MALNUTRITION: NIGER: Chasing food security

 Photo: Catherine-Lune Grayson/IRIN
illage chief and his sons tend to crops in Niger's Tahoua region (file photo)

NIAMEY, 29 March 2011 (IRIN) - Six months before the start of the 2009 rainy season the government of Niger was warned the rains would fail. In the drought that followed, more than half the population - 7.8 million people - faced food shortages. It was the third food crisis in seven years.
“It is part of my duties, and I gave a list of measures to the government to prepare for the drought, such as planting faster-yielding varieties of millet and sorghum (two of the main staples), but governments do not always listen to us,” said Prof Alhousseini Bretaudeau, executive secretary of the Permanent Interstates Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS), a scientific arm of the African Union.
“We have spent 30 years perfecting the science of predicting droughts, and developed tools to help countries prepare but few political leaders pay attention,” Bretaudeau told IRIN at a technical and scientific conference to brainstorm ways of getting the country out of chronic food and nutrition insecurity.
The Conférence Internationale sur la Sécurité Alimentaire et Nutritionnelle au Niger (CISAN) began on 28 March, hosted by a military-backed interim government that will give way to a newly elected civilian administration, headed by Mahamadou Issoufou, on 6 April. To many observers, CISAN represents a long-awaited attempt by Niger to get to grips with the food security issues that have plagued the country for decades.
“Better late than never - the conference was long overdue,” said Jean-Pierre Guengant, director of research at the France-based Institute of Research for Development (IRD), which gave the world Plumpy’nut, a peanut-based therapeutic food, and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.
Niger slipped into chronic food insecurity a long time ago, without any of the former governments noticing, said Guengant, who has spent a decade in the country.
Amongst those who singularly failed to address food issues was Mamadou Tandja, ousted by the military in February 2010. “He did not accept there was a food crisis [in 2010] because he did not trust what the NGOs were telling him - he thought they wanted to make money,” said the man behind the conference, Col Aboulkarim Goukoye, head of the Higher Authority of Food Security (HASA).
“The second reason was that he was a very proud man - he did not want to accept that there was a problem,” said Goukoye, who is also the interim military junta’s spokesperson.
“Under the previous regime words such as ‘food crisis’ and even ‘nutrition’ were taboo - we would have had to pack our bags and leave,” Simone Winneg, coordinator of Humedica, a German medical NGO, commented.
“When we came in power,” Goukoye said, “all the technical people in the agriculture department came to us and said: ’You are probably thinking of security issues, but we have a food crisis.” They turned to the international community for help. Mahamadou Danda, prime minister of the interim government, asked Goukoye to find out how the country could address the recurring food crises. In June 2010 HASA was set up and the idea of developing a food strategy was born. “It naturally led to the idea of a conference where we could consult with technicians and scientists to help develop this strategy,” Goukoye said.

Inclusiveness
Will the incoming regime follow through? Goukoye said he was trying to get at least 10 of the recently elected parliamentarians involved. “Our strategy is not going to be any particular government’s strategy but a Nigerien strategy.” Over the next few days, participants including technical experts from across the world will look at ways to ease access to food, reduce vulnerability and improve governance in food security.
Ibrahim Mayaki, head of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the African Union’s development agency, who served as prime minister of Niger from 1997 to 2000 and was asked to head the conference, said the process was as inclusive as possible, with all previous Nigerien regimes invited to participate.
Governance was a key issue in tackling food insecurity. Local authorities were in the frontline of government service delivery as “the first connection between the government and the people in the rural areas, where most of our people live” and could recognize and the first signs of food insecurity. Mayaki suggested empowering them to address the issue.
Previous regimes had not paid much heed to warnings by technical experts in the country. “This is the first time someone is paying attention,” said Prof Maxime Banoin, an agronomist and head of the scientific and technical committee organizing the conference, who noted that other experts had also presented explanations for why the country was grappling with food insecurity.

So what is wrong with Niger?
The northern two-thirds of Niger, the biggest country in West Africa, is desert, so the entire food requirement depends on the rainy season from May to September to grow crops in the south. “It is a scary thought, and often things go wrong with it [the rainy season],” said Humedica’s Winneg.
 Photo: Catherine-Lune Grayson/IRIN
Two-thirds of Niger is desert

