Agriculture Related Poverty

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Nutrition, health, and agricultural income nexus came to prominence in 2011.With about one billion people world-wide suffering from food insecurity, and major food nutrients like vitamin, mineral deficiencies, there by compromising the nutrition and health of billions of people, the international development community began to ask how much more could agricultural productivity do to improve human well-being if it explicitly included the MDGs nutrition and health goals? Also, what kind of change(s) could maximize agriculture’s contribution to human health, nutrition and productivity and how could improvement in these contribute to a more productive and sustainable agricultural system which will be free from the income poverty stigma associated …show more content…

According to Gilbert et al. (2010) as cited in IFPRI and ILRI (2010), Agriculture-related health losses are huge, accounting for up to 25 percent of all disability-adjusted life years lost and 10 percent of deaths in low-income countries. For the purpose of this article, these four concepts, agricultural income (income poverty), health and nutrition need to be clarified. Agriculture is defined by Merriam-Webster (2010) as the science and practice of cultivating of soil, producing crops, livestock rearing, preparation and marketing of the resulting …show more content…

Conversely, majority of factors that affects health and nutrition will have implications on farming households’ income. As a result, we could assert that agriculture is the only realistic way for most people to get the nutrition they need. In many poor countries, agriculture is highly labour intensive and productive agriculture demands the unwavering labour of well-nourished and healthy people. However, more than 50 percent of the world’s poorest people live in farming communities (rural settings), including many suffering from mal-nutrition. Black et al. (2008) gave a recent estimate that, globally the combined effect of inadequate macro and micro-nutrient (including iron and iodine) intakes underpin 35 percent of all child deaths and are responsible for eleven percent of the global disease

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