VERTICAL PARTNERSHIPS
I am concerned that the approach discussed here does not give sufficient attention to what people at the community level could do for themselves. More attention should be given to what higher level agencies could do to facilitate those local initiatives. As Florence Egal put it, “Given the mandate of both FAO and WHO, the focus on national policies is logical. But unless we include explicitly the sub-national level we will not be in a position to address sustainably all forms of malnutrition.”
Top-down approaches tend to weaken and disempower those working at ground level. This is not a matter of simply favoring bottom-up approaches over top-down approaches. It is about figuring out how to work out an appropriate “division of labor” between agencies at different levels. Based on the principle of subsidiarity, higher level agencies should not do and decide things that ought to be done and decided at lower levels.
There is a need for discussion about how to work out the division of labor. Agencies at the higher levels should shift from designing interventions based solely on their understandings of both the problems and solutions, and move more toward facilitating analyses and action by those at lower levels. These should be partnership arrangements, with learning going on at all levels.
George Kent
ASPIRATIONS versus GOALS
This is a comment on the first draft of the Work Programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition, 2016-2025, accessed at https://www.unscn.org/uploads/web/news/First-draft-Work-programme-Nutrition-Decade.pdf
The draft confuses long-term aspirations and concrete goals. Aspirations are about moving toward something, while goals are about actually getting to some well-defined destination by a specific time.
Paragraph 2 says that at the second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), “the global community committed to eliminate malnutrition in all its forms . . .” That is a good aspiration, but as presented in this draft, the actual plan is to reduce malnutrition in all its forms, not eliminate it. Eliminating all forms of malnutrition is not a realistic goal.
Paragraph 1 points out that there are many forms of malnutrition: “undernutrition, vitamin and mineral deficiency, overweight or obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).” Grouping them all together could lead to very diffuse assignments of responsibility, limiting the potential for holding any agencies accountable with regard to goal achievement. In pooling these issues together, there is a risk that resources would be shifted to favor goals that are achieved more easily, reducing attention to ones that are more important.
The FAO and the Committee on World Food Security generally focus on food insecurity, roughly equivalent to undernutrition or hunger. Given its great importance, a serious commitment and plan could be formulated to eliminate this one form of malnutrition by a specific date, while calling on the global community to reduce the other forms of malnutrition.
Accepting this would mean retaining the sentence in Paragraph 3 that speaks about ending hunger by 2030, but modifying the following sentence so that it speaks about reducing other forms of malnutrition.
With this approach, it would be useful to establish separate lines of responsibility for the ending part of the overall agenda, and others for the reducing parts. Different UN agencies could be designated to take the lead for different parts.
This would be a radical change in the Work Programme. It would lead to a far more serious approach to addressing the challenge of widespread and persistent hunger.
If the consensus is that ending hunger is not a realistic goal, that should be said and it should be explained. Speaking as if it is a realistic goal when key actors are convinced it is not would be unfair to all concerned.
George Kent
Professor Emeritus,
Department of Political Science
University of Hawai'i
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822
USA
Author, Caring About Hunger
http://www.lulu.com/shop/george-kent/caring-about-hunger/paperback/product-22919316.html
Greetings –
Here are a few thoughts on Draft 14.03.16 of Urbanization and Rural Transformation Implications for Food Security and Nutrition and the comments that have been made about it.
In the Draft the paragraph on human rights on p. 5 speaks about several ways in which people’s well-being might suffer, but the relationship of these things to human rights is not explained. There is no follow-up in the document on the human rights theme.
On p. 8 the Draft says, “achieving food security and nutrition will require solutions targeting both rural and urban poor.” The targeting perspective means outsiders will provide the answers, and there will be “interventions”. This top-down orientation to dealing with food security issues can be very disempowering to those who are supposed to benefit from this work.
There is a need for discussion about how the local people themselves might themselves be important agents of change. The Draft does discuss the engagement of people in local communities, on p. 16, for example. However, it tends to see local people as subordinates in projects that come from outside, rather than seeing them as formulating and implementing their own programs of action.