In an analysis prepared for the conference, Banoin and IRD’s Guengant identified the structural causes of the recurring food crises: food production has not kept up with population growth, and rainfall has declined considerably since the 1960s.
“Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate, with an average of seven children per family, so the population has grown at 3.5 percent per year, while food production, at best, has grown at about 2.5 percent per year,” said Guengant. Niger has struggled with a structural deficit for the past 20 years.
Declining rainfall has exacerbated the problem. The areas that grow staples like sorghum and millet, which need a minimum of 400mm of rain per year, has shrunk from 25 percent of the country to 12 percent since the 1960s.
Sorghum yields have dropped from between 600kg and 800kg per hectare in the 1960s to between 200kg and 300kg per hectare, while millet production has remained stagnant at 400kg per hectare.
Besides the shrinking amount of rain, the low production has highlighted the inadequate support given to agriculture, researchers said. “We have to have a multisectoral approach to finding solutions,” Guengant noted.
Investment in biotechnology to improve yields, adequate inputs, agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation systems, and education to empower women in a society that encourages them to have more children, are some of the policy measures the government should take, said Banoin and Guengant.
Harnessing the Niger River system could potentially give Niger 330,000 hectares of irrigated agricultural land.
The country has one of the world’s lowest scores in educating girls,the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, and one of the highest infant mortality rates, which all highlight the low status of women in Niger, and the cause of the high fertility rate.
Only four out of 10 girls are enrolled in primary school, two out of 10 attend secondary school, and only three out of 100 make it into high school, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The social reasons for having large families are deep-seated. “If we have only two children, what if they both die? You need to have at least seven or eight so you still have some children - it is always good to have more children,” said Hadiza Halidou, a woman participating in the conference.
“Women’s education is very important - they are also the main producers of food, which men do not acknowledge,” said NEPAD’s Mayaki.

More money needed
Traditional donors like Europe and the US have been concentrating on their internal financial woes, so African governments had to become more proactive about mobilizing resources to invest in agriculture locally and regionally, Mayaki said.
The technical and scientific conference would be followed by a leaders’ conference, where the new food security strategy would be presented, said HASA’s Goukoye. Regional heads of state, traditional donors, and local and international NGOs would be invited to attend for feedback and investment opportunities.
Mayaki said Africa should consider tapping emerging economies like South Africa, Brazil, China, India and Russia for money. Goukoye commented: “The biggest problem in Africa is implementation and follow-up.”
So what would happen if the new regime did not consider food security a priority and reneged on measures to address it - would the military junta come back?
“Just for that?” Goukoye said. “But I don’t think governments will not act - food security is everyone’s problem now.”

Mothers walking home with supplementary rations for their under-two children in Niger's central region of Tahoua


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MALNUTRITION: Is it easy to grow what is good for you?

 Photo: DFID: More, please!!

NEW DELHI, 14 February 2011 (IRIN) - The debates at the three-day International Conference on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health in New Delhi were peppered with phrases like “think multi-sectorally”, “inter-sectorally”, and “break down the silos”.
Participants pointed out that “nutrition and agriculture talk to each other, and so do nutrition and health”, but “health has never told agriculture what it needs,” because the links between the three sectors seemed to have broken down.
Veteran health, agriculture and nutrition experts – and there were quite a few of them among the estimated 1,000 government officials, academics, aid workers, donors and private sector representatives who attended – remarked that these discussions were at least three decades old.
Symptoms of the breakdown surfaced in 2007/08, when the world was jolted by the food price crisis, said David Nabarro, the UN Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition. The crisis, sparked by various factors that influenced both the supply and demand side of food availability, pushed at least a billion people into hunger.
The fact is, “agriculture, health and nutrition are tightly wedded,” said John Hoddinott, a senior researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a US-based think-tank and organizer of the conference.
Agriculture is the primary source of calories and nutrients worldwide, and in developing countries is often the major source of personal income, as most people are either subsistence farmers or farm labourers.
The links between nutrition and health are obvious. “Health status is… affected by the consumption of goods that directly improve or worsen health. Nutritional status affects health - for example, severe vitamin A deficiencies lead to blindness,” wrote Hoddinott, who developed a framework conceptualizing the links.

Women take centre stage
Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a professor at Cornell University and a 2001 Food Prize laureate, while trying to distil the talk into what needed to be addressed, emphasized “access to food, especially for the poor, often the smallholder farmer or labourer, who in most cases is a woman”.
Women’s health was a central feature in most of the debates. Various speakers pointed out that a woman’s well-being shaped the future of her children, especially her daughters, the mothers of the next generation. The future prosperity of the country often also rested on the shoulders of women, as agriculture not only created economic growth, but children who ate well often went on to earn better incomes.
Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, in the UK, cited research showing that women usually got the short end of the stick when subsidized farming inputs were made available, and suggested experimenting with gender-based quotas.
However, encouraging women to participate in farming meant they would have to spend more time in the field away from their children, which called for innovative solutions and commitment from government and civil society, said Meera Shekhar, a leading health and nutrition specialist at the World Bank. “We need to build a movement.”
Jay Naidoo, a former minister in South African president Nelson Mandela’s cabinet, said the initiative should be led by civil society and grassroots organizations, whose voice he found lacking at the conference.
You can always find the money - if you have the political commitment and drive then anything is possible

Home grown initiatives
Various initiatives have been trying to address these concerns, such as the one led by Ibtada, an NGO working with semi-pastoralist women in northeastern Rajasthan, a mostly arid province in western India.
Women in these marginalized conservative communities have traditionally not had a voice, but as the rains have become increasingly irregular, many men have been forced to seek work in towns, leaving the women to tend their livestock and small patches of land.
Ibtada persuaded the women to form cooperatives to farm and trade goats to supplement household income. “We get the time to look after our children but if we have to go [to the market], the men do not mind looking after them,” said Uganti Yogi, one of the beneficiaries. The women have earned the respect of their communities because they have become equal contributors to the family income.

