African Food Security: The Nutrition Challenge

Food security is a wicked problem: a challenge shaped by interconnected causes, changing circumstances, and competing priorities. There is little consensus on the nature of the problem, or on the most effective solutions. Increasing agricultural production can put further pressure on land, water, and biodiversity, while environmental conservation can limit opportunities for agricultural expansion. International trade can improve affordability and diversify diets, yet also leave countries more dependent on external markets and undermine domestic producers. Likewise, increasing the quantity of food available is essential to reduce hunger, but a singular focus on calories may come at the expense of dietary quality. If food security is indeed a wicked problem, what does that imply for the way we debate it? Can we acknowledge competing objectives, question our own assumptions, and take alternative perspectives seriously? And can doing so help us identify more robust pathways towards food security?

Tesfaye Hailu Bekele (PhD) is a nutrition researcher in healthy diet development, evaluation, and adherence monitoring. Tesfaye led the Ethiopian Food-Based Dietary Guidelines and a Healthy Eating index development and evaluation from 2018-2022 through the food system for a healthier diet flagship and financial support from the food and agriculture organisation of the United Nations. In the future, he would like to work on characterising diet as an Individual, if possible at the meal level, understanding the main cause of an unhealthy diet, and understanding the challenge of the food system. Tesfaye would like to work on dietary intervention implementation research or impact evaluations more on a broad aspect of the food system. He is interested in developing tools using advanced technologies to make dietary assessment easy in low and middle-income settings. In general, he is interested in working on how to make a healthy diet more easy, accessible, and affordable. Currently, Tesfaye is working on Global Diet Quality Project to validate the diet quality questionnaire in his postdoctoral research. A diet quality questionnaire is a tool developed for more than 130 countries to assess nutrient adequacy and dietary risk for non-communicable diseases. Tesfaye is involved in evaluating the indicators for the diet quality questionnaire as a post-doctoral researcher.

Siera Vercillo is an Assistant Professor investigating the governance of sustainable agri-food system transformations at the Public Administration and Policy Group at Wageningen University. She is a scholar-activist pursuing participatory action research in the fields of feminist geography, political ecology and critical development studies, mainly grounded in northern Ghana where she has been working within communities for over a decade. Her work advances the literature on agrarian and nutrition transitions, smallholder livelihoods, food systems, household food security and food sovereignty. She is particularly interested in experimental and applied qualitative research methodologies for facilitating transformative change.

Siera's scholarship is partner and community-driven and she mobilises research for civil society, donors, NGOs and government policy and practice to advocate for agroecology and food sovereignty. Her work is dedicated to upholding the rights of peasant farmers. She holds bylines in Aljazeera and publishes in scholarly journals like the Journal of Rural Studies, Ambio, the European Journal of Development Research, Gender, Place and Culture, and Third World Quarterly.

Sigrid Wertheim-Heck is associate professor in global food system sustainability at the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University, in The Netherlands. She is a fellow of the Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions, and an associate with MoISA, Montpellier Interdisciplinary center on Sustainable Agri-food systems (social and nutritional sciences), France. With a master in history, a master in Russian and Eurasian Studies, both from Leiden University, and a PhD in sociology from Wageningen University, Sigrid is interested in processes of societal transformation.

As a sociologist, her research takes a localised perspective on socio-technical food system transformations and the interrelations between urbanisation, provisioning, and consumption, emphasising bottom-up governance arrangements and the ways local practices connect with national and global dynamics.
In advancing global food system sustainability, her work adopts a reverse food system approach. Rather than starting from production and provisioning, her research begins with everyday consumption practices to understand and promote contextually appropriate and inclusive governance for environmentally and socially sustainable transformations. Through projects across Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe, she examines how these practices evolve and foster cross-contextual learning about global–local dynamics.