Archive for: Food Security


Large-scale anthropogenic changes to the natural environment, including land-use change, climate change, and the deterioration of ecosystem services, are all accelerating. These changes are interacting to generate five major emerging public health threats that endanger the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. These threats include increasing exposure to infectious disease, water scarcity, food scarcity, natural disasters, and population displacement. Taken together, they may represent the greatest public health challenge humanity has faced. There is an urgent need to improve our understanding of the dynamics of each of these threats: the complex interplay of factors that generate them, the characteristics of populations that make them particularly vulnerable, and the identification of which populations are at greatest risk from each of these threats. Such improved understanding would be the basis for stepped-up efforts at modeling and mapping global vulnerability to each of these threats. It would also help natural resource managers and policy makers to estimate the health impacts associated with their decisions and would allow aid organizations to target their resources more effectively.

Year: 2009

Source: Annual Review of Environment and Resources

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    The USAID Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy 2014­–2025 prioritizes family planning and reproductive health services (FP/RH) as nutrition-sensitive interventions that address the underlying and systemic causes of malnutrition. However, there is limited peer reviewed literature and a dearth of documentation on how to best integrate FP with food security and nutrition programming. To address this gap, FANTA conducted an extensive desk review to identify and synthesize programmatic experiences, including integration models, platforms, contact points, and providers used for integrated service delivery. This report synthesizes learnings from 102 health and multisectoral programs, including a rich set of program examples and three case studies, to illustrate the ways programs integrate family planning with nutrition and food security interventions. A third of the multisectoral programs included in the review and one cast study were PHE programs. The report and brief also include lessons learned, promising practices for programming, and recommendations for USAID.

    Year: 2015

    Source: FHI 360

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      Slowing the rapid growth of human population through strengthened voluntary family planning services would powerfully and inexpensively contribute to improvements in food security and the reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. A confluence of long-term environmental and population trends is undermining world food availability and driving climate change. These trends include quickening climate changes and difficulty adapting to its effects; widespread depletion of water, soils and fisheries; increased diversion of grains from human consumption to bio-fuel production and livestock and poultry feed; rapid population growth, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; and increasing affluence in middle income countries.

      Year: 2015

      Source: Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

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        PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc.’s, Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management Project (IPOPCORM) has been scaled-up in the coastal Philippines. In the Siquijor Province, as IPOPCORM expanded to cover all 6 municipalities, the local Governments decided to incorporate population and reproductive health into coastal resource management legislation. IPOPCORM also experienced success scaling-up in the Danajon Bank Ecosystem, a biodiversity hotspot that experienced a loss of fisheries resources due to a dense population, leading to greater food insecurity. In this case study, IPOPCORM discusses their accomplishments in both regions and how it was achieved.

        Year: 2006

        Source: PATH Foundation Philippines Inc.

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          The Coastal Resources Center (CRC) of the University of Rhode Island and its partners are implementing an Integrated Coastal and Fisheries Governance (ICFG) project in all the six coastal districts of Western Region (2009-2013), with funding from USAID Ghana. The goal of the ICFG Program is to support the government of Ghana in achieving its fisheries development objectives of poverty reduction, food security, sustainable management and conservation. CRC recognizes that it will be difficult to sustain the project’s gains in the long run, however, because of the country’s high rate of population growth. Thus it is assessing the feasibility of linking Family Planning and Reproductive Health (FP/RH) interventions with ICFG’s strategies. Experiences from other developing countries show integrated population-health-environment (PHE) approaches can create synergies and results that surpass sectoral management strategies both in terms of impact and sustainability. At the request of CRC, the BALANCED3 project sent a PHE specialist to Ghana in June 2010 to meet with ICFG stakeholders and visit project field sites in Western Region to explore needs, opportunities and possible mechanism of integration. This report summarizes the consultant’s findings and recommendations for integrating FP/RH and other health, nutrition and food security interventions into the ICFG framework. It builds upon a PHE concept that was drafted by CRC’s local implementing partner – Friends of the Nation (FoN) following an exposure visit to the Philippines where local communities have been implementing family planning in conjunction with coastal conservation strategies since 2001.

          Year: 2010

          Source: Coastal Resources Center

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