WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • DECEMBER 2023 71 FIGURE 7. A crop of nutritious gourds, grown on trellises over a pond. Photo credit: Md. Mahfujul Haque. of mangrove), located adjacent to the southwestern portion of the study area acting as a nursery ground for many of the unstocked aquatic species harvested. Among vegetables and fruits, okra, gourds, and long beans are all statistically significantly correlated with the productivity of protein, iron, and zinc (Figure 7). Pumpkins (vitamin A-rich vegetables), shak (leafy vegetables), mangoes, and betel nut are important sources of vitamin A. Coconuts are also positively statistically correlated with the productivity of energy and all nutrients in our study, except vitamin B12. Our results indicate that the species and combinations of aquatic and terrestrial foods produced matter for economic and nutrient productivity, and that the mix of aquatic foods and vegetables included in integrated farming systems could be key to optimizing economic productivity and nutritional adequacy. Aquatic foods are more nutritious per kilogram for certain nutrients, but their integration with terrestrial foods improves the overall availability of the nutrients included in this analysis. These results only relate to the production of foods, not the effects of their sale or consumption. Discussion Our study contributes to a growing body of research on nutrition-sensitive food systems and NSA. Most literature on NSA to date has been conceptual or has evaluated the impact of planned nutrition sensitive interventions on demand side outcomes. Our study’s key contribution is to provide a supply side methodology for estimating the nutrient productivity of farming systems. Agricultural productivity is conventionally measured in terms of biomass or income per area of land. Our study introduces a nutrition sensitive metric for agricultural productivity, expressed as production of kilojoules (kJ), protein, and micronutrients, relative to human nutritional requirements (AEs/ha). This approach made it possible to explore the relationship between economic and nutrient productivity across a range of IAA systems, identified inductively from a representative survey. The results provide an intuitive measure of nutrient sensitivity that may be easily understood by researchers and policymakers and mobilized by development practitioners and food producers. We find strong empirical evidence that production diversity associated with integration of aquatic and terrestrial foods in IAA systems can be beneficial for both economic and nutrient productivity. This finding has important implications for the design of NSA programs to enhance the contributions that aquaculture makes to nutrition security in Bangladesh and other countries where IAA is commonly practiced, and for the realization of nutritionsensitive food systems. These results can also be used to identify and promote culturally and agroecologically suitable combinations of foods that optimize nutritional and economic outcomes. For example, common crops such as bitter gourds, bottle gourds, and long beans are associated with high levels of nutrient productivity, in addition to better-known vitamin A-rich crops such as green leafy vegetables. Increasing production diversity is not necessarily the most effective path to improving diet diversity. Income is another pathway to nutrition, and households that earn money from economically productive but less nutritious foods such as crustaceans may use it to purchase nutritious foods instead of producing them. This is a crucial point as shrimp (which are economically valuable) are produced in saline ponds, making integration with terrestrial crops challenging. It may be more beneficial for these households to seek to increase yields of shrimp and diversify production of aquatic crops to maximize income and aquatic source nutrients. The approach presented in this paper can also be used to identify possible improvements to farming practices such as facilitating the entry of nutritionally and economically productive unstocked fish species into ponds, or identifying suitable candidate fish species for domestication via investments in fish breeding research. Future research using the methods developed here can also seek to identify and promote recommendations for specific crop combinations that maximize economic and nutrient output for a given level of salinity. Acknowledgments This research was made possible by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish is managed by Mississippi State University through an award from USAID (Award No. 7200AA18CA00030; M. Lawrence, PI). The work was also implemented as part of the CGIAR Initiative on Securing the Food Systems of Asian MegaDeltas for Climate and Livelihood Resilience (INIT-18), which is carried out with support from funders through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund. Notes Dr. Liz Ignowski,* WorldFish, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Dr. Ben Belton, International Food Policy Research Institute, Dhaka, Bangladesh and Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA. * Corresponding author: e.ignowski@cgiar.org References Ignowski, L., B. Belton, H. Ali and S.H. Thilsted. 2023. Integrated aquatic and terrestrial food production enhances micronutrient and economic productivity for nutrition-sensitive food systems. Nature Food 4:866–873 https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-02300840-8
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