What is the nutritional diversity provided by this system?In Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of children under five years in age are chronically undernourished. As new investments and attention galvanize action on African agriculture to reduce hunger, there is an urgent need for metrics that monitor agricultural progress beyond calories produced per capita — they also need to address nutritional diversity essential for human health.
A new research paper, “Assessing Nutritional Diversity of Cropping Systems in African Villages,” demonstrates how an ecological tool, functional diversity (FD), has the potential to address this need and provide new insights on nutritional diversity of cropping systems in rural Africa. The nutritional functional diversity metric is based on species composition on the farm and the nutritional composition of these species for nutrients that are critical for human health.
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