Connecting the food and agriculture sector to nutrition interventions for improved health outcomes

This review article proposes an expanded conceptual framework that integrates the food and agriculture sector with nutrition interventions to address malnutrition through a multi-sectoral approach. The study identifies six main pathways through which nutritional outcomes and agriculture are connected: as a source of food, as a source of income, through food prices, women's empowerment, women's utilization of time, and women's health and nutritional status. The framework builds on expanding UNICEF's conceptual framework for undernutrition, incorporating specific food and agriculture system components. The authors argue that current frameworks used to guide nutritional interventions are designed from a health sector paradigm, leaving agricultural aspects insufficiently leveraged. The study concludes by proposing intervention opportunities that consider the ways that the food and agriculture sector is linked to other critical sectors to comprehensively address malnutrition.