The leaders of local communities have more potential impact on local food and nutrition security than anyone in Rome or Geneva or in their country’s capital. The higher-level agencies should do more to facilitate local leaders in their work. Global and national people could work with local leaders to formulate guidelines for local management of community food systems. Working out those guidelines could be a wonderful learning process for all who are involved.
The discussion of data (p. 15) is oriented toward providing information to national governments and international agencies so that they can make better decisions. Attention should also be given to ways in which data collection and analysis could be used to empower local leaders. (I discuss this in the section on Nutrition Status Information in a chapter on “Building Nutritional Self Reliance,” available at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/BuildingNutritionalSelfReliance.pdf)
I agree with Dr. Hampel-Milagrosa’s message on April 1 about the importance of poverty as a cause of food insecurity. However, it is important to recognize that food security is not only a matter of economics. Food security also depends on social relations. Some people exploit others, and some people routinely support their neighbors. In stable, strong communities, where people look after one another’s well-being, no one goes hungry. We should work with that insight. There are many communities in which there is little money but the people are well nourished. Unfortunately, the importance of social relationships is not recognized in analyses that come from the top. There is no hint of it in the annual reports on The State of Food Insecurity in the World.
Some of the contributors to this discussion want to preserve smallholder agriculture in rural areas. They suggest various technological innovations, but recognize that there are many impediments. It is important to also consider social innovations, different ways of organizing food production, processing, marketing, etc. To illustrate, many large farms are organized as industrial operations, with one owner and many poorly paid laborers, operating in ways that exploit both people and the environment. More attention should be given to alternatives, such as organizing farms as cooperatives, with all workers having a share in ownership and decision-making. These different organizational models will have different impacts on local food security.
On March 23, 2016 Dr. Eileen Omosa pointed out that with better technology and better links to urban markets, the food security of rural households could be harmed. The seemingly inefficient smallholders often are important providers of food for the local non-farming poor, and those poor people are likely to be bypassed when the local farmers find ways to sell to richer people. Florence Egal also highlighted this point on April 1.
Dr. Omosa and Florence Egal also discussed the huge problem of land-grabbing by the rich, often undermining local food security. Where I live, much of the agricultural land is now controlled by seed producers who export the seeds and contribute nothing to the local food supply. That is land grabbing, not different from the earlier land grabbing for pineapple and sugar plantations.
Several people spoke about novel ways of producing food such as urban agriculture, vertical agriculture, rooftop gardens, etc. Poor people might not have the resources needed to do such things. There should be some discussion of what would ensure that the food would go to people who need it but have little money.
On March 29 Florence Egal pointed out, “Overall the draft as it stands has by and large adopted a classical supply-driven value chain approach” and suggested it might be useful to focus more explicitly on food consumption and food systems.” I fully agree.
One way to get into that would be to set aside global and national perspectives, and instead explore the issue at the community level.
The Draft focuses on urban and rural areas. It tries to cover many different kinds of situations. Perhaps this Global Forum could launch a follow-up discussion in which the primary unit of analysis is the community, the settings in which people live and relate to one another face-to-face. In many places this is the lowest level of governance. It is the setting in which local people can have the greatest influence.
Imagine that we are on the planning committee for designing a brand new community on a designated bit of land. That committee would have to talk about many things: the physical arrangements of houses and roads, the placement of farms and gardens, where shops would be placed, energy supply, waste disposal, recreation facilities, and so on. As part of that work the committee would have to plan the community’s food system, taking account of the geophysical character of the space and also the types of residents expected to live there. What would we propose? How could our favorite ideas be applied in this very specific place?
The planning committee could advise the community to create a Food Policy Council that would set up and oversee the local food system. What advice and guidelines would you include in its charter? This thought-experiment would be a difficult design challenge, but it would be easier to understand and easier to implement than trying to fix established large-scale food systems.
