Nutrition integration crucial to ensure development: Experts

Nutrition interventions play a crucial role in empowering women, ensuring dietary diversity, building a climate-resilient food system, and boosting the overall economy, said experts at a seminar at Long Beach Hotel in the capital on Friday.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health jointly organised the seminar, said a statement.

The seminar was arranged to provide a platform to share lessons on nutrition-sensitive agriculture and food systems and identify good practices and potential areas of collaboration with different government agencies, development partners, and private sectors.

Speakers from IFAD and BRAC University shared learnings on using gastronomy as a development tool and empowering women to achieve sustainable nutrition impacts that contribute to overall food systems.

“When we consider a food system to be healthy, we tend to investigate and invest in maximising profit and quantifiable indicators. Instead, we have to start considering an integrated system where you include diversity, health, and social factors. The same applies to nutrition interventions which can be used as a tool to transform agriculture and our food systems,” said IFAD Country Director for Bangladesh Arnoud Hameleers.