Milk-and-Dairy-Products-in-Human-Nutrition-FAO

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Milk and dairy products in human nutrition
areas. Changes in dietary patterns made possible by rising incomes and increased
availability of energy-dense foods together with reductions in physical activity
levels are associated with this dietary transition.
While changes in diets have brought significant improvements in nutritional
status, undernourishment and levels of child malnutrition have remained unacceptably
high. Moreover, a growing number of developing countries are affected by the
so-called double burden of malnutrition, where undernutrition and overnutrition
co-exist in the same communities and families. Improvement in the diets of malnourished
populations can help raise the well-being and productive capacity of both
present and future generations.
1.3 Linking agriculture and nutrition
The food and financial crises of 2008 and 2009 focused governments’ attention
on the importance of food and nutrition security as a fundamental component of
socio-economic development and political stability. This is illustrated by efforts
to reform the Committee on Food Security, the creation of the High-Level Task
Force on Food Security and donors’ renewed interest in food and nutrition security
which led to the establishment of the European Union’s Food Facility, the Spanish
MDG‐Fund on Children, Food Security and Nutrition and the United States
Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future programme and the
sixty-third World Health Assembly Resolution on Infant and Young Child Feeding.
The Scaling-up Nutrition (SUN) 1 Movement is calling for high-level international
attention to scale-up nutrition programmes by 2015. The movement was
launched in 2010 with the support of multiple partners, including governments
of countries with a high burden of malnutrition, United Nations (UN) agencies,
donors, non-governmental organizations, academia and the private sector, together
with advocacy initiatives such as the 1000 Days partnership. UN partners such as
FAO, UNICEF, World Food Programme (WFP) and WHO collaborating in the
Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger initiative (REACH) 2 and the UN Standing
Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN) are committed to strengthening governance
for nutrition and to revitalizing the role of nutrition at the international level. The
African Regional Nutrition Strategy 2005–2015 (African Union, 2006), for example,
stresses the need to emphasize nutrition as a basic input in poverty-alleviation
strategies and the achievement of the MDGs.
Growing attention is also being given to the synergies between agriculture,
nutrition and health. A high-level international conference on “Leveraging Agriculture
for Improving Nutrition and Health” convened by the International Food
Policy Research Institute in New Delhi, India, on 10–12 February 2011 sparked an
important policy dialogue on the role of agriculture and how it can be energized to
enhance its impact on nutrition. The conference identified the need to learn more
about the potential for agriculture to work optimally for nutrition, and the implications
for future policies and programmes.
1 http://scalingupnutrition.org
2 http://www.reachpartnership.org