Simple solutions
Purvi Mehta-Bhatt of the Kenya-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and Paul Sommers, head of agriculture at Save the Children, an international NGO, pointed out that policy-makers and academics might be complicating things unnecessarily - all it would take to empower women was the support provided by agricultural extension services.
“It need not be anything complicated - you just need to tell the extension worker that you need the farmers to grow this particular vegetable, legume, or fruit, because the community needs this particular nutrient,” said Sommers.
Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of agricultural development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said identifying the nutritional needs of a community required data, which was lacking in most instances.
Haddad noted that donors needed assessments of the impact of agriculture on nutrition before they could pump money in, and there were hardly any around.
“You can always find the money - if you have the political commitment and drive then anything is possible,” said Bibi Giyose, senior food and nutrition security advisor at the African Union’s development agency, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).
She cited the example of Botswana, which managed to halve its high levels of malnutrition within a decade by running an aggressive campaign to provide fortified porridge to infants, and meals to school-going children, without any donor funding.
Experts said it was time to re-establish the links between agriculture, nutrition and health, and perhaps educate each sector about the objectives of the others.

In his closing address, Shenggen Fan, director-general of IFPRI, said it was about sharing experiences and learning, but at least the dialogue had been reignited.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=91907

MALNUTRITION: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (Gain) and New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad)

Lusekelo Philemon : 25th January 2011

The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (Gain) and New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) have signed a memorandum of understanding which aims to significantly reduce malnutrition in Africa.

The pact aims to develop a five-year joint programme which fully integrates nutrition security into the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).
According to a Nepad statement, the agreement was co-signed on Sunday in Addis Ababa during Nepad’s steering committee meeting by Jay Naidoo, chair of the Gain Board, and Ibrahim Mayaki, CEO of the Nepad Planning and Coordinating Agency.
In Africa, it said, one in four people suffer from malnutrition, twenty-five per cent of children are undernourished and forty per cent are stunted while fifty three per cent of pregnant women are anaemic.
“Malnutrition is costing millions of lives, in particular women and children. It also prevents millions of people from contributing to the continent’s growth and development,” said Naidoo, adding:
“It is directly linked to achieving the MDGs, including poverty reduction, child mortality, maternal health, AIDS and many other infectious diseases.” He also said, it’s estimated that countries lose up to 3 per cent of GDP due to malnutrition.
“We know solutions exist to reduce malnutrition through a number of simple, targeted and cost-effective interventions,” Naidoo said in the statement.
For his part, Ibrahim Mayaki of Nepad said, “Since malnutrition has multiple causes, improvement requires multi-sectoral action across the food security, agriculture, social protection, health and educational sectors.”
The official further said, “This poses a significant delivery challenge for national governments. Although tested, affordable and effective interventions are available; implementation has not yet reached the desired scale.”
Under the agreement, the statement said, Gain and Nepad will assess existing policies, practices and capacities in agriculture, nutrition and food security before engaging the private sector, donors and national decision makers in a bid to facilitate coordination of actions geared to expanding access to more nutritious food.
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MALNUTRITION: AFRICA: Political will can solve malnutrition

