Research Brief

Collaborative Research Support Programs (CRSPs) represent a long?standing form of US government funding for research that facilitates partnerships among US?based and developing?country scholars on agriculture, food and nutrition issues of policy relevance globally. The CRSPs receive core funding from the Bureau for Food Security of USAID, as well as buy?ins from USAID Missions and other parts of the Agency. The Nutrition CRSP is the most recently?established of 10 existing CRSPs.

While best programming methods have been identified for many of the essential nutrition actions?e.g., breastfeeding, micronutrient tablet provision?the way forward for improving complementary feeding practices is much less clear, as is agriculture?s contribution. The vast majority of children in Nepal do not receive a minimum acceptable diet, and behavior change for complementary feeding within households has been difficult to achieve at scale. An underestimated constraint on child feeding is that the child?s food preparation takes a lot of mothers?

The Government of Nepal (GoN) has made a major commitment to improving the nutritional status of its population. For example, Nepal was one of the earliest countries to join the Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) Movement. As a SUN country, Nepal has articulated a clear strategy for scaling up direct nutrition interventions as well as identifying multi-sector strategies for improving nutrition. To this end, GoN in September 2012 released its Multi-Sector Nutrition Plan (MSNP) that will guide the government?s investment for the period 2013 to 2017.

Recently, there have been renewed calls for the integration of nutrition, health, and agriculture to improve the nutritional status of populations. Whereas these sectors previously operated in separate realms, various frameworks have been propounded to highlight the importance of a multi?sectoral approach and to establish links between the sectors to impact nutritional status.

We combine three distinct datasets to study the connections between agriculture and child health in Nepal. Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 2006 are merged on the basis of common GIS data points with satellite remote sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) composites. Using these data we explore the association between the NDVI, a monthly proxy for agricultural production, and nutrition outcomes in children under age 5.

Globally, approximately 2.4 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation facilities, while 1.1 billion of those people practice open defecation (WHO 2012a; JMP 2012). Open defecation contributes substantially to the insanitary environment in which too many children grow up. About 2 million people die every year due to diarrheal diseases; most of them are children less than 5 years of age. Indeed, diarrhea is the second leading cause of death globally among children under 5, killing more young children than HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

There is a great need to establish solid, empirical knowledge of the effects of integrated programs targeting agriculture, nutrition and health (ANH), which are often complex, multi?sector interventions.

In the last few years, there has been a proliferation of interest in how to leverage agriculture to maximize its impacts on nutrition, particularly among mothers and children (USAID 2011; Herforth 2012). The belief that ?agriculture contributes not just to food production, but also to human nutrition and health? (IFPRI 2012) is widely held, and it underpins ongoing efforts globally to ?make agricultural policies and programs nutrition-sensitive.?(BMGF 2012) However, the search for solid empirical findings of ?what works?