ENHANCING THE LINKS BETWEEN RESILIENCE AND NUTRITION

This chapter attempts to bring together the thinking on nutrition and resil-ience, to clarify the role of food and agriculture in each of these agendas, and to define potential synergies between nutrition and resilience concepts and programs. Indeed, nutrition and resilience are strongly interlinked: nutrition is both an input to and an outcome of strengthened resilience. Reducing malnutri-tion is crucial to strengthening resilience because well-nourished individuals are healthier, can work harder, and have greater physical reserves; households that are nutrition secure are thus better able to withstand external shocks. Conversely, households that are most affected by shocks and threats face the greatest risk of malnutrition; (Dufour and Egal 2012; Justino 2012) thus, strengthening resilience is essential to efforts to reduce malnutrition. This chapter focuses on food and agriculture, but some of the concepts and recommendations may be of interest to other sectors. It is based on a longer discussion paper (FAO 2014a), which was written with the following objectives: 1. To describe the common ground between approaches designed to improve nutrition and those aimed at strengthening resilience, and to highlight how the growing attention to resilience represents an opportunity to engage in more effective nutrition programming; 2. To discuss what a nutrition lens can bring to resilience programming in order to maximize the nutritional outcomes of resilience programs in the context of the food and agriculture sector; 3. To highlight issues that require greater clarification and evidence, and where more research and debate is needed