For the remaining years of the Decade, with others, I think much will need change:
- Better late than never, HR --as indivisible-- are to progressively (but quickly) become the framework of the Decade so as to truly be bindingly addressing the root causes of malnutrition.
- PPPs and multistakeholder platforms (such as SUN) in the food and nutrition sector are to be placed on hold until reviewed under a new optic focused on CoI.
- An up-to-date comprehensive assessment of current international trade and investment regimes and their norms and policies is needed so as to ensure that they do not limit states’ ability to perform their sovereign duty bearer responsibilities.
- Greater progress towards achieving the WHO NCDs Action Plan must be demanded from UN member states and from the private sector. (…not just by reformulating junk food!).
- Nutrition education needs to be reconsidered to encompass a wider focus more based on the basic/structural causes of worrisome nutrition outcomes. Basically, how we train nutritionists and health workers to work with policy makers and with communities needs to be changed with a more bottom-up approach creating enabling environments for change rather than focusing on behavior change communication.
- An independent assessment of the impact of the private sector on nutrition policies and funding needs to be commissioned including the impact of the private sector’s role in CODEX ALIMENTARIUS and in the global and national SUN programs.
- Food safety interventions will need more emphasis including the thorny issue of antimicrobials use in animal husbandry.
- More emphasis is needed on all water and sanitation (WASH) issues and on violence and discrimination against women and girls.
- The protection, promotion and support of breastfeeding and complementary feeding desperately calls for a much higher positioning in the nutrition action agenda.
- As accountability must be much more centered on legitimate national and multilateral institutions, the direct participation of rights holders in all issues of nutrition governance --thus protecting the public policy space from undue influence by powerful economic actors-- has become un-postponable.
- Given the need to move away from unsustainable food systems based on agro-industrial food production, any further promotion of them is for us, unacceptable. So are unfair international trade and investment regimes and their responsibility in eco-destruction --all linked to climate change.
- Product-based approaches (e.g., vitamin capsules, RUTF,) must be limited and exclusively targeted to those that actually require them.
- Member states will have to pay more than lip service to sovereign local food systems and to traditional knowledge and native seeds based on biodiversity --and only accept participatory decision-making on these issues.
- Consumer protection against the ever-increasing influx of ultraprocessed foods will require a manifold increased mobilization of consumers as rights holders to demand the needed changes and regulations. This goes hand-in-hand with demands for subsidizing healthy foods, especially in ‘food deserts’.
- Finally, UN member states are to set participatory annual national benchmarks of progress commensurate with the allocation of adequate resources. It is in this spirit, that what remains of the Decade will eventually become a “People’s Decade of Action on Nutrition”.
All the above will require WHO and FAO, as well as Northern external funders and member states, to change the steering and implementation of the Decade in a more holistic and HR-based manner. The question is, can they? will they? Adherence to Extraterritorial HR Obligations will be key here as well.
The experience from other past UN 'decades' has not been too good. We need to do better --therein the challenge. Significant difference will only come from public interest CSOs and social movements pushing member states to commit to action plans and then hold them accountable for the same on a year-to-year basis.
Critical is to refocus the decade on the HR framework clearly identifying rights holders and duty bearers and doing an analysis of what their respective expected roles are. A massive HR learning process will be the only thing that will lead to this. A process of empowerment of rights holders to organize, mobilize and demand needed changes is key. Without this, we can anticipate little happening or just token steps to save face in front of the international community. Moreover, it is not for us to, top-down, decide priorities! It is for the rights holders suffering violations of their right to food and nutrition to lead in deciding priority actions!
The next five years boil down to a push or pull question. Only pulling from the rights holders side will move the Decade ahead. UN and other international agencies can do little to push member states to commit. History is clear about this. Forget about private sector actors being involved in empowering rights holders: it is counterintuitive to them.... This is why so many of us are skeptical about the SUN Initiative with its clearly visible CoI. As said, public interest CSOs have the crucial role in monitoring progress made in the progressive realization of ten year plans to fulfill the right to food and nutrition. Annual benchmarks of processes-set-in-motion have to be set so that CSOs can assess progress, stagnation or retrogression on an annual basis with something like shadow reports.
If shy of all this, we will be discussing the same shortcomings by the end of the Decade.
The full paper can be obtained from the External Affairs Secretary of WPHNA
Dr. Claudio Schuftan