MALNUTRITION: MADAGASCAR: The “less is more” philosophy of rice production

TALATA, 31 January 2012 (IRIN)

 Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN
A family prepares a rice field for planting in the Madagascan capital of Antananarivo

Ernest Rakotoarivony, 45, was teased by some members of the Talata community, a small town 30km north of Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, after breaking with traditional rice cultivation methods and employing a technique taught to him by a Jesuit priest.
A decade ago the Dutch priest, Ed Mulderink, promised him that adopting the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) would substantially increase his rice yield, but warned it would also be more labour intensive.
“When you replant the rice, you have very small plants, and they need to be planted individually in rows [with SRI]. The others [traditional rice farmers] just take bunches of plants, beat the roots against their feet to get the soil off, and replant them. It takes them one hour to replant their field, while it takes me two days. People don’t want to use that much time,” Rakotoarivony told IRIN.
Other farmers were skeptical of the “less is more” approach to rice production. “They think that the more plants they put in the field, the more rice they’ll have. But the opposite is true. Even if they just used some parts of the method, like controlling the water, or not beating the plant roots, it would help,” he said.
“There were people who laughed at me, until they saw the harvest,” said Rakotoarivony, who was approached by the priest when he was earning his living as a bread vendor. “The priest asked me to work with him, using SRI. So we worked on my family land together, and we managed to double the yield, just as he had promised.”
During the lean season Rakotoarivony produces vegetables and now has enough cash to buy seed and fertilizer every three years. Although some of his family have adopted SRI, relatively few others in the area have, despite the best efforts of the priest preaching the benefits of the practice.
Rice is the staple for Madagascar’s 20 million people, and the average annual consumption is about 102kg per person; about 75 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Production has declined from 4.7 million tons in 2010 to 4.3 million in 2011 and prices have doubled in two years to about US$1 per kilogram. In the 1970s Madagascar was a rice exporter but has since become a rice importer, a consequence of outdated farming methods and poor infrastructure, but farmers still produce 80 percent of the country’s national rice requirement.

Development of SRI
The SRI method was developed in the 1980s by the French Jesuit priest Henri de Laulanié, who challenged accepted norms of rice production. Traditional farmers flood their rice fields and plant bunches of mature rice plants, while SRI farmers transplant young seedlings with greater spacing on soil that is moist but not flooded. Proponents of SRI claim this system uses 25-50 percent less water, requires 80-90 percent fewer seeds, and can sometimes double or even triple the yields.
SRI has been promoted locally by NGO Tefy Saina (Change you Mentality, established by De Laulanié) and internationally, through the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD).
“The method has really taken off in Asia and is now practised in more than 30 countries. However, it has not been adopted on a wide scale in Africa or in Madagascar itself,” Winifred Fitzgerald, adviser to the Better U Foundation, told IRIN.
The Better U Foundation, funded by the Canadian actor Jim Carrey, has assisted in SRI’s implementation and dissemination at grassroots, institutional and policy levels.
However, there remains conjecture as to whether SRI methods are outpacing traditional methods. A 2005 report by Cornell University entitled Does the System of Rice Intensification Outperform Conventional Best Management? A Synopsis of the Empirical Record, says: “Aside from one set of experiments in Madagascar where SRI more than doubled rice productivity with respect to Best Management Practices, we found no evidence of a systematic or even occasional yield advantage of this magnitude elsewhere.”
In Asian countries, these researchers found, there could even be a negative impact when the system is used, the report said.
“This is a method that was discovered in the field, not in a laboratory. Some want to promote other systems. But I think that there is no competition. Some places are better for SRI than others,” said Better U adviser Rames Abhukara.
A recent progress report of the Better U Foundation cites the results of an evaluation with its partner, Catholic Relief Service (CRS) - an international faith-based NGO working in the Vakinankaratra highland region of Madagascar. In a sample of 120 households out of 600 beneficiary families, the average yields with SRI were 3.28 tons per hectare, compared to 2.87 tons per hectare prior to the project’s implementation. The regional average of rice production is two tons per hectare.
The study showed that families’ food stocks lasted on average 54 days longer as a result of their increased harvest, and helped to decrease vulnerability during the lean season.

