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Traditional vegetables are very important for food and nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa but have not received much attention in crop improvement research. One exception is amaranth (Amaranthusspp.) for which international breeding research began at the World Vegetable Center in Tanzania in 2004. This study is the first impact evaluation of this research program. It uses a representative sample of 1,355 amaranth-producing households from five agroecological zones of Tanzania to collect questionnaire-based data and plant material. The genetic identity of the amaranth cultivars used by the farmers was identified using DNA fingerprinting, while the impact on crop yield, production cost and sales was quantified using propensity score matching. The analysis shows that 66% of Tanzania’s cultivated area under amaranth uses cultivars derived from the amaranth breeding program. These cultivars had a mean vegetable yield that was 6.1 ton/ha higher (+ 48%; p = 0.002) than that of other cultivars, while there was no significant impact on the cost of production or quantity sold. This suggests tremendous impact of genetic improvement research in traditional vegetables.

Background: Integrated school and home garden interventions can improve health outcomes in low-income countries, but rigorous evidence remains scarce, particularly for school-aged children and to reduce anemia.Objective: We test if an integrated school and home garden intervention, implemented at pilot stage, improves hemoglobin levels among school children (aged 9-13 years) in a rural district in the mid-hills of Nepal.Methods: We use a cluster randomized controlled trial with 15 schools each in the control and treatment groups (n = 680 school children). To test if nutritional improvements translate into a reduction of anemia prevalence, hemoglobin data were collected 6 months after intervention support had ended. Using structural equation modeling, we estimate the direct and indirect effects of the treatment through several pathways, including nutritional knowledge, good food and hygiene practices, and dietary diversity.Results: The integrated school and home garden intervention did not lead to a direct significant reduction in anemia. Causal positive changes of the treatment on nutritional outcomes, although significant, are not strong enough to impact hemoglobin levels. The program improved hemoglobin levels indirectly for children below 12 by increasing the use of good food and hygiene practices at home. These practices are associated with higher hemoglobin levels, particularly for girls, young children, and in households where caregivers are literate.Conclusions: Even integrated school and home garden interventions are not sufficient to reduce anemia among school children. Incorporating behavioral change components around food and hygiene practices into integrated garden interventions is important to unlocking their health impacts.

Background: In homestead food production (HFP) programs, village model farmers (VMFs), after training, implement agriculture and nutrition activities to improve household knowledge and practices. Little evidence exists on what enables VMFs to remain actively engaged and for impacts to be sustained.Objective: To examine variables explaining active engagement of VMFs, at least 4 years post-training, in an HFP program in Nepal.Methods: We used cross-sectional data, collected from 2018 to 2019, among 4750 VMFs of Suaahara, a multisectoral nutrition program. We assessed whether respondents registered their HFP group with the local government, conducted regular group meetings, discussed vegetable growing and chicken rearing practices with group members, or engaged in saving and credit activities in their HFP group. Outcome variable was a count of these 4 activities in which the VMF engaged. Socioeconomic, demographic, and programmatic explanatory variables were identified a priori and by bivariate analysis and were adjusted in ordinal regression models accounting for clusters.Results: On average, VMFs engaged in 1.4 activities. Having attended primary or secondary school (adjusted odds ratios [AOR] = 1.39), being a female community health volunteer (AOR = 1.27), being from an advantaged caste/ethnic group (AOR = 1.34), receiving additional trainings (AOR = 1.56) and inputs (AOR = 1.31) were associated with more active engagement of VMFs.Conclusion: Village model farmers receiving more training and inputs were more likely to remain actively engaged. Female community health workers, people from higher caste/ethnic groups, and those with primary or secondary education were more likely to remain active VMFs and could be targeted for this role in HFP programs leading to sustained impact.

Background: Vegetables are an essential element in healthy diets, but intakes are low around the world and there is a lack of systematic knowledge on how to improve diets through food system approaches.Methods: This scoping review assessed how studies of food systems for healthy diets have addressed the role of vegetables in low- and middle-income countries. We apply the PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews to narratively map the literature to an accepted food systems framework and identify research gaps.Results: We found 1383 relevant articles, with increasing numbers over 20 years. Only 6% of articles looked at low-income countries, and 93% looked at single-country contexts. Over half of articles assessed vegetables as a food group, without looking at diversity within the food group. 15% looked at traditional vegetables. Issues of physical access to food were among the least studied food system topics in our review (7% of articles). Only 15% of articles used a comprehensive food system lens across multiple dimensions. There is also a research gap on the impacts of different policy and practice interventions (13% of articles) to enable greater vegetable consumption.Conclusions: Food system studies necessarily drew on multiple disciplines, methods and metrics to describe, analyze, and diagnose parts of the system. More work is needed across disciplines, across contexts, and across the food system, including understanding interventions and trade-offs, and impacts and change for diets particularly of marginalized population groups. Filling these gaps in knowledge is necessary in order to work toward healthy vegetable-rich diets for everyone everywhere.

