Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture and Appropriate Postharvest Handling of Crops: A Missing Link with Potential for Global Nutrition and Food Security

Currently, 822 million, and 2 billion suffer from hunger, and micronutrient deficiency, overweight and obesity, respectively. This is due to a variety of factors associated with pre-harvest and post-harvest activities in nutrition-sensitive agriculture. This paper is, therefore, aimed at reviewing nutrition-sensitive agriculture and appropriate postharvest handling of crops: a missing link with potential to global nutrition and food security. Agriculture provides food and nutrients through improved agricultural production systems such as biofortified and/or crop breeding, crop diversification, fish, poultry, and animal rearing, use of biodiversity, and urban and peri-urban agriculture. Appropriate postharvest handling such as right harvesting time, methods and maturity stage, field packing, transportation, storage, processing, packing, safety and distribution of the products help to safeguard the quality of the product and reduce postharvest food wastage. However, the agriculture and postharvest system of most crops in developing countries are constrained by lack of a complete package of agricultural inputs, income, facilities/technologies, tradition and religion, and lack of awareness on how to use technologies and protect the safety and or quality of the products. The interventions that make agriculture and the postharvest system of crops nutrition-sensitive should be appropriately applied to the crop and postharvest system of crops. Keywords: Agriculture, Food security, Nutrition security, Nutrition-Sensitive, Postharvest handling.