MALNUTRITION: Please manage the food better

JOHANNESBURG, 24 June 2010 (IRIN) - A new global architecture to govern food security is urgently needed to reduce the number of hungry people, and predict and prevent another food price crisis like the one that took the world by surprise in 2006-08. Shenggen Fen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank, urged leaders of the G8 industrialised countries and G20 emerging countries, who will be meeting in Canada for two days from 25 June, to focus on this issue."The existing governing systems, and even countries, failed to predict the [food price] crisis in 2007/08," and ever more people have been going hungry since then, he told IRIN.The food price crisis and the recession that followed pushed the number of malnourished men, women and children to more than one billion in 2009, according to UN agencies, and the figure is still growing. "Hunger has been much more pervasive than poverty ... If past trends continue, global food security will deteriorate even further," warned an IFPRI report on meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger, called Business As Unusual, written by Fen and released on 23 June."While food prices have dropped, incomes because of the recession have been reduced by a much higher rate," said Holger Matthey, an economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).The G8 countries pledged US$22 million to tackle global hunger at their 2009 meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, "But we don't know how much of that money has come through," said Fen, who proposed setting up a tracking system to monitor funds for reducing hunger. IFPRI uses its Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) to monitor funding for agriculture in Africa. "We could maybe expand this system to cover global flows," Fen suggested.After the 2006-08 crisis, when staples such as maize, rice and wheat climbed to their highest prices in 30 years, many donor countries, aid agencies and analysts suggested that the existing Committee on World Food Security (CFS) be reformed.The CFS is a technical committee of the FAO, and serves as a forum in the UN system for the review and follow-up of policies on world food security, food production, nutrition, and physical and economic access to food.Jacques Diouf, director-general of FAO, announced last week that the CFS was being reformed to make it a "global platform for policy convergence and the coordination of expertise and action in the fight against hunger and malnutrition in the world".Fen said the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, set up after the crisis, had done a "good job" in coordinating initiatives to respond to the crisis. "But that task force also needs support - it needs current information from policy institutes such as IFPRI and other academics; there needs to be more information-sharing between governments and organizations to make this work."Another crisis?Uncoordinated policy actions of governments across the world during the 2006-08 food crisis made prices even more volatile and affected access to markets, said a new joint Agricultural Outlook for the next 10 years, produced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and FAO. Food prices have come down, but are still high, according to FAO.The Outlook acknowledged that the 2006-08 food price crisis "was due to the contemporaneous occurrence of a panoply of contributing factors, which are not likely to be repeated in the near term. However, if history is any guide, further episodes of strong price fluctuations in agricultural product prices cannot be ruled out, nor can future short-lived crises". High crude oil and energy prices were major contributors to forcing up food prices in 2006-08. Fossil fuel and energy prices not only affect the cost of agricultural inputs, but expand the quantity of agricultural land being diverted to produce grain for biofuel. "Crude oil and energy prices are assumed to increase over the coming decade as global economic activity is restored," the Outlook commented. Burgeoning demand for milk and meat in emerging economies like China and India also puts pressure on the amount of staple grains diverted to animal feed. Besides higher population growth rates - two percent per year in Africa - high urbanization trends and a large emerging middle class will drive demand for food.The OECD/FAO projected that staples like wheat would cost 15 percent to 40 percent more from 2010 to 2019 than they did from 1997 to 2006.Merritt Cluff, a senior FAO economist who led the Outlook research team, advised food aid agencies to "source food purchases locally where possible ... [so] that local rural communities receive higher payments for their commodities and stimulate production". Numbers of hungry growing The task of halving the number of hungry from 1990 levels by 2015, as required by the MDG, has grown - the world will have to help 73 million people out of hunger every year to reach the MDG target. To help achieve this, Fen suggested that countries scale up investment in agriculture and social protection - a twin-track approach proposed by the UN task force in the wake of the 2006-08 crisis.A study Fen conducted in China showed that for every $1,200 spent on agricultural research in 2000, 11 people were lifted out of poverty; in Uganda, for every additional $920 invested in agricultural research in 1999, 58 people were lifted out of poverty.It paid to concentrate on country-led, bottom-up approaches to making people food secure by involving local governments and seeking broad participation; if countries could not afford agricultural reforms, the private sector should be brought in. Fen urged countries to experiment with new policies and expand successful pilot initiatives, saying: "Scale up the unusual." The IFPRI report noted that in Kenya, where the Business Alliance Against Chronic Hunger launched its first pilot programme in 2009, more than 30 private companies had become members. According to local news reports the initiative had helped more than 2,000 farmers.Worldwide, food markets remain volatile. In 2006-08 prices were "exacerbated by trade policies of exporters, creating higher import prices", said FAO's Cluff. No trading system could ensure that people would get "cheap food, but net importers deserve to have unrestrained access to markets on a predictable and fair basis". Cluff suggested that developing countries put in place well functioning markets, and establish commodity exchanges to make "price discovery more transparent and fair".