Resistance to change
“For some farmers, they don’t see why they should change the way their fathers and grandfathers grew rice. To minimize risk, they may start practising SRI in one corner of the rice field,” Fitzgerald explained. “Others are interested in the method, but do not know how to start or have received insufficient training, so partners are working to address these gaps.”
For some farmers, they don’t see why they should change the way their fathers and grandfathers grew rice
“We don’t tell them to do this. We tell them: If you think it’s useful, we can help you with it,” Abhukara added.
At the institutional level, the Better U Foundation helped to create an association known as the Groupement SRI de Madagascar (GSRI).
GSRI has 267 members, including local and international NGOs, research institutes and private sector entities. In June 2011, the Ministry of Agriculture included SRI in its national strategy for rice development for the first time.
“We were also quite pleased that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, in his preliminary conclusions cited SRI as an important agro-ecological method that could contribute to the country’s food security,” Fitzgerald said.
Apart from increased productivity for farmers, the method has environmental benefits, its proponents claim. With increased yields and improved incomes, there is less pressure for farmers to cut down forests for agriculture purposes. SRI also contributes to a reduction in greenhouse gases, especially methane, because the rice fields are not continuously flooded as in traditional rice cultivation.
“Just producing more rice is not enough. For an effective SRI dissemination strategy, you have to consider the whole rice chain, such as farmers’ access to micro-finance as well as the storage, transportation and marketing of rice,” Abhukara said.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94764

MALNUTRITION: 'Super wheat' resists devastating rust

Naomi Antony : 17 June 2011
 Stem rust can destroy wheat crops : Flickr/CIMMYT

'Super varieties' of wheat resistant to the deadly stem rust fungus Ug99 could replace wheat in affected areas in as little as two years — if farmers can be persuaded to adopt them, according to a wheat rust expert.
First discovered in Uganda some 13 years ago, Ug99 is increasingly virulent. It is spreading throughout East and Southern Africa, and spores have also reached as far afield as Iran and Yemen. Wheat breeders had been working on promising resistant varieties in Njoro, Kenya, in the hopes that one of them could combat the fungus.
Now they have bred new varieties with good resistance and with up to 15 per cent better yields than today's varieties, said Ronnie Coffman, head of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat Project at Cornell University, United States.
Stem rust, also known as black rust, is even more damaging than stripe (or yellow) rust which has wiped out about 40 per cent of harvests in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
The new varieties, developed by wheat breeding expert Ravi Singh and colleagues at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, are resistant to both rusts. They were unveiled at the 2011 Borlaug Global Rust Initiative's Technical Workshop in Minneapolis, United States, this week (13–16 June).
The varieties were developed by combining several plant resistance genes, which individually give low levels of resistance but when found together in the same plant make it more difficult for the Ug99 pathogen to unravel their combined defences, providing better resistance.
"We're trying to raise awareness of these materials and convince farmers that they should adopt them before [wheat rust] grows endemic — especially in countries such as Ethiopia," said Coffman.
Coffman said that the two most critical countries to tackle are Ethiopia and Yemen. However, as Yemen's political unrest has impeded anti-wheat rust efforts — material recently sent to the country by CIMMYT perished in customs — breeders are initially focusing their efforts on Ethiopia.
"We believe that farmers in Ethiopia will accept the new varieties," he said. "There is a major outbreak of yellow rust (stripe rust) there. It is not nearly as devastating as stem rust, but it's significant and farmers want something resistant to it.
"These new varieties are resistant to both rusts so we're hopeful that the incidence of yellow rust will cause them to accept the new varieties. Unless farmers have an incentive that they can see, they don't tend to accept new varieties."
He said that if the incentive works, the whole of Ethiopia could be growing resistant strains in just two years — and this same timetable could apply to the entire East African region. "But it's a big if," he added.
Singh said: "We need to see national governments making the investments in seed systems development, including seed production and distribution. In many areas there will need to be support and leadership from wealthy countries and international institutions to carry these innovations into farmers' fields."
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/-super-wheat-resists-devastating-rust.html

MALNUTRITION: AID POLICY: Call for local manufacture of nutrition-rich foods

MEDFORD, USA, 6 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Georgina Cranston/UNICEF
Plumpy'Nut destined for Southern Sudan

