Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

Dear Friends,

I have been following this discussion but have hesitated to contribute because I cannot point to well substantiated success stories at country level, although I have been involved at various times in being a minor player in policy change processes in many country situations. Nor do I feel that, as implied in the introduction, “information”  itself is the key to inducing policy change. What I think we need to look at is how new ideas emerge and are successfully propagated, and what we do to improve and accelerate these processes.

One implication might be that our own FSN “community” should move from simply sharing ideas and experiences and making comments on CSF draft papers to becoming a group of advocates for policy changes related to its host Organization’s 5 strategic objectives. I think that we have to ask ourselves how we can become catalysts for change.

To understand this, It might be interesting to take a careful look at the strategies and tools applied in two highly successful recent moves to induce radical policy changes – the Jubilee 2000 campaign on debt forgiveness (http://advovacyinternational.co.uk) and the international campaign to ban land mines (www.icbl.org).  Both of these succeeded in moving rather obscure topics very quickly to the top of the international agenda, mobilizing “people power” to put pressure on governments and international institutions to commit to reversing conventional policies. The aims were very clear and expressed in simple terms that everyone could understand. They appealed to people’s sense of justice and fairness, and the campaigns were managed with great skill, using most of the communication skills available at the time.

Avaaz and other internet petition-raising programmes, are, I suppose, the modern-day heirs to Jubilee 2000 and ICBL.

-           

In the food security area, it would be interesting to make a careful review of what has worked – or not worked.

The idea of the “Right to Food”  gained initial recognition in the 90’s and has been propagated with reasonable but still quite limited success over the last 10 years following the launch of the Voluntary guidelines, in the sense that a growing number of countries are building the RtoF into their constitutions. But it remains quite a complex concept with legal connotations, and hence it has been difficult to generate wide popular support for it and I suspect that it is hard to show a correlation between a country’s subscription to the RtoF and nutrition improvements. Lula was much more successful in creating the immediate emergence of public and political support for ending hunger in Brazil by simply pledging to ensure that, as a result of the Zero Hunger Initiative, every Brazilian would enjoy 3 meals per day by the end of his term as President - a goal that everyone could understand and work towards. (Interestingly it was only several years after the launch of Zero Hunger that Brazil adjusted its constitution to incorporate the right to food as a national objective thus guaranteeing long-term commitment to achieving Lula’s vision).

I am totally convinced that hunger and most other forms of malnutrition can be eradicated very quickly. The great communication task is not so much to share information and ideas on this amongst the “cognoscente” as we are now doing, but to create a broad constituency of public support for the very simple idea that within 10 years it should be a perfectly normal function of any society to see that all its people are able to eat healthily.  

Achieving this goal may, like Brazil’s Zero Hunger, require 30 or 40 well-coordinated component programmes involving, food production, nutrition, education, social protection and so on – but that is for the technical people to work out and the more that communicators are drawn into the details, the less successful they will be in creating needed support for the major policy changes this goal implies.

Perhaps members of the Forum could be invited by our Secretariat to work together in advocating this idea in the run-up to ICN2, using the wide range of different tools available to them.

Too down to earth?

Best wishes,

Andrew

Co ops etc, hijacked by people in power, forced members to suffer losses made by them - Government of India intervened and legislated in the Indian Cos' Act, through Amendment IX A, in Dec 2002, putting in place the Producer Company (PC) - the rest is now history!

Name of your organization, country

Devarao Shivaram Trust, India

Your role

Trustee

What type of FSN information do you currently use for decision making?

Outputs posted

How do you give feedback to information producers and advise them of your information needs?

Keeping focus on the fact that ‘Public funds are for Public Good’ and for meeting the needs of the  poor and for their long term sustainability

Do intermediaries (media, individuals, etc.) play an important role in delivering useful FSN information to you?

E consultation contributions

In your own words , tell your success story  or describe challenges you face!

