LCIRAH is a new Centre established under a five-year £3.5m grant from The Leverhulme Trust to build a new intersectoral and interdisciplinary platform for integrating research in agriculture and health, with a focus on international development goals. This Centre is enabling researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, School of Oriental and African Studies, School of Pharmacy, and Royal Veterinary College to work together to develop unifying research approaches and methodologies that integrate agricultural and health research. 

 

With support from the Foresight Programme, UK Government Office of Science, the Agri-Health Working Group will examine how agriculture affects global health, through its influence on the nature, production, distribution and pricing of foods, and how it could improve global population health in future. The project will consider designing a healthy diet for nine billion people  and redefine food security in the context of food quantity, quality and health. It will analyze how current patterns of food supply, availability and consumption generate diets in different parts of the world, and gaps and issues in our understanding. Finally it will identify the health effects of these, and other agricultural processes and changes.

Collaborations

LIDC is collaborating with the following partners under the new Agri-Health initiative, to provide complementary research expertise and embed Agri-Health approaches internationally:  STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Rothamsted Research, University of Reading and the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC.  Links will be strengthened with WHO, FAO and other key institutions from the academic, governmental, civil society and private sector, to provide greater stakeholder engagement with the Agri-Health approach.