Why ship-in nutrition-rich foods from abroad to treat malnourished children when they can be made locally, at a fraction of the cost?
Nutrition expert Steve Collins believes it is not only a waste of money for aid agencies to import ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF) manufactured in Europe or the USA, but also a lost opportunity to develop an added-value local manufacturing capacity.
Collins points out that developing countries such as Botswana and India have developed their own RUTF but many aid agencies, including the UN, prefer to buy branded RUTF manufactured abroad such as Plumpy'nut - a lipid paste made from peanuts and milk powder and fortified with vitamins and minerals proven to be effective in treating severe acute malnutrition.
Part of the reason for this was that similar peanut pastes produced in poor countries do not meet the stringent UN requirements on aflatoxin content, which it has set at a maximum of five parts per billion (ppb).
“You can sit in the US and eat food with aflatoxin content of 20 ppb, but if a peanut paste made in Malawi has an aflatoxin content of even 10 ppb it will not be approved by the UN agencies [for use in an intervention programme run by them],” said Collins, addressing a panel discussion at the World Conference on Humanitarian Studies at Tufts University, Medford, USA, on the opportunities in scaling up nutrient-rich food aid.
As a result the cost of product manufacture goes up. Ingredients such as milk powder also add to the costs.
Aflatoxin is produced by a species of fungus which contaminates the peanuts after they are harvested and can affect the liver and even cause cancer. Moderate levels of aflatoxin can moderate a child’s growth. International food standards allow for a maximum of 10-20 ppb of aflatoxin.
NGOs are experimenting with other locally available protein sources such as chickpea to bring the costs of RUTF down.
Jean Herve Bradol, the former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, suggested during the discussion that perhaps a headline-grabbing campaign, similar to those which led to the eradication of small-pox and the manufacture and use of generic antiretrovirals to treat HIV, was needed to create a momentum to tackle malnutrition.
These efforts would help to find a way towards cheaper and more sustainable alternatives.
Maria Kasparian, who heads Edesia, an NGO set up in the USA by Nutriset, the manufacturers of Plumpy’nut, said they were collaborating with partners in developing countries to produce RUTF locally.

Effective distribution networks
Mark Moore, a manufacturer of RUTF in the USA who was trying to set up a plant in Rwanda, said local manufacturers would not be able to handle the distribution networks required to scale-up operations.
He suggested partnerships with private sector multinationals, which have good distribution networks even in remote corners of Africa, such as soft drinks manufacturers.
Bradol pointed out that multinationals are not altruistic and the product would still be unaffordable for the poor. “Price will always be a factor,” he said.
In a commentary in the February 2011 edition of the journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association, Michael Latham of Cornell University’s nutritional sciences division, and Urban Jonsson, the former chief of nutrition at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and others caution that the debate around commercial RUTF as a “miracle” cure could distract attention from “rational and sustainable policies and programmes” such as the promotion of breastfeeding.
“As things now are, 'scaled-up' delivery of commercial or foreign 'packages' of nutrition interventions is being aggressively promoted, inside the UN, and outside by major governments, their agencies, foundations, and other big NGOs. Branded, commercial RUTF is now part of these packages," the authors noted.
“In contrast, the promotion of community-based and local government-supported empowerment of people living in poverty to claim their human rights to good nutrition, which is the rational way forward, is neglected.”
Even severe acute malnutrition can be treated with local foods. The authors noted India’s refusal to allow UNICEF to import commercial RUTFs in 2009. About 49 percent of the world’s malnourished children live in India. The authors said: “For decades good Indian hospitals have successfully treated severe acute malnutrition with local foods, comparable to the sugar, casein, oil and milk commonly used in Africa.”

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=92913

MALNUTRITION: FOOD: Biofuels make a comeback as prices rise

JOHANNESBURG, 18 April 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN
An increase in the price of a staple cereal triggers a domino effect in grain markets

The combination of higher fuel prices and increased biofuel production, a main driver of the 2007/08 maize price hike, is back in the news because stocks are at their lowest levels in 30 years in the US, the world's largest exporter.
Maize prices have more than doubled since April 2010, said Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Grains at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). An increase in the price of a staple cereal triggers a domino effect in grain markets as people opt for cheaper alternatives.
Higher food prices since June 2010 have forced an additional 44 million people into hunger, the World Bank noted in a new report.
2010 ended with food prices at their highest since 2008. In January 2011, IRIN looked at whether the world was headed for another crisis but experts thought price escalation had not yet hit the benchmark for a crisis as recorded in 2008, when global supplies of all staple grains were affected.
Christopher Barrett, a food expert who teaches development economics at Cornell University in the US, said maize stocks in the US were "down to less than six months' consumption”.

