Friends,
At this stage I wish to comment on Section 5 and particularly on the tentative proposal to create an Inter-Governmental Panel on Nutrition (IPN) that would report to the UN General Assembly.
Over the years, one of the great institutional weaknesses at the international level has been the treatment of matters relating to food security and hunger eradication on the one side and nutrition on the other as largely different subjects. The cause for this separation has more to do with the first subject has been seen as lying within the purview of Ministries of Agriculture and the second as falling under Ministries of Health. At the international level, this dichotomy is reflected in the respective mandates of FAO and WHO.
One of the really good things about ICN 1 and 2 is that there has been a genuine recognition of the need to bring many disciplines together to tackle nutritional problems whether they relate to hunger, mineral and trace element deficiencies or overweight/obesity. We are also seeing in the draft Plan of Action welcome attention being given to the environmental dimensions of food production and consumption.
It seems a step backwards, therefore to recommend, albeit tentatively, the creation of IPN when we already have the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) reporting to the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) which, in turn, reports to UN ECOSOC.
Would it not be more consistent with the spirit of the Plan of Action to propose a widening of the agencies sponsoring the CFS (FAO, IFAD, WFP) to include also WHO and probably UNICEF, and to open its discussions more explicitly to Ministers of Health rather than mainly Ministers of Agriculture? This would conserve within the UN system the unity of approach to food security and nutrition that is evident in the Plan of Action and any successful practical interventions. It could give added weight to the CFS and especially to the HLPE. To create the IPN runs the risk of having two bodies within the UN system dealing with nutrition-related issues in the broadest sense, competing for scarce resources, reporting to different bodies within the UN system and possibly becoming rivalrous.
I would not have suggested this a few years ago, but the reformed CFS is now proving its worth and the HLPE is producing some high quality reports. Let’s build on this rather than be tempted to create yet another body.
Andrew MacMillan
Andrew MacMillan