World Food Policy Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 84

The Negative Side of the Agricultural–Nutrition Impact Pathways: A Literature Review

1. Nutritional risk despite an increase in
real incomes (relative to prices): the level
of the households, including farm and
nonfarm household.

represent only farmers; for nonfarmers
one just has to imagine that these two
boxes are empty). These boxes represent
the production factors and assets, taken
in a broad sense (labor, land, financial
capital, but also human, and social,
natural capital) and the farm outputs,
subdivided into two categories: food and
nonfood.

Surrounding these two individual
and household levels, on the top of
the figure the agri-food market at a
“national” level is represented in a very
schematic way, while at the bottom, the
socioeconomic/cultural drivers are also
represented. At the left side of the figure,
the different food and agricultural policies
and interventions are finally represented.
We will now start from this left side and
propose different pathways through
which these interventions may affect,
actually in a positive or negative way, the
nutrition outcome of the individual. One
has to underline the fact that pathways
may be the same for different types of
interventions and/or different for a single
intervention.

T

he rise in income linked to an
ADI usually enables households to
increase their food expenditure, as well as
their health expenses, both of which are
positive for nutrition. Some studies have
shown that agriculture is a powerful lever
in lifting people out of poverty, which
is itself correlated to an improvement
in
nutritional
indicators
(World
Bank 2007; 2013). The growth in real
incomes (relative to price) derived from
agriculture generally enables a reduction
in malnutrition (Webb and Block 2012),
but it is not automatic. It depends on:
1. Modalities of change in other sources
of income: An increase in the
income derived from marketing a
product may be counteracted by
a drop in other incomes derived
from other farming or nonfarming
activities (Masset et al. 2012).
2. Modalities of change in source of
food access: The impact of ADIs
encouraging commercial crops
was studied in the 1980–1990s
(Fleuret and Fleuret 1980; Von
Braun and Kennedy 1994). They
may be negative, from a nutritional
viewpoint, when the income
derived by converting from a
subsistence system to cash crop
farming does not compensate for
the loss of self-consumed products.
For example, the sale of milk, whose
consumption reduces the risk of
chronic malnutrition, may have a
negative impact on the nutrition of

IV - The main agricultural risks
for nutrition

T

he topic of this paper is to identify
potential risks of agriculture
interventions or policies. Using
the schematic figure we just explained
the different pathways from agriculture
toward nutrition of individuals, we
chose to present six families of risks
corresponding to six impact pathways and
to present them separately, though they
are interconnected. Each risk/pathways
is represented by a star in Figure 1 that
corresponds to the numbering of the title.
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