Biography

Ulonka Barnard is a PhD student at the University of Pretoria. She holds an MCom in Agricultural Economics and is currently focusing on improved methods for determining staple food demand elasticities through choice experiments. Her passion lies within Agriculture, especially production and consumer economics, food and nutrition security, and land reform. She is passionate about acquiring new knowledge and passing it on to others, especially tertiary students. She has worked extensively in the grains industry and has a special interest in how price movements within the staple food basket affect the maize value chain. Her research also focuses on how price movements of food affect micronutrient intake. She enjoys translating scientific evidence to easily understandable messages through empirical examples. Apart from her studies, she is also an assistant researcher at the University of Pretoria and a middle office manager at a local agribusiness focussing on logistics and maize quality.

Discipline/s

Nutrition and food safety

Research description

Undernutrition, including insufficient consumption of protein, remains a persistent problem in developing communities in South Africa. The goal of food aid systems at its core is based on alleviating hunger. However, striving to provide nutrient-dense foods as part of a balanced meal can ensure nutrition security and better health outcomes in the long run with associated benefits for individuals and the economy. Therefore, research should be directed at producing and making available food with high nutritional content in government-linked support programs and empowering individuals to implement sustainable food systems at ground roots. Improved nutrition is the platform for progress in health, education, employment, empowerment of women, poverty reduction, and inequality. Contributing to the design of new food aid action responses that provide affordable, adequate, safe, and diverse foods that contribute to healthy diets and incomes for the poor and the most vulnerable will surely help achieve these social goals. This project's overarching aim is, therefore, to evaluate the various forms of food aid systems as implemented in South Africa and device methodologies to improve selected systems while supporting sustainability.

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