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

Chapter 9 – Human nutrition and dairy development: Trends and issues 367
part of emissions trading and no taxes are applied to greenhouse gas emissions from
livestock, so these considerations are not currently affecting the location or intensity
of dairy-industry development.
Climate change has the potential to change the location of dairy production.
The optimum conditions for dairy cattle are those where the climate favours the
growth of protein-rich grasses and supports the high-yielding dairy cattle bred for
cool temperate regions with temperatures between 18 and 20 °C. Water is needed
for milk production and also for processing. These factors favour concentration of
milk production in certain areas, including the highlands of East Africa, the north
of China, the grasslands of Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand and parts of Europe.
As certain areas become hotter and drier, or as competition from biofuels raises the
prices of inputs, production may relocate.
However, changes in location need not necessarily affect the contribution of
dairying to human nutrition – production and consumption centres are already
separated in much of the world. Most of China’s milk is consumed in the south of
the country while production is in the north, and much of East Africa’s population
lives on coast while the most productive dairy herds are in the highlands. As a result,
there is already considerable movement of milk and other dairy products within the
countries where it is produced, as well as the increasing exports of processed dairy
products previously discussed.
9.2.7 “Nutrition-sensitive development”: can dairying contribute
Integrating nutrition and agricultural development seems intuitively obvious, but a
discussion brief from the International Food Policy Research Institute argues that
often this link is not made, with those who fund nutrition programmes preferring to
invest in supplementation and food fortification (Levin et al., 2003). By implication,
agricultural development has become somewhat de-linked from explicit nutritional
aims. A World Bank publication in 2007 threw out the challenge that “agricultural
programs should … include nutrition as a specific objective and a clear plan of how to
implement nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions and how to achieve impact”.
The most prominent examples have come from small-scale crops, such as the integrated
gardening programme in Bangladesh that involved 900 000 households and the
promotion of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes in Mozambique (Arimond et al., 2011).
No similar examples exist for dairying. As noted elsewhere in this chapter, several
dairy-development projects appear to have had beneficial impacts on nutrition, but for
the most part they have set out to target income or production rather than nutrition.
Part of the reason for producing this book was to examine the possibility of
rebuilding the links between dairy development and nutrition by making nutritional
goals more prominent in dairy-industry development and other dairy programmes.
In theory this might be achieved in either of two ways: by providing the ingredients
for specially formulated supplementary or “blended” foods that use milk powder as
an ingredient; or by using what are called “food-based” approaches to make dairy
products more readily available to those whose diets are currently deficient in a
range of essential nutrients and who would benefit from consuming milk and dairy
products on a regular basis.
Food-based approaches include dietary diversification and modification (adding
new elements into the diet, to boost its nutritional content or help the absorption of