I asked myself the Q; How can I give back my 50 years experience and having made it as a successful entrepreneur!

Looking out of the aircraft window and seeing farming communities, mostly resource poor, illiterate, isolated, not even having access to a road, fending for themselves. I came to the conclusion that these out of sight out of mind entrepreneurs needed support, assistance and direction as they were not on the Government/ NARES’ rudder, if they are to  come out of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, deep debt  and for us to manage the effects of climate change.

Having access to FAO, IFAD, WFP, whilst in Rome, I pursued the concept of farmers setting up their orgs, but soon realized that the money bags, large farmers/ corporations took control of the management and at the cost of the illiterate resource poor  smallholder members, as they continued to be poor, malnourished and in debt. Having had a similar experience as a member of a Club during the 1980's, where elected members also managed by farming out portfolios among   themselves and bleeding the institution. Some of us members intervened, when we received the annual accounts showing a loss. Some of got together and cleaned out those committee members whose families had become permanent fixtures, replacing them with members having integrity and ensurring professionals were hired to manage This experience encouraged me to extend this intervention to the rural poor communities following low cost agro eco systems of their area.

In 1999 I discussed this intervention with and persuaded friends in FAO to consider a pilot project for implementation in the South Asia region, funded by IFAD. Thus a beginning had been made to facilitate rural producers to set up their producer org/ company (PC), assisted by the NGO/ CSO working with them, also to hire professionals (general practitioners [GPs]/ MBAs in agriculture) to take over all risks and responsibilities, other than on farm activities, to manage the ’Cash to Cash Cycle’ of each of its members, a successful model being: www.navajyoti.org.

A similar situation was being faced by the milk co operatives in Gujrat, India, around the same time and they had persuaded the Government of India to get Parliament to pass a bill for democratisation of the co ops, resulting amendment IX A of the Indian Co’s Act - setting up of Producer Company.

Ministry of Agriculture has now issued guidelines for a National programme to fund and support producers for setting up PCs, as all future funding and support from Government will be delivered through the PC (not possible for them to deal with millions of producers).

Prof Dr Amar KJR Nayak's paper of March 2014 in support is attached.

What recommendations would you give to producers of FSN information wishing to improve the uptake and relevance of their information for decision making?

FSN has focussed on meeting smallholder producer communities' needs, must ensure that that all e consultation facilitators focus on this and not leave grey areas in their outputs, being then filled by the business usual agenda of the system pushing for their mandates and TORs,   promoting high cost conventional agri systems, the cause of the deep distress among 80% of the rural poor smallholder producer communities, if we are serious about achieving the goals set by the UN from time to time.

Any other comments?

Change in Mandates of Government NARES, Global Institutions and their TORs, is urgently required to reverse the top down being o a bottom up approach, converting the high cost conventional back to the roots/ low cost smallholder friendly agro ecological systems of each area.

Dear FNS moderator,

I share a lesson learnt from FNS policy development process in Afghanistan. Lesson learnt from my country food and nutrition security policy development process and implementation indicate that inclusive consensus and collaboration of main stake holders on key FNS issues, good ownership, political support and feasible implementation policies are key issues. Over one third of population of this country is food insecure and there is dire need of FNS policy document. National priority program 2 (food for life) that is part of 22 NPP in the country is developed and well owned by government and currently implemented in the country. On the other hand, non-government entities started to produce policy documents that resulted in development of two documents on nutrition and food security, one document with more focus on nutrition and another document having more focus on food security objectives while the two documents overlap each other on sharing aspects of food security and nutrition. However, the process of development of policies somehow moved in isolation from each in real term and involvement of relevant government and CSO materialized not as being the owner the document but for the sake of agreeing to the process. Now the two documents are still not being seriously considered to be implemented by government due to disagreements on one hand and overlaps of strategic objectives on the other hand and thus decision making is challenged and the document process outcome is not clear yet. In summary the process was prescript rather than based on needs and demand of national government.

