In spite of nearly five decades of international development assistance and additional efforts from many other organisations, the number of people requiring assistance during and/or after an emergency has remained unacceptably high. It is because of this ongoing demand for emergency relief that the issue of assistance during and after a crisis needs to be critically examined and more effective types of intervention sought.
The need to develop intervention programmes which do more than merely mitigate the effects of a crisis, furthermore, arises from the fact that emergencies, in the vast majority of cases, are not just a temporary collapse of a social and economic system, but the consequence of very basic structural deficits in the country or region of concern.2
It is especially because of the latter that emergency-affected people need to be assisted in such a way as to not only enable them to survive the crisis and recover quickly, but also to improve their overall living conditions so that they become less vulnerable to future threats to their livelihood. This will require both, a) the creation of conditions which lead to the sustained nutritional well-being of affected populations,3 and b) the enhancement of the households' ability to support themselves rather than increasing their dependence on external assistance. Only if the provided assistance succeeds to establish sustained food security, will the future need for emergency assistance be significantly reduced.
However, there is growing recognition that the achievement of this desired outcome is largely dependent on the type and nature of assistance, both during the crisis itself, and during the subsequent phases of rehabilitation and development. Mutual reinforcement between development and relief assistance would be essential in the attempt to overcome the costs of emergencies (in terms of human life and resources) and their drawbacks (e.g. disruption of development). In reality both types of assistance often operate at cross-purposes, with different objectives and modes of operation.4
Effective future assistance of emergency-affected people, therefore, requires to fully take into account the characteristic features of the so-called “relief-rehabilitation-development continuum” (also termed “relief-to-development continuum) and to tackle the barriers to recovery and long-term improvement with appropriate interventions.
Based on the experience of more than 4 decades of development assistance FAO is convinced that nutrition has a critical role to play in the design and implementation of such interventions.
This paper supports this point by raising some of the crucial issues of post-emergency and rehabilitation situations as they affect recovery of household food security and nutritional well-being in post-emergency situations. Section 2 introduces the concept of the relief-rehabilitation-development continuum and briefly discusses characteristics of both household food security and nutrition security. The role of nutrition in post-emergency and rehabilitation interventions is explained in section 3. Section 4 identifies common influences and constraints in post-war and post-natural disaster situations and Section 5 outlines the types of interventions which could lead to improvements. The paper is intended to raise key concerns and promote discussion on the subject.
