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

8
Milk and dairy products in human nutrition
household health and nutrition, provide employment and income for the poor and
can make a substantial and sustainable contribution to poverty reduction. Chapter
8 reviews experiences and highlights a market-driven approach to investments in
national and dairy institutions, such as cooperatives, groups or associations, development
of sustainable and integrated supply of locally available inputs and support
services and ultimately providing a fair benefit for the tens of millions of smallholder
farm families who produce and market their surplus milk on a daily basis.
The agriculture–nutrition linkage is elaborated in Chapters 7 and 8. However,
many of the programmes examined did not measure nutrition impacts, and there
is a school of thought that questions whether we need to measure such an obvious
benefit as the daily provision of milk and dairy products at smallholder household
level. To compensate for this lack of measurement of nutrition impacts, this publication
also draws upon the field-level experiences of a host of experts in nutrition
and dairy-industry development from both the public and private sectors globally.
Based on this, Chapter 8 presents a series of recommendations for enhancing the
design of dairy-industry programmes, including incorporating improved process
and impact evaluations to examine nutrition outcomes.
A major challenge is how to ensure that smallholder farmer families can participate
in and benefit from dairy-industry development. Dairying is unique in
agriculture in that it provides not only daily food at the household level but also a
modest but regular income for the farm family. Moreover, dairy animals can be a
source of farm power and very importantly also provide manure that is used as fertilizer
for crops or as fuel. Ensuring that dairy-industry programmes are inclusive of
smallholders thus has significant food-security and poverty-reduction implications,
and there is increasing evidence that there can be a significant benefit for women in
the household in many instances.
There is increasing interest of both governments and the private sector to meet
food demands locally where feasible. Producing high-quality milk and dairy products
that are or will be demanded by consumers can be a challenging and complex
task. Governments may need to make initial investments in the dairy sector to stimulate
private-sector investments. Both public and private sectors have a key role to
play in inclusive dairy-industry development and increased collaboration between
the two would optimize economic and social impact of many programmes. FAO
should optimize its presence and role to facilitate and encourage such collaboration.
As aptly noted in Chapter 9 – Human nutrition and dairy development: trends
and issues, there are many publications on dairy development and even more on
human nutrition, but this book is unusual in that it examines the extent to which it
is possible to make explicit connections between the two. The concluding chapter
draws together the threads of the two stories, on nutrition and on dairy development,
and discusses the implications of these findings for the future of the sector,
particularly in developing countries. The issues and challenges posed require actions
on many fronts and an integrated effort by various stakeholders.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare that no conflict of interest exists in relation to the content of
the article.