Africa's record in dealing with malnutrition has been dismal
KAMPALA, 26 July 2010 (IRIN) - "Children don't vote," said Dr Robert Mwadime, of Uganda Action for Nutrition, at a session on the subject before the three-day African Union (AU) meeting opened in Kampala, Uganda. This means that political leaders in Africa often pay scant attention to the millions of children who die every year of malnutrition-related causes. Most of the audience nodded in agreement; many clapped. I was moderating a technical session on nutrition at the invitation of Boitshepo "Bibi" Giyose, Food and Nutrition Security Advisor to the African Union's New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which ran the event on 24 July, a day ahead of the AU meeting. Giyose, Prof Richard Mkandawire, head of NEPAD's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), Prof John Joseph Otim, senior presidential advisor to the Ugandan government, and various other ministers, government officials, NGO and UN representatives, were keen on drawing up a statement to spur action on nutrition during the AU meeting. The theme of the AU meeting was "Maternal, Infant and Child Health and Development in Africa", so it was an apt opportunity to wave the flag. "Nutrition is practically an orphan," Mkandawire commented. About 40 percent of children younger than five in Africa are chronically malnourished. Nutrition to the fore The food price crisis of 2006-08 pushed the number of malnourished children to shocking levels and put a new focus on nutrition. Africa's efforts to deal with malnutrition and hunger have been dismal. Only nine African countries are on track to meet the UN Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger and malnutrition by 2015, according to a 2009 report by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). "Some leaders may not consider nutrition to be politically expedient because it requires investment over the long term, and the results are not always immediately visible," the UNICEF report had said. Donors with limited budgets for aid often "focus elsewhere".
Some leaders may not consider nutrition to be politically expedient because it requires investment over the long term, and the results are not always immediately visiblel Finding solutions More than 70 percent of Africa's population is rural and depends on agriculture for food and income, so the solution to food security seems easy and logical: people can grow enough nutritious food to feed themselves. Rémi Kahane, Executive Secretary of the Global Horticulture Initiative, a non-profit programme, said growing vegetables not only brought a better income for small-scale farmers but also improved their diet. Yet Africa has some of the world's highest levels of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, especially among pre-school aged children: about 68 percent suffer from anaemia caused by a lack of iron, found in green leafy vegetables like spinach; up to 40 percent lack vitamin A, found in vegetables like carrots and pumpkins. Overall, around 40 percent of Africa's population suffer from iodine deficiency, which can be corrected by adding a pinch of iodated salt to the diet. A lack of iron and iodine affect the mental growth of a child; vitamin A is critical to the immune system and can reduce the risk of dying from illnesses by nearly 23 percent, according to UNICEF. Jan Low, a researcher at HarvestPlus, a joint programme of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture and the International Food Policy Research Institute, said HarvestPlus had developed a sweet potato - a popular root vegetable in Africa - that could be grown already fortified with vitamin A. HarvestPlus is working with 60 research organizations globally to produce beans, cassava, pearl millet, rice and wheat fortified with iron, or zinc or vitamin A. Mary Shawa, Malawi's permanent secretary for Nutrition, HIV and AIDS, said most of the country's farmers grew maize, the staple crop. "We are getting our farmers to grow other crops." Fortifying maize-meal with iron was another option. Malawi not only has one of the world's highest numbers of chronically malnourished children, but also suffers what UNICEF described as a "double burden" - high rates of stunted as well as overweight children. In Guinea-Bissau more than 10 percent of children are overweight, and around half are chronically malnourished. Uganda's Mwadime pointed out that surveys in parts of Uganda had found overweight mothers with undernourished children. In 1989 Cote d'Ivoire started a home-grown school feeding programme, in which mothers grow food and sell it to the government to feed their children in school; Kenya is doing the same. "The children not only get well-balanced meals – it also puts cash into their hands of their mothers, who are mostly small-scale farmers, and it helps the local economy," said Odette Lago-Daleba, head of Cote d'Ivoire's national school feeding programme. Nancy Walters, of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said the agency, which runs school feeding programmes in 63 countries, was trying to phase in the home-grown school feeding model across the continent. Getting the job done Knowing the problem and the solution is only half the job. Most experts at the event agreed that nutrition could not get the attention it deserved if it remained closeted in health ministries. Elizabeth Madraa, until recently the head of nutrition in the Ugandan health ministry, said countries should create room for nutrition in four key ministries: education, gender and social welfare, agriculture and economic affairs. "You need to educate the people, get them to grow the right kind of food, and you need to target women especially, who are the caregivers and the producers of food in most African countries," she said. You also needed the help of the finance and economic affairs ministries to find the money and involve the private sector in initiatives like fortifying mass-produced staple foods with vitamins and minerals. NEPAD's Mkandawire said Ghana and Malawi already had a multi-sectoral approach to tackling nutrition, and Malawi had a nutrition head in 10 of its ministries.

In a reality check, Mafa Chipeta, sub-regional coordinator at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), pointed out that before nutrition could be discussed, "There has to be food first." Many African countries were still running 40-year-old food aid programmes, and there had to be a greater urgency in getting them to spend more on agriculture to become food self-sufficient. Elhadj As Sy, UNICEF's regional head, said countries also needed to strengthen nutrition information gathering systems. At the end of the three-hour long session we had to put together the key messages for political leaders. When the AU assembly opened the following day, no political leader mentioned nutrition in their address. The main theme - maternal and infant health - got little mention. A substantial portion of the speeches were devoted to the conflicts raging in the continent. Unfazed, Giyose said she had set herself the task of engaging key ministries in at least six countries over the next 12 months to focus on nutrition. Mkandawire added optimistically, "We just need the political will to drive the process, and it can happen."
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89970