Food, Ecology and Nutrition
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Research at the Earth Institute is organized into nine themes. Food, Ecology and Nutrition is one of them.
Featured Projects and Centers:
Balanced diets, reliable food sources, clean drinking water, stable agricultural systems fed by predictable water flow, and plant pollinators all contribute to the stability and well-being of a populace’s nutritional health. Caloric intake alone is not a sufficient indicator of an individual’s or a society’s nutritional status. Healthy populations require healthy environments and sufficient nutrients to meet basic dietary needs.
Given the complex interplay between food, ecology and nutrition, the Earth Institute works to ensure the sustainability of all three. The following are a few projects that deal with these issues:
Millennium Villages Project
The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages themselves are showing that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and escape from the poverty trap.
Improving food security and nutrition is a key component to the work of the Millennium Villages project. By increasing production, communities in rural Africa can combat hunger and malnutrition, boost their income through the sale of cash crops, guard their families from food shortages, generate savings, and create opportunities to take on other income-generating opportunities.
Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment
The Tropical Agriculture Program of the Earth Institute is dedicated to addressing the interactions between agricultural production, environmental quality and human well-being. The program uses science, technology, management, and policy tools to improve environmental quality, nutrition, and farmers' incomes through sustainable agricultural practices in developing countries.
The program’s work focuses on the tropics, where the expansion and intensification of agriculture is needed to improve food security, but the risk of threatening long-term environmental integrity is an issue of local and global concern. The Tropical Agriculture Program also leads the Earth Institute's Millennium Villages Project, supports the Millennium Development Goal Centers in Nairobi, Kenya, and Bamako, Mali, and administers the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger.