Assessing nutritional diversity of cropping systems in African villages

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of children under five years in age are chronically undernourished. As new investments and attention galvanize action on African agriculture to reduce hunger, there is an urgent need for metrics that monitor agricultural progress beyond calories produced per capita - they also need to address nutritional diversity essential for human health.

A new research paper 'Assessing Nutritional Diversity of Cropping Systems in African Villages' demonstrates how an ecological tool, functional diversity (FD), has the potential to address this need and provide new insights on nutritional diversity of cropping systems in rural Africa. 

Jessica Fanzo, co-author and Senior Scientist for Nutrition at Bioversity International explained:

"There is a real need for new tools and indicators to measure the associations between agrobiodiversity on the farm, and what that could translate into on the plate. This new indicator, nutritional functional diversity, measures the capacity of ecosystems to provide the diversity of elements required for complete human diets resulting in healthy and productive lives. There is no reason to think that lessons learned by ecologists on the functional consequences of species losses should not apply within a nutritional framework."

Read the research paper here