For the past thirteen years, symposia have been held either in South America or in Mexico on subjects of special interest to Latin American scientists. When the opportunity of holding the 14th International Biological Symposium in Guate mala was offered, it was most welcome, especially as the occasion was the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP). With the encouragement of members of the Ford Foundation staff and the National Academy of Sciences, the idea for a symposium on the broad approach to the problem of nutrition was developed by Dr. Moises Behar, the second director of INCAP, 1961-1974, Dr. Nevin Scrimshaw, fIrst director of INCAP, 1949-1961, and members of the INCAP staff. Because the availability of food has become a serious international problem, a discussion of the underlying problems was most timely. INCAP, one of the pioneer and leading institutions in the area of nutrition, has a profound influence on nutrition in Latin America. The meeting was attended by about 300 scientists from more than 20 countries. Because this was the fIrst symposium in this series to be held in Central America, it provided an opportunity to get acquainted with scientists from many of the Central American republics. It was especially rewarding that so many students from the Central American universities attended this meeting.

Subsistence production: a sign of market failure. Commercialization cannot be left to the market. Household effects of commercialization. Nutrition effects of commercialization. Policy action needed.

This book is an expose of the many food consumption-related problems which need to be considered alongside agricultural production issues in development. It examines factors that determine the degree to which people have access to food and can assimilate its nutrients.

Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World is the first comprehensive exploration of key emerging issues facing developing-country agriculture today, from rapid urbanization to rural transformation to climate change. In this four-part volume, top experts offer the latest research in the field of agricultural development. Using new lenses to examine today’s biggest challenges, contributors address topics such as nutrition and health, gender and household decision-making, agrifood value chains, natural resource management, and political economy. The book also covers most developing regions, providing a critical global perspective at a time when many pressing challenges extend beyond national borders. Tying all this together, Agricultural Development explores policy options and strategies for developing sustainable agriculture and reducing food insecurity and malnutrition. The changing global landscape combined with new and better data, technologies, and understanding means that agriculture can and must contribute to a wider range of development outcomes than ever before, including reducing poverty, ensuring adequate nutrition, creating strong food value chains, improving environmental sustainability, and promoting gender equity and equality. Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World, with its unprecedented breadth and scope, will be an indispensable resource for the next generation of policymakers, researchers, and students dedicated to improving agriculture for global wellbeing.

Agricultural development has historically focused on poverty reduction and food security but is now increasingly asked to help improve nutrition. Despite this strengthened nutritional mandate, agricultural policies and programs have struggled to develop effective, scalable and cost-effective approaches for reducing undernutrition. This study was therefore undertaken to assess more the more strategic issue of how to re-design agricultural development strategies for greater nutritional impact. To do so we review the literature on agriculture-nutrition linkages through an economic lens, focusing on systemic agriculture-nutrition linkages that go beyond the much-explored question of how a farm family’s agricultural activities affect their own household members’ food consumption or nutrition outcomes. To that end we structured this review around three types of linkages between agriculture and nutrition: (i) agricultural income effects (including income stability); (ii) relative food price determination (including the shadow prices involved in consuming one’s own production); and (iii) agricultural livelihood characteristics (encompassing the many neglected dimensions of agricultural activities and rural livelihoods that influence nutrition and health). For each of these literatures we reflect upon relevant economic theory, methodological challenges, and key empirical evidence. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for developing more nutrition-sensitive agricultural development strategies.