Are we in a crisis?
No, say the experts, but their level of concern has gone up a notch since January. High crude oil prices, a weak US dollar, widespread unrest in the oil-producing regions of the Middle East and North Africa, and the situation in Japan, where damaged nuclear reactors raise demand for conventional fuel while the threat of radiation exposure decreases food supplies, are not a recipe for price stability any time soon. "The next few months will be critical," said Abbassian.
Crude oil prices surged by 10.3 percent in March and were 36 percent higher than at the same time in 2010, the World Bank noted in its Food Price Watch for 2011. "These oil price increases impact the price of food - a 10 percent increase in crude oil prices is associated with a 2.7 percent increase in food prices in the World Bank Food Price Index."
Crude oil is maintaining prices well above US$100 per barrel, which they last reached in the 2007/08 food price crisis.
High fuel prices mean that more maize, vegetable oil and sugar cane are used to produce biofuel. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in its World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, released in April 2011, reported that the use of maize to produce ethanol rose from 31 percent of total maize output in 2008/09 and would reach a projected 40 percent in 2010/11.
High fuel prices also mean more expensive farm inputs such as energy for irrigation and transport, and other production costs. The World Bank said maize prices had increased in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and the Kyrgyz Republic in the past year, reflecting increased transport costs from Kazakhstan.
Abbassian said US-made maize ethanol could possibly compete with high petrol prices without any subsidy in the long term, which was "worrisome." He was also concerned about tight maize supplies in China, where production was affected by weather conditions in 2010. There was also uncertainty about the level of Chinese imports in 2011.
Stocks of other staples, "in particular, wheat and soybeans… haven't seen nearly the same draw-downs," Barrett said. "Production has been pretty good in South America, and thus far the USDA reports that indications in the US for the 2011 harvest are good, so the supply-side issues are mainly inadequate growth in yields to keep pace with demand."
Abbassian pointed out that in the first week of April 2011, wheat prices were 84 percent higher than in the same period in 2010, whereas the price of rice was up by only six percent.

Are developing countries affected?
Although it takes time for global price hikes to be transmitted to domestic markets, the impact is determined mostly by local conditions.
Poor rains in the Horn of Africa have seen the price of white maize rise in Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Benin, with the biggest jump - 80 percent - in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, between January and February 2011, and a year-on-year increase of 340 percent compared to the same period in 2010.
Production uncertainties pushed up global rice prices by 18 percent between June and December 2010 and led to large importers increasing domestic stockholdings, said the World Bank. Prices have been coming down in countries like Bangladesh and Mozambique.
In West Africa, depreciation of the CFA franc against the US dollar has driven up prices by 10 percent to 20 percent since March 2010, according to FAO.
Conflict in Côte d'Ivoire has disrupted supplies of processed foods such as dried milk, sugar and vegetable oil to the landlocked countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, making these commodities more expensive, the World Bank said. Prices were rising in Sudan, Ethiopia, India and Colombia, and the impact of high wheat prices was also being felt in Mongolia, which depended largely on imports.
On the upside, high prices have encouraged farmers in the European Union (EU), Russia and Ukraine to plant more wheat, resulting in bigger harvests in 2011. "But if you have another bad weather spell [like the drought in Russia in 2010] we could be facing a crisis," said Abbassian.

What should countries do in the meantime?
Countries that buy most of their food should monitor import tariffs and reduce rates to keep prices low, suggested Barrett. "In many countries, a domestic currency naturally strengthening against the [US] dollar will already be serving that anti-inflation purpose, although pushing the exchange rate as a means of stemming inflation is a dangerous strategy because of likely consequences for their agricultural and other tradables (e.g., the light manufacturing and tourism) sectors."
Abbassian said countries should have had enough time since the last crisis in 2007/08 to contemplate safety nets. "If not, start putting a strategy in place now."
Barrett noted that higher market prices for staple cereals gave farmers and countries an opportunity to invest in upgrading irrigation and other improvements that could bring long-term benefits.
The World Bank focused on what Arab countries, the largest net cereal importers in the world, could do to reduce costs and found that logistics contributed substantially to the price of imported wheat. For instance, vessels carrying wheat routinely wait up to 10 days before they unload cargo. The Bank suggested improving capacity and upgrading infrastructure in ports to lower costs.
In times of unforeseen crisis - floods, unexpected disasters affecting production - countries should take steps to protect themselves from the large margins between the contracted price and the delivery price, so that they do not pass on a price shock to the local markets.
The Bank suggested that small regional humanitarian reserves be set up in disaster-prone, infrastructure-poor areas, such as the Horn of Africa, to meet emergency needs quickly.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID), aid arm of the US government, the world's largest food aid donor, has a warehouse in Djibouti, in the horn of Africa, where food aid is prepositioned for possible emergencies in Africa and Asia.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=92502