Increasing vegetable consumption is being promoted as a critical step towards more nutritious and sustainable diets. Despite the recognition that context shapes food consumption practices, there have been limited systematic analyses of the role of social institutions in enabling or hindering consumption of vegetables. In particular, we focus on cultural, cognitive, socioeconomic, and contextual influences that shape local understandings, attitudes, and practices surrounding health and wellbeing. We seek to address this knowledge gap by exploring whether and how academic research has engaged this issue, with a particular focus on Africa. The analysis finds that a range of social institutions play a role in shaping vegetable consumption. Most publications focus on cultural norms and personal perceptions and beliefs, the latter also reflecting one's cultural conditioning and social positioning. Contextual factors such as education and economic status have been reported as having either positive or negative effects on vegetable consumption, depending on context. In terms of types of vegetables affected, traditional vegetables are featured more frequently rather than exotic (externally introduced) ones. The results of this analysis may contribute to informing agricultural and food security policies and programs aimed at promoting vegetable consumption in Africa.

Home garden interventions combining training in agriculture and nutrition have the potential to increase vegetable production and consumption in lower-income countries, but there remains a need for better evidence for impact. This study contributes to filling this gap by evaluating the impact and distributional effects of a home garden intervention in Cambodia. We used a cluster randomized controlled trial with before and after data for a sample of 500 rural households with children under five and women 16–49 years old. Impact was estimated using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and conditional quantile regressions with non-parametric bounds. The results show that the intervention significantly increased the adoption of nearly all promoted gardening methods. More households (+ 35%; p < 0.01) produced vegetables, and the production period was extended by five months on average. One-month recall data show an increase in vegetables harvested (+ 25 kg; p < 0.01) and consumed (+ 10 kg; p < 0.01) from the garden. Quantile regressions confirm these findings and show that nearly all households benefitted, but households that were already doing better at baseline tended to benefit more. Seven-day recall data show an increase in the quantity of vegetables consumed (+ 61 g/day/capita; p < 0.01) and an increased quantity of vitamin A, folate, iron, and zinc contained in these vegetables. Women contributed more to the garden work than men and their time spent in the garden increased by 29 min/day on average. These results add further evidence that integrated home garden interventions can contribute to nutrition outcomes and that almost all participants can benefit.

There is a need for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa to diversify into more nutrient-rich crops to meet the subcontinent’s nutritional needs in terms of micronutrients and reduce health risks related to high and rising rates of overweight/obesity. Many traditional African vegetables (TAVs) are nutrient-dense and have much potential to reduce malnutrition. These vegetables can also provide sustainable incomes to rural, urban and peri-urban farming communities. In addition to their high economic values and health benefits, most TAVs are amenable to be grown under low input conditions and even organically. However, TAVs are under-researched and underutilized across the vegetable value chain. This paper provides a detailed account of the value of TAVs, focusing on their importance, research and development progress, and future needs. To exploit the potential of TAVs, there is need for a more concerted research and development efforts including effective characterization of the nutrition and genetic profiles; enhancing adaptability and yield gains; and capacity development in value addition, postharvest handling, processing, marketing, and seed system development. Success in these areas depends on effective collaborations among national and international partners including the private seed sector, and government and non-governmental organizations working in the areas of agriculture, nutrition and health.

Fostering better access to more nutritious foods across sub-Saharan Africa will be critical to ending hunger and malnutrition. In Asia, vegetable production and consumption have grown rapidly since the 1990s and the development of a dynamic vegetable seed industry, led by the private sector, played a pivotal role in this process. The availability of locally-bred and adapted varieties facilitated the rapid expansion of production and increased the supply of affordable vegetables to consumers. In contrast, the vegetable seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa has been slow to develop and has received little attention in the development agenda. Drawing from Asia’s experience, this paper outlines a four-point strategy to accelerate the vegetable seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa. First, there is a need to strengthen the technical capacity of African seed companies to allow them to develop varieties that are well-adapted to local conditions and consumer preferences. Second, seed regulations, originally designed with food grains in mind, should be reviewed and revised to facilitate domestic vegetable breeding research and seed production. Third, more farmer extension is needed to exploit improved varieties together with good management practices. Fourth, vegetable marketing systems should be strengthened to reduce risks to farmers and traders. Investment in these four areas will help energize private sector investment in the vegetable seed sector. Asian experience suggests that investment in locally adapted vegetable varieties is a critical step in improving productivity, availability and ultimately consumption of nutritious vegetables.

