World Food Policy Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 80

The Negative Side of the Agricultural–Nutrition Impact Pathways: A Literature Review It is interesting to underline the fact that these studies sought the positive effects of interventions, while agricultural interventions may also have negative effects, as the impact pathways are complex and interlocking. Taking a “do no harm” lens, based on the existing literature and interviews with experts, this article proposes to shed some light on the risks that ADIs might entail for nutrition. The article sets out to inventory potential risks, without assessing neither the reality of the threats nor their relative weight, which greatly depends on the intervention contexts. It proposes conceptual guidelines for agricultural policy or project designers to assess ex ante likely impacts and to mitigate the possible drawbacks of their actions. The followed methodology of data collection and analysis is detailed in Section II. Section III illustrates the different pathways from agriculture to nutrition. Six different risks are identified and developed in section IV. Discussion and conclusion are the last two sections. interviewed 15 colleagues, from different backgrounds: history, human nutrition and epidemiology, agricultural economics or agronomy from Food and Agriculture Organization - FAO, Action Against Hunger (Action Contre la Faim in French – ACF), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - IRD, and Centre de coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - Cirad about their knowledge of existing literature or empirical evidences concerning a possible negative effect of certain types of projects or policies on nutrition. Altogether, we gathered 171 different documents, in English and in French, all written between 1980 and 2013. We excluded from this stock of documents all references presenting neutral impacts of ADIs on nutrition or stating impacts are not necessarily positive but without specifying impacts are negative. It appears that studies documenting specifically the negative impacts of ADIs on nutrition were scarce and relatively old (e.g. those published by Von Braun and Kennedy 1986; 1994). For example, despite a number of studies highlighting the limitations of biofortification and questioning its relevance as a “silver bullet solution” compared to dietary diversity (e.g., Keatinge et al. 2011; Brooks 2010, Kimura 2013), it has been difficult to find references clearly showing negative impacts on nutrition. Consequently, articles revealing negative links between agriculture and certain key variables for nutrition were also taken into consideration, even though the impact pathways did not extend all the way to nutrition. We then included references presenting negative impacts of ADIs on II - Methodology S tarting from the different recent reports (Webb 2013; World Bank 2007, 2013; du Vachat and ACF 2013), conference presentations (Headey 2013; Hoddinott 2012), books (Fan and Pandya-Lorch 2012), and scientific papers (Masset et al. 2012; Ruel, Alderman, and Maternal and Child Nutrition Study Group 2013; Berti, Krasevec, and FitzGerald 2004) concerning the effect of agriculture on nutrition, we followed a backward snowball methodology, identifying each paper or author, who was quoted about a possible negative causality. In addition, we 79