MALNUTRITION: World experts meet to find solutions to malnutrition

 22 Mar 2011
Pretoria - More than 60 world nutrition experts are currently meeting at the World Health Organisation (WHO) headquarters in Geneva this week to revise guidelines and identify solutions to tackle the growing problem of malnutrition.
According to WHO, malnutrition, including under-nutrition and obesity, accounts for 11 percent of all diseases and long-term poor health and disability, and leads to stunted growth and wasting in nearly 300 million children.
The organisation revealed that four million children die each year from nutritional risks including being underweight, vitamin and mineral deficiency, particularly vitamin A, iron, iodine and zinc.
WHO's Director of Nutrition for Health and Development, Francesco Branca, said while lack of food can lead to serious health problems, too much food can have the same affect, pointing out that 43 million children under the age of five are overweight.
"We are seeing that often we have in the same countries, at the same time, the presence of under-nutrition and overweight. We are seeing that this increase in overweight figures is becoming a problem in developing countries.
"We have the greatest increase in overweight figures in Africa, particularly North Africa and we now can say that perhaps the proportion of the number of children who are overweight is actually larger in developing countries than in developed countries," said Branca.
The WHO also reported that about one-third of the 1.5 billion overweight people in the world are obese. Approximately 35 million of the 43 million overweight children are in developing countries, with the largest numbers in Asia. The fastest overweight growth rates are in Africa.
"Today's children are becoming overweight because they are more sedentary than in the past. Simply put, they are eating more than they need. The highly refined, processed high-energy density food available in rich countries also is widely available in poor countries and these foods are high in sugar and fat content," said WHO.
Professor of nutrition at Cornell University, Rebecca Stoltzfus, said the overweight and obesity epidemics were now present in every country in the world, noting that the conditions of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, being overweight and obese are related in multiple ways.
"The kinds of diets that lead children to become overweight - the high sugar, high fat diets - tend to be relatively low in essential vitamins and minerals. There is evidence emerging that the condition of overweight or obesity also changes one's metabolism of key minerals, such as iron, so that obese individuals do not absorb and metabolise iron normally," said Stoltzfus.
She also noted that being underweight in women and children is responsible for more premature deaths and disability than any other preventable risk factor - more than unsafe sex, use of tobacco and being overweight.
Child obesity can also lead to serious health consequences, including the early onset of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and certain cancers.
http://www.buanews.gov.za/news/11/11032211251001

MALNUTRITION: DFID and Gates team up for agricultural research

28 February 2011: Yojana Sharma

 New funding will help develop wheat varieties resistant to emerging strains of stem rust disease: Flickr/CIMMYT

A windfall of US$40 million to fund global research on a deadly strain of wheat rust that is threatening the world's wheat supply was announced yesterday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
It is part of a new collaboration between the two organisations that will see US$102 million invested into agricultural research and the rollout of technologies to small farmers to help manage crop diseases and food security over the next five years.
Cornell University in the United States will receive US$25 million from the foundation and US$15 million from DFID over five years, for research on wheat varieties resistant to emerging strains of stem rust disease such as Ug99 which, began in Uganda and is spreading. It is now found in Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Sudan, and Yemen.
"Against the backdrop of rising food prices and wheat in particular, researchers worldwide will be able to play an increasingly vital role in protecting wheat fields from dangerous new forms of stem rust," said Ronnie Coffman, principal investigator at Cornell's Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat (DRRW) project.
DRRW, led by Cornell, involves 18 universities and research institutes around the world including national research centres in Ethiopia and Kenya, the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas in Syria and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
It also collaborates with scientists and farmers in 40 countries where new stem rust resistant varieties have been distributed for testing and evaluation.
Andrew Bennett, president of the Tropical Agricultural Association, told SciDev.Net: "There is a need to move very quickly. Rusts like Ug99 mutate fast and are carried on the wind. Ug99 has already arrived in Iran and it is not a great distance to get to Pakistan and India, the bread basket of South Asia. It is very important that resistant material is not only developed but deployed."
Leaf and stripe (yellow) rust also threaten wheat crops. But virulent stem rusts such as Ug99 are the most feared because they can quickly lead to the loss of an entire harvest.
The Global Cereal Rust Monitoring System at the FAO in Rome suggests that Ug99 variants are also threatening major wheat-growing areas of southern and eastern Africa, the Central Asian Republics, the Caucasus, the Indian subcontinent, South America, North America and Australia.
George Rothschild, chair of the European Forum for Agricultural Research for Development (EFARD) and a former head of the International Rice Research Institute, told SciDev.Net: "It is an exciting initiative to see substantial resources going into this research at a time when resources are very, very tight."
But he warned that such plant diseases tend to evolve rapidly, because there is a need for a broad range of rust-resistant wheat varieties, both traditional and genetically engineered.
Scientists and policymakers "must make sure they don't end up with a dominant variety or one strain" which would accelerate the development of resistance.
"Getting resistant crops out there is very important but in doing that it is vital that farmers do not give up their traditional varieties. The traditional varieties can be used as basis to cross-breed using the resistant genes to get the anti-rust properties in," Rothschild said.

