Читать книгу Hidden Hunger: Strategies to Improve Nutrition Quality - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Nutritional deficits and undernutrition affect large shares of populations around the world. Food and nutrition security is not just a matter of increasing food production and distribution, but matters of health, sanitation, and human behavior. Systematic, multi-faceted changes, that is, innovations are needed to improve nutrition. Simplistically innovation may be defined as “getting things done better” (improved processes), and “getting better things” (improved products and services). We distinguish between technological (e.g., biological, medical, engineering), institutional/economic, and policy innovations. Innovation is an important driver for economic and social progress, including in the whole food and nutrition system, which is our focus here. Innovations must tackle the complex problems of hunger, undernutrition, and malnutrition (obesity) to find effective and efficient solutions to them. This paper focuses on economic and policy innovations for nutritional improvements. Achieving food and nutrition security will not only require policy makers to commit, but also evidence-based choices of action, and sound policy implementation. Enhancement of scientific knowledge is fundamental for innovation. Experimentation and scaling of innovations require inclusion of the public in transparent discourse on choices of actions.

Table 1. Impact of economic growth on health and nutrition¹