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

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Milk and dairy products in human nutrition
citing reports from Ethiopia and Bangladesh). Support to small-scale dairying can
therefore improve livelihoods and increase food security in rural areas. Using species
other than cows also increases the accessibility of dairying to poor rural families.
However, the poorest rural families seldom keep dairy animals and for them milk
can be expensive. Poor urban families also have limited access to livestock products,
including milk, because of their cost. Urban livestock keepers are for the most part
restricted to the fringes of residential areas (FAO, 2011b), where keeping animals
allows them to diversify livelihood-generating activities and provides a source of
locally produced food products for people living in the vicinity of the livestock
keepers (Güendel, 2002). For most urban families, growing vegetables or keeping
chickens is easier to manage than dairying, and for some home food production is
not possible. Ruminants, which need large quantities of forage, are particularly hard
to manage in confined urban spaces. Thus, the majority of urban populations must
buy their food and may often eat outside of the home. For those who can afford it,
consumption of dairy and other animal-source foods has risen, but dairy products
remain out of reach for many others.
It is not a simple matter to make animal-source foods cheap enough for poor
people to afford them; this is particularly true for those poor who are net food purchasers,
a group that includes all of the urban poor and many of those in rural areas
(FAO, IFAD and WFP, 2011). The same policies cannot necessarily be counted
on to promote sustainable income for farmers and cheap and nutritious food for
consumers. Measures to ensure that the poorest people have access to adequate food
are indispensable. These may include indirect subsidies and support for technology
adoption as well as direct support to increase consumption. The nutrition of women
and children can be targeted directly through dairying by: (i) supporting poor
families to produce and consume milk at home; and (ii) supporting school feeding
programmes that include milk. There are advantages to doing both at the same time.
Well-designed school feeding programmes, including those that supply milk, have
the dual benefit of providing children with supplemental nutrition and encouraging
parents to send their children to school. They can be introduced in both rural and
urban communities. School milk programmes are fairly widespread in middleincome
countries and have been shown to improve child nutrition (Chapter 7) but
they are not the whole answer; in particular, they do not reach younger children and
their mothers, who are generally at greatest risk of malnutrition. Since good nutrition
in the first 1 000 days of life has been shown to be critical for physical growth
and mental ability, 58 programmes are also needed that reach women and young
children at home. Two such programmes are described in Chapter 7: the National
Complementary Food Programme in Chile, which targeted pregnant women and
children under 6 years, and the Liconsa programme in Mexico, which successfully
used iron-fortified milk to reduce anaemia in children aged 1 to 11 years.
The safety of dairy products is an important element of their nutritional value.
The most vulnerable members of the population – those who are undernourished,
the immune-compromised, infants and children, pregnant mothers – are all at
58 http://www.thousanddays.org