Andrew Bennett is the chair of SciDev.Net's board of trustees.

http://www.scidev.net/en/news/dfid-and-gates-team-up-for-agricultural-research.html

POVERTY: 'Practice Babies': An Outdated Practice, Rediscovered

NPR Staff : January 6, 2011


  Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library : Practice apartment babies were held to a strict, scientifically engineered diet by their student "mothers."
From 1919 to 1969, college home economics programs around the country had so-called practice houses or practice apartments where young women learned the domestic arts: cooking, cleaning, running a household.
The college students learned mothering skills by caring for "practice babies" — infants lent by local orphanages to live at the school.
Lisa Grunwald researched the practice and used it as the premise for her novel The Irresistible Henry House. She says she discovered this use for orphan babies while working on an anthology of letters written by American women when she found a snapshot of "the most beguiling baby with this roguish grin." She learned he had been a practice baby at Cornell University.
"He had been cared for by about a dozen women who took turns being his practice mother," Grunwald tells NPR's Michele Norris.
By the 1950s, there were 40 or 50 colleges and universities throughout the country who had this program in place, or something very similar, Grunwald says.
The baby Grunwald came across was named Bobby Domecon, short for "domestic economics." All of the babies at Cornell took the last name Domecon, and all of the practice babies at Illinois State University had the last name North or South, depending on the building they were raised in.
When I first read about this, I thought it was sort of weird and a little bit creepy.

- Lisa Grunwald, author of 'The Irresistible Henry House'
Grunwald says the babies would come from the orphanage as young as possible, and the mothers would take rotations caring for them. The rotations depended on the college — sometimes one mother would have a baby a week at a time or 10 days at a time. In others, a mother would put the baby down for a nap, and another student would be there when it woke up. But it was always on a very careful schedule.
"When I first read about this, I thought it was sort of weird and a little bit creepy," Grunwald says. "But, in fact, at the times in which this took place, everything was considered a possible opportunity for a scientific approach, and child care was no exception. The practice houses really embraced the idea that you could learn mothering the same way you learned cooking or learned chemistry — everything was learnable, and systems were really important."
Many of the babies arrived at the universities suffering from malnutrition, and they were quickly plumped with good health after their stint in those programs.
Grunwald says she found little evidence of controversy around the practice, with the exception of a 1954 Time magazine article, where the Illinois state child welfare division found out a child was being raised on campus this way and was extremely disturbed by it.

Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Bobby Domecon arrived at Cornell as a malnutrition case, but developed normally during his two-year stay.

Grunwald also wanted to find out the long-term effects on someone who is raised this way. She says she talked with various experts and psychiatrists.
"They told me about attachment disorder," Grunwald says. "If a child doesn't form one really tight bond in the first years of life, it sometimes happens that he or she can develop attachment disorder."
But there was no evidence, because the babies weren't followed and studied as they grew up.
"It was really the reason I wanted to write it as fiction because the alternative didn't seem very viable," Grunwald says. "They were returned to their orphanages and they were adopted in due course, the way most children were adopted, which was, at the time, very anonymously.
"While there is some evidence that some parents really wanted a Domecon baby — because he or she had been raised by scientific methods — there doesn't seem to have been any way of tracking them or following them. There was never a study done, there were never even records kept."
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/06/132708047/practice-babies-an-outdated-practice-discovered?ps=cprs