Integrated home garden interventions combine training in gardening practices with education about nutrition knowledge. Such interventions have been shown to improve nutrition behaviour in low income countries. However, to date rigorous evidence is lacking for their long-term impact. We test the impact of an integrated home garden intervention on vegetable production and consumption three years after the intervention ended. We analyse three rounds of survey data for 224 control and 395 intervention households in rural Bangladesh. Three years after the intervention, the average impact on vegetable production per household was 43 kg/year (+ 49% over baseline levels; p< 0.01), and the effect was not statistically different from the impact one year after the intervention, which demonstrates that impact was maintained in the long-term. The impact on the micronutrient supply for iron, zinc, folate and pro-vitamin A from home gardens was maintained in the long-term. These impacts may have been driven by the long-term improvements in women’s nutrition knowledge and gardening practices, explaining the sustainability of the behavioural nutrition change. We also identify positive impacts on women’s empowerment and women’s output market participation, highlighting how integrated programs, even if modest in scope, can be drivers of social change.

The adoption of improved varieties is an important indicator of the effectiveness of agricultural research. This study quantified the adoption of improved mungbean (Vigna radiata(L). Wilczek) varieties and agricultural practices in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan using an expert elicitation approach. Data were collected from 19 expert panels, organized at subnational levels and involving a total of 259 mungbean experts. The study found that improved varieties were planted on 94% of the mungbean area in Pakistan, 89% in Myanmar, 82% in India and 72% in Bangladesh. International mungbean breeding research conducted by the World Vegetable Center has had a major impact with its germplasm adopted by an estimated 1.2 million mungbean farmers and grown on 1.8 million hectares of land. Widespread variation in the adoption of improved technologies at subnational levels point to opportunities for increased mungbean yields such as the adoption of line sowing and mechanical harvesting, the use of seed treatments with biofertilizers and biopesticides, and the adoption of better varieties with more comprehensive disease resistance.

Vegetables are increasingly recognized as essential for food and nutrition security. Vegetable production provides a promising economic opportunity for reducing rural poverty and unemployment in developing countries and is a key component of farm diversification strategies. Vegetables are mankind's most affordable source of vitamins and minerals needed for good health. Today, neither the economic nor nutritional power of vegetables is sufficiently realized. To tap the economic power of vegetables, governments will need to increase their investment in farm productivity (including improved varieties, alternatives to chemical pesticides, and the use of protected cultivation), good postharvest management, food safety, and market access. To tap the nutritional power of vegetables, consumers need to know how vegetables contribute to health, and find them at affordable prices or be able to grow them themselves. Vegetable consumption must therefore be nurtured through a combination of supply-side interventions and behavioral change communication emphasizing the importance of eating vegetables for good nutrition and health. To fully tap the economic and nutritional power of vegetables, governments and donors will need to give vegetables much greater priority than they currently receive. Now is the time to prioritize investments in vegetables, providing increased economic opportunities for smallholder farmers and providing healthy diets for all.

School gardening interventions have been touted as an effective approach to improve children’s eating habits in developed countries, but there is little evidence for their impact in developing countries. We studied the combined effect of school gardens linked to complementary lessons and promotional activities on the eating behavior and nutritional status of 9- to 15-year-old schoolchildren in Bhutan. We also studied the effect on a range of secondary indicators derived from the impact pathway. We used data from 468 schoolchildren in 9 control and 9 treatment schools following a randomized controlled trial design. We found that the school gardening intervention significantly increased children’s awareness about vegetables, their knowledge about sustainable agriculture, and their preferences for healthier foods. We found an 11.7-percentage point increase in the probability that children included vegetables in their meals (p< 0.05), but not in the number of different fruits or vegetables consumed. These results support the idea that comprehensive school garden interventions, combining gardening with education and promotion, can positively influence food preferences and food behavior in developing countries.

Home-based vegetable production has been recognized as a nutrition- and gender-sensitive intervention that has the potential to improve nutrition in developing countries, yet evidence is lacking. This study tested whether women’s training in improved home gardens (including nutrition as well as technical aspects) contributes to increased production and consumption of vegetables, which are necessary preconditions for improving nutrition. The study used data from 582 poor rural women in two districts of Bangladesh (479 control and 103 intervention). Training increased the per capita production of mostly leafy vegetables from 20 to 37 kg per year (+86 %). Diversity of production and frequency of harvesting also increased. In terms of nutrient yields, the improved gardens increased the supply of plant proteins by 171 %, iron by 284 %, vitamin A by 189 % and vitamin C by 290 %. Training had a significant impact on the diversity of vegetables consumed, based on 30-day food frequency data and also increased the relative involvement of women in the home garden for all gardening tasks. These results indicate that women’s home gardens are an effective intervention in Bangladesh for increasing the supply and consumption of a diverse range of vegetables in poor rural households, thereby contributing to nutrition security.

