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Recent large-scale pandemics such as the covid19, H1N1, Swine flu, Ebola and the Nipah virus, which impacted human health and livelihoods, have come about due to inadequate food systems safeguards to detect, trace and eliminate threats arising from zoonotic diseases. Such diseases are transmitted to humans through their interaction with animals in the food value chain including through the consumption of bush meat. Climate change has also facilitated the emergence of new zoonotic diseases. The lack of adequately enforced food-safety standards in managed agricultural production systems creates the necessary conditions for diseases to mutate into highly contagious strains. The lack of food safety measures in handling, packaging and sales of food increases risks of cross-species contamination. Finally, increasing anti-microbial resistance, combined with rapid urbanization and global interconnectedness allows diseases to spread rapidly among humans. Thus, part of the reconstruction efforts, post covid19, should include prioritizing proactive investments in food safety. The key to stave off another such pandemic lies in integrating one-health knowledge on zoonotic diseases along with food safety measures along the food value chain. Refocusing policy priorities from disease control to prevention will improve international coordination efforts in pandemic prevention. Implementing such proactive actions will cost a very small fraction of the reconstruction budgets. However, the expected benefits of the food-safety approach will include preventing global economic losses due to pandemics.

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Lokshin and Radyakin (2012) present evidence that month of birth affects child physical growth in India. We replicate these correlations using the same data and demonstrate that they are the result of spurious correlations between month of birth, age-at-measurement and child growth patterns in developing countries. We repeat the analysis on 39 additional countries and show that there is no evidence of seasonal birth effects in child height-for-age z-score in any country. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Demographic and Health Survey data used to estimate the correlation is not suitable for the task due to a previously unrecognized source of measurement error in child month of birth. We document results from several papers that should be re-interpreted in light of this issue.

For commercialization, along with increased linkages to factor markets, the link to agricultural output markets is also essential. Access to output or commodity markets determines price realization, incentivizing small farms to diversify production in line with the changing demands of the market. Rising demand for diversified foods has led to a growing emphasis on grades and standards to ensure quality, health, safety and differentiation of products based on tastes and preferences. In response, rapid technological changes to improve the quantity, quality and efficiency of production and marketing are becoming increasingly relevant (

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As India becomes the world’s most populous nation, the two central concerns for food security is how to increase and diversify food production. Although this is an opportunity for income growth for small farms, rectifying disadvantages owing to low economies of scale and poor access to capital, technology, and mechanization is critical to leverage it. In this chapter, we look at the scope of institutional interventions such as aggregation models in the form of cooperatives and farmer producer organizations in addressing the scale and access disadvantages. We also touch upon the need to revisit the issue of land reforms to enable land tenure systems to improve access to land and access to mechanization and credit.

As structural transformation changes countries from subsistence agriculture economies to modernized economies, countries undergo a nutrition-related transition 1 (Griffiths & Bentley, 2001). High rates of undernutrition 2 come down and population health improves. However, even as undernutrition decreases, experiences of some countries in the recent past have shown that obesity rates may increase due to overnutrition 3 and this can decrease overall gains made to health during the 1 In the previous chapter, we use the definition of the nutrition transition as described in Popkin (1997), which refers to the dietary transformation that are related to ST. In this chapter the nutrition transformation refers to the changing burden of nutrition-related health problems that constitute the triple burden of malnutrition-we build on the Griffiths and Bentley (2001) conceptualization here. 2 At its broadest level, undernourished individuals are those who do not have access to one or more essential nutrients in their diets. Being undernourished, represented by individuals who are either underweight (too thin for their age), wasted (too thin for their height and age) or stunted (too short for their age) compared to a well-nourished reference population, is one type of undernourishment. Another type of undernourishment is called hidden hunger. This manifests itself as deficiencies of essential micronutrients such as vitamins or minerals in the human body. 3 Over-nourished individuals, on the other hand, are those who consume an excess of a particular macronutrient-calories in particular. This condition is represented by overweight and obesity outcomes which are determined by the age, gender, height and weight of the individual in relation to a similar well-nourished group.