MALNUTRITION: US shipping policy: Millions wasted on shipping food aid

JOHANNESBURG, 13 July 2010 (IRIN) - US taxpayers spend about US$140 million every year on non-emergency food aid in Africa, and roughly the same amount to ship food aid to global destinations on US vessels; money that could have been used to feed more people says a new study by researchers at Cornell University in the US. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has accounted for more than half of the world's food aid (http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=70066) every year for decades, but has been "the last and slowest donor to reform its food aid policies", noted Christopher Barrett, a leading food aid expert, and his colleagues, Elizabeth Bageant and Erin Lentz. Their study, Food Aid and Agricultural Cargo Preference,(http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/61250/2/AAEA%202010%2010877.pdf) has come up with the numbers to back a long-standing call for reforms, and goes a step further in showing that the policy designed to "nurture" or subsidise the US shipping industry "under the guise of humanitarian assistance" is not doing either effectively. Most donors have moved towards (http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=88666) cash transfers or vouchers to buy food, instead of providing food as aid, but the paper points out that most countries only had agribusiness and some NGO interests to contend with while reforming their food aid policy. Reforms in the US have faced much tougher opposition from "a uniquely effective lobby", referred to as the "iron triangle", comprising agribusiness, the shipping sector and some NGOs. Barrett and Daniel Maxwell, an associate professor at Tufts University, Boston, in the US, who wrote at length about the "iron triangle" in their 2005 book, Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role, estimated that it cost more than two dollars of US taxpayers' money to deliver one dollar's worth of food procured as in-kind aid. Little known shipping subsidy Little has been written about the costs and effects of a policy called the Agricultural Cargo Preference (ACP), which affects the shipping sector of the "iron triangle", and USAID, the world's largest food aid programme. The ACP requires that 75 percent of US food aid be shipped on privately owned, US registered vessels, even if they do not offer the most competitive rates. Some of these costs are reimbursed by the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, but ultimately the US taxpayer foots the entire bill. The Cornell researchers used data available for every USAID food aid shipment in 2006, when ACP cost US taxpayers $140 million, "The amount paid above the regular cost of ocean freight on the competitive market," said Barrett. ACP was calculated by taking into account the costs of transporting the food aid on competing foreign vessels plying the same waters, after deducting the ACP costs borne by US Department of Agriculture food aid programmes, and reimbursements. The un-reimbursed cost of ACP to food aid agencies was almost the same as what USAID spent on non-emergency food aid to Africa, which benefited 1.2 million people and was "widely deemed important to preventing food emergencies". USAID declined to comment on the findings of the study, saying the research "spoke for itself". About 20 years ago the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent investigative arm of Congress, looked at the costs of shipping food aid in US-flag vessels rather than using cheaper foreign ships, and estimated that it cost $150 million each year. Another report in 1994 put the cost as high as $200 million a year. Failing shipping as well The ACP was put in place to achieve four objectives: ensure that US vessels remained seaworthy and prepared should a war break out; maintain skilled jobs for American seafarers; maintain the financial viability of US ships; protect US ocean commerce from foreign domination. Barrett, Bageant and Lentz found that "contrary to its national security and 'buy American' objectives", ACP used vessels which were not useful to the military, and most of the vessels used were ultimately owned by foreign corporations. They recommended that the US administration revisit the ACP, and suggested separating security objectives from humanitarian ones, with direct support for the Maritime Security Program. But shipping industry says The US shipping industry, which produced its own study - Impacts on the US Economy of Shipping International Food Aid ( http://www.usamaritime.org/pdf/Economic_Impacts_of_Shipping_Food_Aid-April_2010.pdf) - around the same time as the Cornell researchers, argues that eliminating the ACP would shrink the US-flag merchant fleet by 15 percent to 30 percent, with the loss of between 16,500 and 33,000 jobs. Barrett said the shipping industry's study had used "very crude multipliers not developed for this application, and seem to use the total ocean freight costs, not the marginal cost of cargo preference, thereby assuming that every maritime job would disappear. That's a highly questionable assumption that they then inflate, using highly questionable multipliers". The Cornell study's calculations showed that US taxpayers were paying a subsidy of almost $100,000 every year per mariner on an ACP vessel shipping food aid. "That's a pretty handsome subsidy," he commented. "One would hope there would be some economic multiplier. The question is whether that's the best use of those funds, if our objective is to generate US jobs; and if the objective is to generate US jobs, why do so through a humanitarian food aid programme, rather than focusing on generating jobs directly?"