This open access book examines the interactions between India’s economic development, agricultural production, and nutrition through the lens of a “Food Systems Approach (FSA).” The Indian growth story is a paradoxical one. Despite economic progress over the past two decades, regional inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition problems persist. Simultaneously, recent trends in obesity along with micro-nutrient deficiency portend to a future public health crisis. This book explores various challenges and opportunities to achieve a nutrition-secure future through diversified production systems, improved health and hygiene environment and greater individual capability to access a balanced diet contributing to an increase in overall productivity. The authors bring together the latest data and scientific evidence from the country to map out the current state of food systems and nutrition outcomes. They place India within the context of other developing country experiences and highlight India’s status as an outlier in terms of the persistence of high levels of stunting while following global trends in obesity. This book discusses the policy and institutional interventions needed for promoting a nutrition-sensitive food system and the multi-sectoral strategies needed for simultaneously addressing the triple burden of malnutrition in India.

Access to markets and marketing information by smallholder farmers depending on agriculture in developing countries have always been challenging. Factors such as poor road infrastructure, illiteracy, financial constraints, poor communication means and lack of access to information, all limited their access to markets. These smallholders depend on traditional means of communication and sell their produce at the farm gate and local markets. This has not been fruitful for these poor farmers as traders, intermediaries and other stakeholders in the chain take a large share of their produce. As a result, rural farmers remain poor and agriculture contributes little to their income, economy and welfare.

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - Case Scenarios, grade: A, University of Applied Sciences Chur, language: English, abstract: African small-scale farmers are inadequately linked to markets to sell their harvested produce. On the one hand this is mainly because farmers are unable to produce according to what is demanded by buyers and on the other hand due to intermediary constraints. This current lack of adequate market linkages prevents farmers to sell their surplus production profitably. While this problem has been widely recognized by NGOs and governmental institutions, little improvements have been made so far. Literature fails to provide an overview of this problem that includes all variables affecting farmers and their linkage to markets. Zambia in particular has received minor consideration in the current literature concerning this problem. Therefore, two NGOs, namely Henwood Foundation and NAK Karitativ, have chosen this Master Thesis to create a farmer-to-market linkage model that incorporates all variables affecting farmers from being inadequately linked to markets while focus is placed on those variables that are amendable to influence by NGOs rather than external variables. The literature review in the following section two indicates how severe the market linkage problem actually is for small-scale farmers and what possibilities there are to tackle this dilemma. Based on the literature review, the research problem, its goal and its objectives as well as the data collection methods are specified in section three. Section four will provide an introduction to Zambia as well as to Western Province, a state in Zambia, and to Mongu District, a region in Western Province which received the geographical focus of this thesis. Building on this, the farmer-to-market linkage model will receive attention. Section five and six point out preconditions that determine agricultural output, which ultimately decides how well farmers can be linked

This book includes examples of achieving wider change in smallholder agriculture, through influencing policy decisions, linking smallholders to value chains, innovating service provision for small farmers, with an emphasis on promoting equitable livelihoods and developing rural women's economic leadership.