MINI postdoc Greg Cooper reflects on another action-packed ANH Academy.
This week marked the second year that the MINI project has participated in the annual Agricultural, Nutrition & Health (ANH) Academy, which brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world in the fields of, well, you guessed it, agriculture, nutrition and health! The academy is jointly organised and run by the amazing 'Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions' (IMMANA) and 'London Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture & Health' (LCIRAH) teams, as well as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Tufts University, Massachusetts.
This year marked the first time that the Academy went virtual - in response to the Covid-19 pandemic which unfortunately made travel to Malawi all but impossible. A huge amount of credit and gratitude has to go to the core conference team, including Joe Yates, Abel Endashaw, MINI's very own Dr Suneetha Kadiyala and the wider Academy team. The conference appeared to run seamlessly, and the use of Zoom to host the meetings really helped to bring the authentic conference experience into our own homes.
Each speaker recorded a 7-minute presentation for the conference participants to view ahead of the parallel sessions. This year MINI presented a series of preliminary model outputs, including some ‘consumer versus producer’ trade-offs emerging from scenarios designed to adapt aggregation schemes to increase the delivery of fruits and vegetables to local, traditionally more neglected market environments in Bihar, India. Our presentation is available below and the rest of the conference presentations may be found on IMMANA's YouTube channel.
Nobel laureate Angus Deaton kicked off the week with a broad-brush introduction to the interactions between economics, nutrition and health. Angus explored the paradox around how inequality is widening on average at the national scale, but appears to be falling at the global scale, largely due to the economic development of India and China over the past 50 years. Relevant to MINI, Angus briefly discussed the implications of Covid-19 on agricultural food systems, noting the importance of resilient markets and distribution networks for international, national and regional food security.
The rest of the research conference included a total of 110 oral and poster presentations, covering a range of qualitative and quantitative research on topics as diverse as food environments, food safety and bio-fortification. Moreover, the research conference was preceded by a week of 'learning labs', with experts from across the globe providing two hour methodological masterclasses.
A personal favourite was the 'Using Nutrition Modeling Tools to Inform Policy Decisions' learning lab ran by the Nutrition Modeling Consortium. Of particular interest was Steve Vosti's learning lab on the MINIMOD tool - which aims to help national-level policymakers more efficiently plan micronutrient intervention programs. A number of the questions MINIMOD focuses on share similarities with the aims of MINI (e.g. increasing the availability and consumption of nutritious foods), so it was particularly interesting to learn about the ins and outs of an alternative modelling approach. The session also provided a timely reminder about the importance of estimating the financial costs of different food system interventions (something which the MINIMOD approach is a specialist at)!
A big thank you again to the ANH team for a really engaging and thought-provoking two weeks. I know that I've come away from the conference feeling refreshed and
ready to jump into the last six or so months of MINI, and I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that the ANH community will have the opportunity to meet in person next year.