Best Regards

Akbar Shahristani

Mohamed Ajuba Sheriff wrote that working together with SUN could help harmonize efforts of the different ministries and partners involved in FSN policy making.

Indeed, larger initiatives can serve as intermediaries to help you reach policy makers.

Well, the purpose of the recent consultation is policy outreach, no? SUN is an initiative with uncontrolled active corporate inputs. Not too difficult to imagine what type of policies they are likely to be pushing.   The many conflict of interest issues in SUN has NOT been resolved and SUN refuses to respond to CS concerns on this. A bogus consultancy was set up with Gates funds that totally misrepresented the conflict of interes issues SUN has been challenged for.

 So, Mohamed, larger initiatives yes, but SUN no.

Claudio

cschuftan@phmovement .org

Chers modérateurs,

Il est important de faire des clarifications relatives à l"INFORMATION sur "la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition". 

Car, la compréhension de nombreuses personnes est la suivante. Tous les programmes/projets dans le secteur agricole sont du domaine de la sécurité alimentaire et de la nutrition. En terme clair, il ne peut avoir d'actions spécifiques pour "la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition". 

Cette attitude de nombreux cadres de l'Administration et des Bailleurs a été pour moi et pour quelques rares personnes averties le premier et TRÈS GROS obstacle à lever dans les processus d'analyse et de planification au niveau macro. Ce n'est que tout récemment que TRÈS TIMIDEMENT un certain changement est apparu.

Mondé H.M. Prosper

Dear Moderator,

Having worked with small-scale  farmers in Africa that are often resource and information constrained, one of their major concerns has been the issue of TRUST. Too often farmers say, promises regarding policies that are enacted by agricultural ministries are simply “empty promises”.  In good faith, farmers take on board the new policy suggestions to diversify or to grow more legumes. They allocate land that is slowly diminishing in size for these supposedly better initiatives that will lead to enhanced food and nutrition security. They expend and exert their energy, already in limited supply on these “new policies” . In the end it is like the emperor’s new clothes – empty and naked policies. What we have seen happening:

• When the harvest is ready, there are no systems in place for purchasing the abundant harvest
• If there is a collection of the harvest it is made with a promise of later payment. Which small-scale farmer can afford a deferred late payment?
• The payment is delayed for eons, because the government or those that encouraged the farmers to grow these crops do not have the means to pay them
• Those that are short changed once again are the small-scale farmers whose margins for dealing with such outcomes are non-existent

How can we as implementers of these policies, together with those that craft these policies, be more TRUSTWORTHY. That in my opinion is the weakest link. Without being more trustworthy in the delivery and implementation of our policies, not much will work at the local country level.

Kind regards

Linley

I share the case study of Project IssAndes (www.issandes.org) about using advocacy and public awareness activities to spread the agriculture and nutrition approach in different publics.

The case is in spanish. 

Feedback by the facilitators

While the discussions have brought up many important points, it would be good to go back to the original purpose of this forum: ie. identify approaches and strategies that worked in terms of reaching policy makers and perhaps even resulting in action.

Have a look at the list below and let us know if you have used any of them and what the outcome was. What were your lessons learned? What other approaches have you used that are not on the list?

Successful approaches mentioned in the discussion included:

1.Participatory workshops, writeshops and other inclusive approaches

Florence Egal gave an example of participatory nutrition workshops where both decision makers and different population groups agree on the causes of malnutrition and how to tackle them, providing policy makers with practice-based evidence they can act upon.

Denise Melvin mentioned Writeshops where policy makers (or other users of the information) prepare policy briefs together with the producers of information (for example, food security analysts). Together they look at the information at and jointly prepare recommendations.

2.  Joining forces with other NGOs/CSOs and preparing a joint White Paper for an important conference

Subhash Mehta wrote about how several CSOs and NGOs prepared a white paper for the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) 1. He noted that “… I am happy that our effort has put the smallholder producer communities’ AR4D needs on top of the table…”

Indeed, joining forces with like minded organizations increases the chances your report will be read and used. While policy makers may or may not be at a technical conference, it is a good way of getting your key messages into the policy debate.

