Fixing food security isn't enough. Nutrition security needs solving, too

This year’s United Nations General Assembly and the many dozens of events alongside it have placed a big emphasis on hunger and food insecurity, both of which are worsening worldwide in the face of climate change. But lately, there’s a growing recognition that investing in food security alone is not enough. Governments, philanthropies, and even the private sector must be thinking about nutrition security, too, according to Cary Fowler, the U.S. special envoy for global food security. He said it was important that the world is producing not just enough food, but enough nutritious food, to prevent problems such as stunting, wasting, and micronutrient deficiencies which can affect cognitive development. It’s a positive development that the two issues of food security and proper nutrition are now being linked, he noted Wednesday at Devex’s The future can’t wait summit held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “For nutrition security, I think the implication would be that we invest more in diverse farming systems,” Fowler said. “We invest more in the kinds of foods that provide micronutrients for children to prevent the awful, awful scourge of stunting, for example.” Improved nutrition is one of the goals Fowler is trying to achieve with the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils — a U.S.-led initiative that aims to build more climate-resilient food systems through a focus on indigenous crops and healthier soils. Launched in Africa last year, the initiative has expanded to Central America and the Pacific islands this year. It’s well recognized that the worsening climate crisis is hurting the global food supply, with extreme weather such as heavy rains and drought wreaking havoc on harvests and livestock. Lesser known is the impact of climate change on nutrition for children in particular: stunting and wasting can lead to physical and cognitive decline that affects them for the rest of their lives. In the long run, that can also devastate economies. In 2022, 148 million children experienced stunting and 45 million experienced wasting, the most severe forms of chronic and acute malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization. Those numbers are set to rise with worsening climate change, as the Gates Foundation highlighted in its annual Goalkeepers report last week. “We really don’t want statistics increasing in the wrong way,” Fowler said. So we really have to focus on not just improving [food] production in the face of climate change, but improving nutrition.” This time of rising climate change is a “pivotal moment” to discuss the intersection between food production and consumption, and nutrition, said Afshan Khan, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition, or SUN, Movement, who spoke alongside Fowler on the same panel. “Food systems without nutrition is kind of like air without oxygen,” she said. She pointed to the SUN Business Network — led by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and the World Food Programme — which is trying to encourage local production of quality nutritious foods. The problem of undernutrition has to be addressed in a comprehensive way that examines every part of the agrifood value chain, Khan added, referring to the journey of food from farm to fork and beyond. That means investing not just in healthy crops and soils — but in things like improving access to markets and preventing spoilage to ensure that nutritious food reaches the people who need it. She said it was also important to ensure proper nutrition for the people who grow the world’s food — many of them female smallholder farmers. She said this was not only socially just, but also good economics. Both Khan and Fowler emphasized the need to bring nutrition into conversations about climate change. “If we think about creating nutrition security, not just food security — if we think of nutrition at the center of our food security as being the goal of every good food system, then it changes the way you analyze,” Fowler said. “It changes your prescription of what needs to be done. It changes your time frame. So I think that that type of focus on nutrition first is what needs to be embedded in policy discussions and development agencies at the U.N.”