COVID-19 has exposed many of the vulnerabilities in our food system, one of which is just how reliant global supply chains are on people’s well-being at every step of the journey. The small-scale farmers in emerging markets who produce much of the world’s food ingredients, live in countries that face high rates of malnutrition, with many farming households unable to eat healthily themselves.
Within our operating groups Olam Food Ingredients and Olam Global Agri, our efforts to tackle the causes of poor nutrition in farming communities can serve as useful lessons on what we, and other businesses, can improve, continue or change, to improve the health and well-being of those who contribute to a sustainable and food secure future for all…
Understand the barriers and enablers to healthy eating
Many of the households of farmers that grow our cocoa, coffee, cashew, rice and other ingredients, can be considered food secure from a calorie perspective, but often these calories come from only a few food groups and primarily starchy staples, which lack many of the micronutrients needed for normal functioning of the immune system and optimal health. In Côte d’Ivoire, where about 1 in 5 children under the age of five are stunted (a result of chronic malnutrition), we conducted a survey of the cashew households in our sourcing network and discovered that the greatest deficiencies exist amongst women and children, with less than one-third of adult women and 6% of surveyed 6-23 month-olds eating adequate and diverse diets.
Having a better understanding of the eating habits, practices and culture in our communities has prompted new strategies to support farmers on crop diversification and nutrition education, as well as spurring on efforts to address some of other determinants of malnutrition, like limited access to clean water.
Target practical solutions on the ground
We run various initiatives, including distributing vegetable seeds for kitchen gardens to coffee-growing families in Uganda, educating cocoa-farming communities on healthy eating and giving cooking demos using local produce in Nigeria. Our teams our also fortifying common consumer food products like tomato mixes, wheat flour, drinking milk, and most recently our premium long-grain rice brand in Ghana, Royal Aroma, with micronutrients including iron, zinc, and B-complex vitamins.
At the Olam Dairy innovation centre in Malaysia, the R&D team are developing fortified drinking milk recipes to cater for nutrition-deprived countries.
The impact of COVID-19 on small-scale farmers has also highlighted the need to provide direct food assistance to those hardest hit by market disruptions and movement restrictions. We’ve delivered food and hygiene supplies across our sourcing networks in Africa, Asia and the Americas as part of a global relief package worth over US$6 million.
Meanwhile, our Hazelnuts business in Turkey has long been recognised by the state for its ‘baby-friendly’ culture. New mothers are supported to continue breastfeeding once they return to work with the provision of private ‘nursing rooms’ and a support scheme run in partnership with the Ministry of Health.
Team up with local authorities and partners for greater impact
Malnutrition is a result of many different factors across sectors and so we need the power of partnerships and alliances to help solve the issue.
In Côte d’Ivoire, we teamed up with the government’s National Nutrition Programme and their partners, including UNICEF, Hellen Keller International and others to administer vitamin A supplementation, deworming tablets and malnutrition screening to some 2.5 million children under the age of five in the districts where our cashew farmers are based.
For rice farmers in Nigeria, who are part of our out-growers programme with IFAD and the Nigerian Government, they receive training on nutrition; learning what constitutes a balanced diet for them and their children, and are given vegetable seedlings to start cultivating in garden plots. Together with the income benefits derived from the programme and sale of rice to Olam, these efforts have led to all 5,000 women participants reporting improvements in their diets, eating three meals per day instead of only the two they would have had previously.
We don’t need to have all the answers ourselves or even commit a lot of investment, but strengths like an expansive origin footprint and direct relationships with farmers, can be leveraged through partnerships to improve nutrition.
Factor in nutrition to your sustainability KPIs
First you need to look at industry benchmarks; what the SDGs are tracking on nutrition and what has already been identified by the experts as the key indicators – dietary diversity being one example. Then consider the external asks of industry on nutrition – platforms like World Benchmark Alliance provide a useful reference as well as the increasingly health-conscious consumer themselves.
Lastly, we need to consider the context and the different risk factors that exist in the places where we work. Obviously, the nutrition priorities, and therefore KPIs, will be different on our coffee estate in Tanzania from a worksite in the United States.
Now that we know the metrics that matter, we are monitoring our progress through AtSource, our sustainability insights platform. It gives both us and our customers visibility into the key challenges that our farming communities face. Here is an example of the health data we track at the farm level:
Secure buy-in from across the organisation
We need to demystify nutrition and communicate just how relevant it is to supply chain resilience and the overall sustainability agenda. As a business that plans to run efficiently for the next 30, 50 years and beyond, helping to reduce malnutrition in the communities where we operate is actually a down payment on future productivity[i].
Improving nutrition is not something that can be done by any one actor, but we know that by seeking more and new types of collaborations, especially with communities themselves, we can increase our impact. Together, we have the tools and ingenuity to improve the nutrition of farmers everywhere, and, in turn, improve the resilience of the supply
[i] The Business Case for Investment in Nutrition https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/07-08-business-case-investment-nutrition-wellesley-et-al.pdf
