This lecture relates to the topics covered in three of the Case Study sections: Human Health and Nutrition Policies, Food Security, Consumption, and Demand Policies, and Poverty Alleviation Policies.

Improving human health and nutrition is a key goal of food systems. This lecture and the related cases describe the interactions between the food systems and human health and nutrition and illustrate how government action may improve health and nutrition through a portfolio of direct interventions such as food fortification, biofortification, price policies, educational campaigns, food for education, and a variety of other government policies to improve health, reduce hunger and malnutrition, and decrease the prevalence of overweight and obesity.

Food security is defined as access to sufficient food to meet the energy and nutrient requirements for a healthy and productive life. The majority of food-insecure people live in rural areas of developing countries. Their food security is heavily influenced by poverty, access to resources, and fluctuations in weather patterns and markets. Household and individual food security is also influenced by household behavior in general and intrahousehold allocations in particular, which in turn, are influenced by knowledge, promotion, and advertising. The lecture explains how government policies can reduce food insecurity caused by rural poverty and fluctuations in weather patterns and markets to which the rural poor are exposed, as well as change household allocative behavior and regulate external influences such as food advertising by retailers and wholesalers.

The lecture also addresses the interaction between income distribution, poverty, food security, and nutrition and illustrates how government action can influence all of these through conditional transfers programs, policies to facilitate migration out of agriculture, and a series of other policies to influence income distribution and poverty.