GOVERNMENTS must invest in producing food with high nutritional value and in strengthening the local sourcing of food to withstand disruptions that threaten food security, experts said at an Asian Development Bank (ADB) forum.
Cindy H. McCain, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme, said Asian populations are vulnerable to health risks due to lack of nutrition content in food.
“Rural communities across Asia are experiencing concerning rates of malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. Lifestyle changes are a factor, along with difficulty accessing a sufficiently wide range of nutritious foods,” Ms. McCain told the ADB’s Food Security Forum.
Jyotsna Puri, Associate vice-president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said that official development assistance (ODAs) for food systems invest the most in humanitarian assistance (31%) but the least in nutrition and health (9%).
She said that investing in local food industries would help countries weather food crises more effectively.
“What we found is that those value chains that were very local during these crises and those that were depending on markets that were local were able to deal with a lot of the disruptions better than the others,” Ms. Puri said.
Around 400 million people in Asia are undernourished, with 64% of them are children, according to Ms. McCain.
Malnutrition must be viewed as a development challenge to be integrated across key programs, like food system initiatives, social protections, school feeding programs, and private sector partnerships, she added.
Steven Victor, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Environment for Palau, emphasized the need to change behaviors on food, which should begin in schools.
Jo Swinnen, director general of International Food Policy Research Institute, said countries would need to adopt “sustainability criteria” to impact consumer spending and behavior.
“We need a system where the changed preferences, changed sustainability criteria, have to go through the value chain to reach the farmers to induce change in investments and behavior,” he said.
The ADB has committed $7.6 billion out of $14 billion to ease the food crisis in the Asia-Pacific region, “is on pace to deliver the rest by the end of 2025,” President Masatsugu Asakawa told the forum. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz
