Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2011, 8 362 nations. As argued by Bouis and Welch, ―Agricultural systems have never been explicitly designed to promote human health and, instead, mostly focus on increased profitability for farmers and agricultural industries‖ [21]. In an industrialized country such as the United States, national agricultural policies have rarely focused on public health [22,23]: since the 1930s their main aim has been to maintain or improve the living standards of farmers and their families, and to ensure availability of enough food to feed all Americans in the present and future times [24]. The standard federal food assistance programs have been largely focused on calorie-based approaches to improve nutrition with little attention to improving the quality of food. As the authors argue, ―All of these programs appear to have been developed with the assumption that if consumers were provided with an adequate supply of food and calories, good nutrition would naturally result‖ [22]. In the context of developing countries, during the 1970s, the ―Green Revolution‖ was launched in Asia and Latin America. Labor-saving technologies, fertilizers, pesticides and various types of improved seeds were promoted to increase agricultural productivity. While there is still an ongoing debate of the revolution’s impact on hunger alleviation [24,25], some limitations of these interventions can be delineated. The green revolution focused predominantly on the increased production of rice and wheat—staple grains consisting mainly of carbohydrates, modest amounts of protein and a few other nutrients essential to meet human nutritional requirements [26]. Before the revolution, many Asian farmers maintained a more diversified agricultural production system including pulses and legumes. This push to concentrate on a few staple crops may be a contributory factor to the simplified diets, the continued undernutrition in South Asia and widespread hidden hunger [19]. India is a clear example of the failure of these policies to achieve improved food and nutrition security. While it is estimated that between 1966 and 2007, the per capita availability of calories increased by nearly 25% in South Asia [27], with India having an amount of food sufficient to feed its population, the prevalence of child malnutrition there is among the highest in the World. While the green revolution improved food productivity significantly, the role of healthcare, childcare, and diverse and quality foods for household food and nutrition security was less emphasized [28]. More detailed analyses have also highlighted that women and children benefited the least from the technological revolution [29,30], and there was insufficient attention towards women’s empowerment and intra-household distribution of resources. However, the revolution had a specific goal—to increase food productivity—and it did accomplish that. One lesson emerging is that massive policy reforms in one sector could be more impactful if other sectors are integrated simultaneously in both policy and practice. In the beginning of the 1980s, more nutrition elements were incorporated into agricultural policies because of a well defined concept of food security with an emphasis on access [31,32]. Agriculture is an important instrument in reducing hunger in rural areas, by increasing farmers’ income and assets [33]. However, there is plenty of evidence of agricultural projects increasing farmers’ income and assets, which did not succeed in improving child nutrition [34]. Only those programmes which included additional components such as nutrition education, produced improved nutrition outcomes [35]. During the 1990s, agricultural interventions have drawn more attention to nutrition with agricultural production, research, and technology as fundamental for the alleviation of micronutrient deficiencies.