Presented by Tom Randolph at the Science Forum 2013, Bonn, Germany, 23‒25 September 2013

1. Ensuring access
to animal-source foods
Tom Randolph
Science Forum 2013
Nutrition and health outcomes: targets for agricultural
research, Bonn, Germany, 23‒25 September 2013

2. Our challenge
Protect and enhance adequate access of both rural and
urban poor to a particularly valuable nutritional resource
in their diet: animal-source foods
• Demand growing faster than capacity to supply
• Aspects of both food and nutritional security
• Change from traditional CGIAR focus on livestock for
livelihoods
• Conclusion: Not simply a production or nutrition issue
 Requires a multidimensional food systems approach

3. Our reasoning
Food &
Nutrition
Security
•Access to an
appropriately
diverse diet
Poor rely on
local
production
•Smallholder farms + informal marketing
systems, especially in rural areas
•Often competitive vis-à-vis larger-
scale, industrial, formal systems

4. Limited success in supporting
smallholder supply response
0.06
0.08
0.03
0.17
0.06
0.11
0.04
0.2
Meat
(kg output/kg biomass/yr)
1980
2005
411
1021
517
4226
397
1380
904
6350Milk
(kg/cow/yr)
1980
2005

5. Promoting ‘smarter’ pro-poor
animal-source food systems
• Producing and delivering more, good quality food
• Serving the poor and targeting the nutritionally
challenged
• Ensuring it can be sustained and adaptive
• Managing potential trade-offs: environmental, resource
use, role in diet, health risks
Value chain approach
– Harness market incentives to promote uptake...
– While identifying opportunities to enhance
nutritional benefits as broad food-based
intervention

6. Premise for CGIAR Research
Program on Livestock and Fish
Research for development and impact that:
• Puts together and pilots an integrated intervention
across the targeted value chain
• While conducting longer-term research on more
fundamental productivity constraints
• Works together with development partners from the
start so they can take intervention to scale
• Focuses on only a few selected value chains

7. Focus, focus, focus!
Working in 8 target value chains  accountability
PIGS
AQUACULTURE
SHEEP & GOATS
DAIRY

8. Status
• Partnership of 4 CGIAR Centers
• Officially started January 1st, 2012
• Activities and momentum achieved in 4 value chains

9. Will it work?
Can livestock & aquaculture interventions improve
nutrition security?
Series of literature reviews (Webb, 2012) have concluded:
• Projects rarely have explicit food or nutrition security
objectives
• Among those, very few appropriately designed
impact studies
• Weak evidence, but suggests positive
benefits, especially if accompanied by nutrition
education
Nutrition influenced through several pathways

10. Mapping the links for a
smallholder dairying household
Randolph et al. (2007)
Animals
owned
Human
nutritional
(growth) status
Human health
status
+
+
Probability of
zoonotic disease
Animal
production
Food crop
production
Food crop sales
Animal &
product sales
+
+ +
+
-
HH
Income
+
+
Dietary
intake
+
Level of care/feeding
behavior
+
Labor allocated
to livestock
+
-
Labor demands on
(female) caregiver
Total labor
demands
+
+
Health
inputs
+
Food crop
purchases
ASF purchases
HH crop
consumption
HH ASF
consumption
+
+
+
+
+
Chronic
disease risk +
-
Land allocation
to feed
Traction, nutrient
cycling
+
-
+
+
+
+
+
Environmental toxin
concentration
-
+
test
test
Food-borne
diseases
+
-
Water
contamination
+
-

11. Evaluating a major dairy project
East Africa Dairy Development Project (Heifer Project Int’l)
• Objective: double dairy income in 179,000 households
• Also improving nutrition?
Qualitative study by ILRI and Emory University
• Project areas in Western Kenya, June-August 2010
• Test hypotheses about 4 main pathways
• 27 focus groups: men, women, mothers with young
children
• 94 randomly sampled households, stratified:
o No milk
o Emerging (<6l)
o Advanced (>6l)