3. Leveraging larger initiatives such as the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Initiative

Mohamed Ajuba Sheriff wrote that working together with SUN could help harmonize efforts of the different ministries and partners involved in FSN policy making.

Indeed, larger initiatives can serve as intermediaries to help you reach policy makers.

4. Reaching Policy Makers directly is only really possible if you are part of the same project or organization

Santosh Kumar Mishra comments that policy makers can communicate their information needs to information producers only if they are part of the same project or organization.

5. Round Table Approach:  bringing together key stakeholders to assess the food security situation and decide on actions – especially in emergencies

Kodjo Dokodjio wrote that “In my country, during natural calamities where crops or harvest have been destroyed, causing food insecurity, a stakeholder’s round table is often organized including information producers, decision makers and donors. In these emergency cases, decision makers inform information producers of the type of indicators or information they need to address the situation. It is necessary to underline that in this case the FSN information produced and used by the decision makers influences policy making and remains clear.”

A few years ago FAO organized a series of workshops on “Producing Food Security Information Products that Result in Action”. The workshops brought together producers and users of food security information so that users/policy makers could give advice on how to improve existing food security information products. To learn more about these successful workshops see: http://www.foodsec.org/web/newsevents/training/trainingtopic/en/#18702

6. Education Programmes

Lal Manavado wrote that “perhaps, it is time to try an indirect approach, at least as an adjunct to the inclusive approach… Public education can play a role in having public put pressure on policy makers.”

However, we wonder who funds and decides on the key messages for these programmes. Does anyone have any experience in helping to influence policy change through public education? What role can the media play ?

Denise, Renata and Cordelia

The major problem with sub saharan policy makers is that they do not implicate all sectors of the population during policy formulation. But they expect these to be respected by the local population. Secondly those who are in charge of inforcing such policies are unaware of their existence. Glaring examples exist in Cameroon when it comes to differentiating between wild NTFPs (Non-Forest Food Products) and domestic NTFPs. 

Most often in the phase of tragedy like the suspension of certain NTFPs by CITES, the government rush into conforming to CITES rules and regulations just for this ban to be lifted. Most government officials think of their immediate benefit and not that of the general public and the environment.

Dear Moderators and Forum Members,

The topic on the present online discussion about policy outreach and communication on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) is of high importance, as the outcome decision making remains on the pertinence and information reliability. All depends on how policy outreach or communication is worked out, the approach used. Method used to produce FSN information is quite important as it influences policy making.

Policy outreach or communication on FSN comes from different sources: journalistic information, sociology information, statistical information and so on. But there is correlation between these sources of information.

Among the different sources of policy outreach or communication on FSN, the one I best know and work is statistics information on FSN. 

Policy outreach or communication at statistical level to improve FSN information is based on indicators worked from the field. In my country, during events such as flood, draught and other natural calamities where crops or harvest have been destroyed, causing food insecurity, a stakeholder’s  round table is often organized including information producers, decision makers and donors. In these emergency cases, decision makers inform information producers the type of indicators or information they need to address the situation. It is necessary to underline that in this case the FSN information produced and used by the decision makers influences policy making and remains clear.

Policy outreach or communication on FSN, not in emergency case is the one worked every year through Current Survey System (CSS)  by the statistical service of the country where the national agricultural production is measured and from which a Food Balance Sheet (FBS) is worked out and mapped to highlight food shortage and food surplus zones. Information is then communicated for decision making. The outcome of the communication is that food from the surplus areas or regions of the country is driven to the food insecure zones.

Other policy outreach and communication on FSN derive from Census of Agriculture (CA). Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), Questionnaire Unifié des Indicateurs de Base de Bien-être (QUIBB) and so on.

Best regards

Kodjo Dokodjo