Presiding) HIV/AIDS AND FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY: INTERACTIONS AND RESPONSE

HIV/AIDS epidemics are long-wave crises, with impacts to be felt for many decades to come. Whatever the impact of the highly publicized but slow-moving roll-out of an-tiretroviral therapy, a much more comprehen-sive and scaled-up response is needed from many quarters so as to better match the scale, breadth, and interconnectedness of the pan-demic’s causes and impacts. Against this back-drop, there is an urgent need for a broader understanding of the integral role that food and nutrition security can and should play in such responses. The first part of this article will define concepts and map potential interactions between HIV/AIDS and food and nutrition se-curity. The second will focus on what is known about how food and nutrition insecurity may increase the risk of exposure to HIV infection and how HIV/AIDS in turn impacts food and nutrition security. The third section provides a conceptual tool—an HIV/AIDS lens—to help agricultural and other development policies become more “HIV-responsive. ” The conclud-ing section highlights a few important research gaps. Defining Concepts and Mapping Interactions The interactions at a societal level can be rep-resented by figure 1, which shows the waves of determinants of HIV infection, from macro-Stuart Gillespie and Suneetha Kadiyala are with the Internationa