenges ahead?’ I regret there is neither a video nor an audio clip of the seminal discourse, which will certainly steer, if not influence our course for the future as researchers in this new discipline.

Kudos to LCIRAH under the leadership of Jeff Waage for their yeoman contributions in bringing us all together – in increasing numbers as the years rolled – and to the mantle that has now passed on to us to continue to convene this annual conference (not any more in London), possibly in Africa or Asia in 2016!