12. Direct consumption pathway
• Milk consumption increased with intensification
• Children <5 in advanced hhs received more milk than
children in emerging or no milk
• Children 12-18 mo in advanced hhs receiving 2x than in
emerging or no milk: 1.14 vs 0.50 cups a day
• Children 18-24 mo: 2.17 vs 1.25 cups.
• Reference child went without milk at least 1 time in the
preceding 30 days in 3 of 10 hhs in ‘no milk’ vs 1 of 10
emerging hhs vs no household in advanced

13. Income-mediated pathway
• Effects less clear
• Dairy income increased but total hh income marginally
• Women lose some direct control of dairy income
(controlled by HH head in 44% of advanced vs 33% in
emerging), but offset by more joint decision-making (28%
vs 14%)
• Improvements in dietary diversity score across
categories, but ability to control for income was limited

14. “MILK BELONGS TO THE WOMAN AND THE
MONEY BELONGS TO THE MAN”- MALE
FARMER, EMERGING GROUP, CHEBORGE
“MEAT IS A MUST WHEN WE GET PAID
[FROM THE DAIRY].”- MALE
FARMER, EMERGING GROUP, KIPKELION
Soundbites
FROM THE FOCUS GROUP DISCUSSIONS:

15. Childcare pathway
• Increased workload for women in emerging category
meant a significant share of daytime childcare
entrusted to pre-teen siblings (25%)
• Transition dynamic : workload decreased among
advanced hhs, as did daytime childcare by siblings
• Cessation of breastfeeding and introduction of other
foods advances across intensification categories 
role for nutrition education

16. Health pathway
• Inconclusive: samples too small and other
measurement challenges to detect differences in
disease incidence as measure of exposure to risk of
zoonoses
• Similarly, data on health expenditures too limited to
evaluate offsetting effect

17. Summing up…
• It’s complicated, and that was just for on-farm…
• Teasing out clear net benefits will require large
samples and extensive surveys, and even then…
• Consider challenges at community or regional level
when extending to other actors in the value chain

18. From our perspective
• Major progress:
o Systematic conceptualization of food systems to
understand the links between agriculture and nutrition
• Major gaps:
o Framework for considering
 role of different food commodities in achieving
appropriate diet accessible to the poor
 Implications for policy to influence land use and
investment
• Innovative approaches:
o Systems approach / scenario analysis to putting
nutritional objectives into a food systems context, and
how different food systems contribute to an appropriate
diet

19. Acknowledgements
• Int’l Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi
– Isabelle Baltenweck
– Delia Grace
– Jemimah Njuki
– Thomas Randolph
• Emory University, Atlanta
– Aimee Girard-Webb (faculty, HDGH, Nutrition)
– Craig Hadley (faculty, Anthropology, HDGH)
– Peter Little (faculty, Anthropology, Development Studies)
– Claire Null (faculty, HDGH, Economics)
– Usha Ramakrishnan (faculty, HDGH, Nutrition)
– Shreyas Sreenath (student, Economics)
– Amanda Watkins (student, Nursing)
– Amanda Wyatt (student, Hubert Dept of Global
Health, HDGH)
– Anna Yearous-Algozin (student, Nursing)
– Kathryn Yount (faculty HDGH, Sociology)
• University of Nairobi, Nairobi
– Prof. Erastus Kang’ethe
• Egerton University, Njoro
– Samwel Mbugua
• East Africa Dairy Development
Project
• The Global Health
Institute, Emory University
• The Halle Institute, Emory
University
• Program in Development
Studies, Emory University
Collaborators (alphabetical order) Funding

20. CGIAR is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for a food secure future. The CGIAR
Research Program on Livestock and Fish aims to increase the productivity of small-scale livestock and fish systems
in sustainable ways, making meat, milk and fish more available and affordable across the developing world.
CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish
livestockfish.cgiar.org