MALNUTRITION: Feed The Future Initiative

At the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy in July 2009, global leaders committed to "act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global food security." They recognized that the combined effect of longstanding underinvestment in agriculture and food security, historically high and volatile food prices, and the economic and financial crisis was increasing dramatically the number of poor and hungry and jeopardizing global progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). By robbing people of a healthy and productive life and stunting the development of the next generation, hunger leads to devastating consequences for individuals, families, communities, and nations. At L’Aquila, leaders called for increased investment in agriculture and rural development as a proven lever for combating food insecurity and as an engine for broader economic growth, prosperity, and stability.
Feed the Future (FTF), the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, renews our commitment to invest in sustainably reducing hunger and poverty. At L’Aquila, President Obama’s pledge of at least $3.5 billion for agricultural development and food security over three years helped to leverage and align more than $18.5 billion from other donors in support of a common approach. The 2009 G8 and G20 Summits established a framework for coordinated and comprehensive action among host governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, and other stakeholders. The five principles of a common approach, first articulated at L’Aquila, embrace the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action, and were endorsed unanimously as the Rome Principles for Sustainable Food Security by 193 countries at the 2009 World Summit on Food Security.
We are guided by the Rome Principles as we work alongside development partners to support processes through which countries develop and implement food security strategies and investment plans that reflect their needs, priorities, and development strategies. The country-owned plans, referred to in this document as Country Investment Plans (CIPs), serve as the foundation for countries to mobilize resources and coordinate with development partners to accelerate their progress toward the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger and poverty by 2015. As described in the Rome Principles, we commit to work in partnership to:
http://www.feedthefuture.gov/FTF_Guide.pdf

Health Goals may not be appropriate

We stand at an unprecedented moment in global health: advances in public health science enable us to project health trends into the future as never before and to understand how to prevent or effectively treat many of the significant global health concerns - or position us to figure out more effective approaches. We also have global experience in setting goals, deploying resources, and observing outcomes. This is a critical time to be cognizant of the broad changes that are in process and take stock of whether current approaches will serve us well in this changing world. This article seeks to reflect on both of these issues and suggest on how each can inform the other for future success in improving global health.
The new world of global health will be characterized by persistence of our longstanding concerns to mitigate infectious disease and improve maternal and child health, food and water availability and safety. In these areas, there is little doubt that global goals and targets have been critical for redirecting policy attention and mobilizing advocacy. Witness the rise of attention to maternal mortality once it was chosen as an MDG - and the equally striking decline in the fortunes of reproductive health when it was omitted from the original Goals. Yet, even when there is such welcome attention, successive goals and targets have come and gone, largely unmet.
Our poor track record may stem from the reliance on plans that are formulated with an eye trained exclusively on the bar set globally by the goal, while ignoring what science teaches us is needed locally for lasting solutions. In fact, recent analyses by Peters et al, in the 2009 The World Bank's Improving Health Service Delivery in Developing Countries: From Evidence to Action, clearly demonstrate how global goals and targets have been set without reference to crucial aspects of the country context that influence change, and without acknowledging the varying pace of change that is possible across different settings with different starting points.
Too often, global goals and targets that were meant primarily to refocus political attention are mistakenly assumed to dictate appropriate first steps in a plan of action for effective implementation. For example, there is clear consensus that a goal such as MDG 5 on maternal mortality cannot be met without an approach that strengthens district-level health systems. Yet many of the Roadmaps for Reduction of Maternal and Newborn Mortality developed by countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, while aspiring to meet global MDG targets for births attended by skilled health professionals, are devoid of adequately resourced implementation plans to tackle the systemic problems that have repeatedly sabotaged such aspirations.
http://www.globalhealthmagazine.com/top_stories/chasing_goals_solving_problems