麻豆视频

The food production theme focuses on actions aimed at strengthening sustainable urban food production and short food chains – including home and community garden interventions, smallholder farming, training for food production, food processing and distribution infrastructure and food preparation interventions. The database includes 101 interventions with an even distribution across each of the themes (except food processing infrastructure with just one intervention). The effectiveness of these interventions varied depending on the type of intervention, the target population, and the specific context in which they are applied.

Many focus on disadvantaged communities including vulnerable and marginalised communities, in rural areas these interventions target smallholder low-income farmers, with particular focus on women and families with small children.

Settings

Interventions related to food production cover rural, urban, peri-urban settings. Many are linked with institutions such as schools, church and community-based organisations, located in marginalized areas with high proportion of food insecure households and individuals.

Facilitators and barriers to successful interventions

The effectiveness of interventions to produce food is influenced by various facilitators and barriers, which can either support or hinder implementation and impact.

Facilitators

• Support and collaboration from a country’s government and development partners can facilitate data access, resources, and expertise.
• Availability of documentation on interventions in similar locations can provide valuable insights.
• Collaborative engagement with local farmers and community stakeholders provides qualitative insights into challenges and opportunities.
• Context-specific approaches are better suited to address diverse local challenges and meet the specific needs of each community.
• Adopting a holistic food systems approach enables a comprehensive understanding of the complexities and interdependencies within smallholder communities, including socio-economic dynamics and diversity in production resources.
• Inclusive business models to improve smallholder farm productivity and income can contribute to equitable production and access to food.
• Multidisciplinary approach to addressing challenges related to smallholder food systems involving collaboration between various disciplines such as agroecology, nutrition, economics, and sociology.
• Recognizing diversity in local conditions and the need to adapt intervention design.
• Clear theory of change outlining the process through which interventions are intended to lead to desired outputs and outcomes.

Barriers

• Insufficient documentation on potential interventions may challenge design and implementation.
• Ecological and socio-economic diversity makes it hard to generalise findings across the region. Local context plays a significant role in intervention outcomes.
• The most marginalised smallholders may be excluded due to lack of power and capacity. Constraints on access to land, water and production capacity may perpetuate socio-economic inequalities and limit impact of interventions.
• Lack of consideration of wider local structural factors such as land and water constraints.
• Failure to adopt a broader food systems approach to contextualise the role of food production in improving food security. Limitations in a focus on changing farm productivity and income without adequately considering the broader socio-economic aspects of food systems.
• Challenges in encouraging youth participation – the farmers of the future.
• Lack of complementary interventions, as part of a holistic approach including non-farm income opportunities, social protection programmes, and safety nets.
• Lack of consistent measurement of food insecurity. Different countries and regions use varying measures, making it difficult to compare results across contexts.
• Lack of a theory of change outlining how the intervention will generate outputs and achieve its intended outcomes.

Systematic review

• In general, systematic reviews of food production interventions have shown effectiveness in terms of improving access to food, but there is less evidence on whether this has translated into nutrition and health benefits of individual household members.
• Community gardens have the potential to increase access and availability of fresh fruit and vegetables and they have been shown to reduce household food expenses. However, the number of households, population-wide, that take advantage of such interventions is relatively low when compared to large-scale need.
• Longer-duration interventions have greater potential for effectiveness.
• Assessing the impact of interventions on food security is inherently complex due to the numerous interconnected factors influencing food security outcomes, posing challenges in isolating and attributing the effects of specific interventions.
• The lack of appropriate counterfactuals often hinders ability to accurately quantify the effects of the interventions. The use of different tools and methodologies to assess food security across studies limits the ability to compare results.

Download the food justice intervention - food production database

Home and community gardens

Homestead and community food production initiatives strengthen family and community bonds and can provide a key source of healthy nutrient-rich foods including fruits and vegetables. Schemes include nutrition-sensitive agroecology, urban agricultural schemes, farm-to-school initiatives, and interventions to support purchase and use of agricultural inputs and garden supplies.

Farming

Along with landless households, smallholder farmers are likely to be most at-risk of food insecurity and injustice. Schemes targeting smallholder farmers, including support to small agribusinesses, cultivation of, conservation farming, crop diversification (including cultivation of wild foods and climate-resilient crops), income generation activities linked to smallholder farming, inclusive business models, microfinance, cooperatives.

Training for food production

This includes interventions that link training and knowledge generation to the farming schemes listed above – including agriculture extension training, peer-to-peer counselling, and knowledge support systems.

Food processing

Food processing interventions across diverse systems include the large-scale production and export orientation of the agro-industrial system, and the community-based consumption focus of the domestic-indigenous system. The agroecological system emphasises sustainable, local production, while regional systems balance local production with broader distribution. Meanwhile, local food systems prioritise immediate community needs through short value chains. All these approaches can play a key role in strengthening food security.

Food preparation

Interventions here are aimed at strengthening skills and capacity to prepare healthy meals. They include hands-on guidance on preparation and cooking of various meals, demonstrations, recipe card distribution, newsletters, community education (including support to refugees on local food provisioning and meal prep), healthy meal programmes and so on.

Page last updated: 25 September 2023