Opening and closing of LCIRAH’s successful 4th Conference

Prakash Shetty attended LCIRAH’s 4th annual conference. Here is his account of the opening and closing keynote presentations

LCIRAH’s 4th conference had a great turnout, a distinguished panel of Keynote speakers and a wide selection of papers presented. Here I provide a flavour of the opening and closing remarks.

Nutrition enhancing food and agriculture systems

Per Pinstrup-Anderson opened the Conference. In his inimitable and provocative style he delivered an excellent talk ‘Nutrition enhancing food and agriculture systems’. He defined the term nutrition sensitive as “food systems that effectively and explicitly incorporate nutrition objectives into their overall goals, strategies and implementation”. He followed this with an outline of the key health and nutrition drivers of contemporary food systems.

While food and agricultural systems to strengthen nutritional impact are gaining ground, Per questioned why the potential has not been fully realized. Some of the factors he identified were:

• responsibility distributed over several sectors,
• conflict between nutrition and other developmental goals, 
• market signals and the behaviour of system agents, and 
• limited evidence of impact. 

The LANSA research programme has been designed to help plug some of these evidence gaps. Highlighting the pathways between food systems and nutrition Per emphasized the critical role of the political and policy context. Watch the video, see the presentation and read the paper. 

The modern global food system - and how it is related to health

The last keynote speaker was Barry Popkin who coined the term ‘Nutrition Transition’ over two decades ago. Barry presented data supporting the enormous changes in global diets suggesting a convergence in their patterns with the emergence of nearly identical modern food manufacturing and marketing systems worldwide. The consequences of these changes, in low and middle income countries, is the rise of non-communicable diseases and obesity. There is a need for future research to understand the potential implications of these dynamics for population behaviour and health globally. See Barry Popkin’s presentation here or watch the video.