Planetary health brings together intrinsically linked issues of human health and natural systems. This paper reviews evidence of how agrobiodiversity underpins dietary diversity for current human populations in the context of fruits and vegetables, and ways to maintain and improve these for future generations.

Multiple recent global nutrition initiatives have recommended actions to transform food systems to improve food environments and food choice. This study aimed to identify actions recommended by these initiatives and understand their similarities and differences. Twelve global nutrition initiatives were reviewed, collectively spanning 13 action themes and accompanying strategies. Action themes were analyzed according to primary focus on either food environments and their food system drivers or food choice. Representation of the 13 actions varied across initiatives. Some actions overlapped; others were infrequently represented. Strategies targeting food environments and their food system drivers were more frequently recommended than strategies targeting food choice for 11 of the 13 action themes. Although these global initiatives share a mission to improve nutrition through food systems and food environments, less attention has been allocated to individual food choice and sustainability.

The use of agent-based models (ABMs) for investigating land-use science questions has been increasing dramatically over the last decade. Modelers have moved from 'proofs of existence' toy models to case-specific, multi-scaled, multi-actor, and data-intensive models of land-use and land-cover change. An international workshop, titled 'Multi-Agent Modeling and Collaborative Planning - Method2Method Workshop', was held in Bonn in 2005 in order to bring together researchers using different data collection approaches to informing agent-based models. Participants identified a typology of five approaches to empirically inform ABMs for land use science: sample surveys, participant observation, field and laboratory experiments, companion modeling, and GIS and remotely sensed data. This paper reviews these five approaches to informing ABMs, provides a corresponding case study describing the model usage of these approaches, the types of data each approach produces, the types of questions those data can answer, and an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of those data for use in an ABM.

Recent research on land use and land cover change (LUCC) has put more emphasis on the importance of understanding the decision-making of human actors, especially in developing countries. The quest is now for a new generation of LUCC models with a decision-making component. This paper deals with the question of how to realistically represent decision-making in land use models. Two main agent decision architectures are compared. Heuristic agents take sequential decisions following a pre-defined decision tree, while optimizing agents take simultaneous decisions by solving a mathematical programming model. Optimizing behaviour is often discarded as being unrealistic. Yet the paper shows that optimizing agents do have important advantages for empirical land use modelling and that multi-agent systems (MAS) offer an ideal framework for using the strengths of both agent decision architectures. The use of optimization models is advanced with a novel three-stage decision model of investment, production, and consumption to represent uncertainty in models of land use decision-making.

In Poland and Russia, which provide two widely different examples of transition countries, small-scale individual farms employ more labour per hectare of land than large-scale corporate farms without suffering from lower productivity. Individual farming is a labour sink for the rural population, and land policies promoting individualization of agriculture in transition countries can alleviate the social consequences of rural unemployment without sacrificing agricultural productivity. Pending long-term development of nonagricultural employment opportunities, the average transition country should encourage the rural population to remain in agriculture by emphasising individual rather than corporate farming.

School gardens have become a widely used approach to influence children's food knowledge, preferences and choices in low- and high-income countries alike. However, evidence indicates that such programs are more effective at influencing food knowledge and preferences than actual food choices. Such finding may occur because school gardens insufficiently influence the food behavior of parents and because healthy food items are not always available in children's homes. We tested this hypothesis using a one-year cluster randomized controlled trial in Nepal with 15 treatment and 15 control schools and a matched sample of 779 schoolchildren (aged 8–12) and their caregivers. Data were collected before and after the intervention during the 2018–2019 school year. In addition, children's food consumption was monitored using a monthly food logbook. Average treatment effects were quantified with a double-difference estimator. For caregivers, the intervention led to a 26% increase in their food and nutrition knowledge (p < 0.001), a 5% increase in their agricultural knowledge (p = 0.022), a 10% increase in their liking for vegetables (p < 0.001), and a 15% increase in home garden productivity (p = 0.073). For children, the intervention had no discernible effect on food and nutrition knowledge (p = 0.666) but led to a 6% increase in their liking for vegetables (p = 0.070), healthy food practices (p < 0.001), and vegetable consumption (October–December +15%; p = 0.084; January–March +26%; p = 0.017; April–June +26%; p = 0.088). The results therefore indicate both schools and parents matter for nudging children toward healthier food choices.