Food Systems Research in South Asia: Highlights of Results from the LANSA Programme

Martin Broadley and Rachel Lambert, Agriculture Research Team, Research & Evidence Division, Department for International Development

The DFID-funded research consortium project Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) was recently graded ‘A+’ during its Project Completion Review report, which highlighted an impressive array of publications and outcomes.

LANSA’s focal countries were Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where undernutrition rates are high and whose populations are largely dependent on agriculture.

Despite being a relatively small actor in the region, with a budget of £7.6 million, LANSA has already helped to change the public and political discourse on nutrition sensitive agriculture in the region.

For example, LANSA has generated high quality evidence on how to design and implement food systems policies and interventions to increase their impacts on nutrition outcomes, particularly for children and adolescent girls. Highlights include:

• Work in India and Pakistan has strengthened evidence on women’s roles in agriculture and its implications for their, and their children’s, nutritional status for the south Asian region. Recent papers in the journals Feminist Economics and Food Policy highlight how seasonality, poverty and gender shape linkages between women’s work and nutrition. There is a pressing need to move beyond simplistic views of women and agricultural systems. This includes new policies to recognise women’s work contributions and ensure adequate support, such as the Sindh Women Agricultural Workers Bill 2019, Pakistan, which is expected to pass into law shortly. The proposed law recognises the right of women workers to have a contract, minimum wage, social security and welfare benefits, and requires wider gender parity in wages. The work on this law has drawn on LANSA research, supported by partnerships with UN Women and ANH Academy.
• A new body of work on pro-nutrition food value-chains through ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). Investments to promote innovation in agriculture and nutrition should take into account the ‘three Ds’: its direction, its distribution, and its diversity. This means evaluating the strategies and objectives of investment and innovation; assessing their impacts on different ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ groups across food value chains; and identifying demands for innovation in diverse agri-food systems.
• A review of the largest food policy initiative in the region (India’s National Food Security Act).
• Influence on initiatives including the South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative (SAFANSI), the Global Panel on Agriculture and Nutrition for Food Systems, FAO-Food Security and Nutrition Forum, Transform Nutrition, CGIAR’s Agriculture for Nutrition and Health programme, and DFID’s Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Action (IMMANA).

LANSA’s strong partnerships with leading international research groups, including in the UK, have been pivotal to their success. Findings in one country often have wider relevance across the region, and LANSA was able to draw together these regional insights.

The LANSA consortium partners included: the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) India (project lead), BRAC Bangladesh, and the Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR) Pakistan from the region; the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture & Health (LCIRAH) in the UK, and the CGIAR’s International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

During the Project Completion Review by our team, we reviewed a portfolio of LANSA research outputs published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. A qualitative review of a subset of these outputs was undertaken by the first author in his role as a DFID Senior Research Fellow.

Particular highlights include a special issue of the leading international journal, Food Policy, edited by the LANSA team, which comprised seven excellent synthesis papers from the project. This special issue was dedicated to the memory of Professor Prakash Shetty, who led LANSA as its Chief Executive Officer from 2012 until mid-2018 when he resigned due to ill-health, passing away shortly afterwards.

Other publication highlights include:

• Evidence showing that sheep ownership lowered anaemia risks for women in Afghanistan;
• A narrative on wheat flour value chains in Pakistan, which makes the compelling case that fortification programmes (including those funded by DFID) must consider the context of wider food systems to be successful in reducing micronutrient deficiencies;
• Evidence that a fortified yoghurt (called Shokti, meaning ‘strength’ or ‘energy’ in Bengali), manufactured and distributed by a social enterprise in rural Bangladesh, can improve the nutrition of children although many challenges still remain in scaling to reach the most marginalised groups.

We have been able to attribute 64 peer reviewed publications to this project. This is a remarkable number of academic publications over the seven years of its operation.

Fifty-four of the publications can be identified on the Web of Science (WoS) Database, the other papers are either ‘in press’ or in journals not covered in WoS (other search engines which could be used include Scopus and Google Scholar). From the WoS database, we can conduct basic bibliometric analyses: 48 of the publications are classified as ‘articles’, the rest are ‘reviews’, ‘editorial material’ and ‘book chapters’. The primary disciplinary classification of these publications reveals a good balance across the natural (food, nutrition, and dietetics) and social sciences disciplines (NB some have more than one classification in WoS).

These 54 LANSA publications have been cited 397 times by other publications on WoS and there is evidence of a rapid acceleration in citations in 2018 and 2019.

The three most cited papers to date are in the journals Journal of Development Studies (Malapit et al. 2015, 62 citations); World Development (Heady et al. 2015, 55 citations); and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (Kadiyala et al. 2014, 55 citations).

Whilst citation numbers themselves can’t substitute for qualitative peer review, they can provide a useful proximal measure of ‘academic impact’ and therefore augment any evaluation of research quality.

Bibliometric analyses also help to reveal geographical academic linkages. For example, it is interesting to note that academics currently based at UK universities, including academics who were originally educated/trained from across the world (including from South Asia) are co-authors on 28 (>50%) of LANSA’s publications on WoS. Their contributions to LANSA’s outputs and impact show the importance to the UK of being able to attract and retain global research leaders and will, in due course, help to return investment to UK universities, including via the Research Excellence Framework 2021 (REF 2021).

Well-deserved congratulations and recognition to the global LANSA team for their commitment to delivering high quality research to help reduce undernutrition in South Asia.

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