My question is, how should community food systems be designed? That should be the starting point for our thinking about how national, regional and global food systems should be designed.
George Kent
Greetings –
International food trade can contribute to the food security of those who are well off, but it tends to work against the interests of poor people who are not food producers and the small-scale producers who are not selling into the major markets. Thus trade is not a good means for ending hunger.
Some people think of the commodity-based global food system as if it were the only one, but for many people there are separate local food systems that have little connection with the global one. Small local farms, often dismissed as “inefficient”, play a crucial role in providing low-cost foods to the local poor. If those small local farms are consolidated, and made more “efficient”, perhaps under the ownership of outsiders, they are likely to ship their products out to people with money, whether in the same country or abroad. The local poor are bypassed.
Also, new large scale-farms are likely to do much more harm to the local environment than the agro-ecology that is traditionally practiced on small local farms.
Food exports from poor countries produce benefits for local people, but the distribution of those benefits is likely to be highly skewed, with much of the benefit going to outsiders, the local rich, and the government, not to those who work in the fields, and not to local non-farmers.
Many poor countries see trade agreements as increasing their vulnerability to exploitation by powerful outsiders. They become especially vulnerable when the agreements prohibit making any restrictions on imports. Powerful outsiders can easily displace local producers.
In the case of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, it was clear from the outset that small-scale corn producers in Mexico would be hurt as a result of massive imports of subsidized corn from the United States into Mexico. The pressure to open domestic markets to foreign suppliers often means the flooding of domestic markets with food from outside. Local food producers cannot compete with the imports, with the result that their incomes plummet, destroying their food security.
The division between international trade advocates and its critics can be understood in terms of two connected points: markets are beneficial mainly to the rich and powerful; and strategies of self-sufficiency are beneficial mainly to the poor and weak.
This explains why the strongest advocates of free trade are the rich, and the strongest advocates of self-sufficiency are the poor and their friends. Strategies of self-sufficiency protect the weak from potentially exploitative relationships with those who are stronger.
Richer countries promote trade in a way that suggests it would be beneficial to all, but it would not be equally beneficial, and it certainly would not favor the poor. Trade tends to provide its greatest benefits to those who are more powerful. It contributes to the widening of the gap between rich and poor. The market system promotes the flow of food and wealth toward money and power, not toward need.
One way to protect the vulnerable would be to ensure that all parties have a clear voice in deciding what would be good for them. If small-scale corn producers in Mexico had a seat at the negotiating table, they might not have been overrun by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It is possible to add elements to trade agreements to protect the vulnerable. Rather than relying on the market alone to improve living conditions for the poor, trade agreements could include non-market measures such as social safety nets that protect and improve their living conditions. Those who are confident that the safety nets for the poor will not be needed should have no hesitation about providing them, as a kind of insurance.
Packaging trade proposals together with protective programs of this kind might increase the likelihood that poor communities would support them.
Aloha, George Kent
I would like to offer comments on the Zero Draft: Agenda for Action for Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises (CFSA-4A) of February 2014.
(1) It should be recognized that sustained, intense, and widespread food insecurity or malnutrition is in itself a form of protracted crisis.
(2) The work of the UN’s Committee on World Food Security and other global agencies on this issue should be harmonized with that of leading national providers of international humanitarian assistance. The emerging global policy of the U.S. with regard to nutrition is discussed at http://www.globalhealth.gov/global-health-topics/non-communicable-diseases/trending-topics/draftframeworkforusgglobalnutritioncoordinationplan.html
(3) Paragraph 10 of the Zero Draft suggests that it is in the interests of everyone to address the problems of protracted food insecurity and malnutrition. That is not true. Some people, such as those who employ low-wage laborers, benefit from the persistence of food insecurity and malnutrition, since food insecure people work cheaply. Similarly, many consumers benefit from being able to purchase goods at low prices because they are produced by low-wage laborers.
(4) Item 31(vi) speaks about the absence of good governance, and points out the need to establish mechanisms for ensuring that obligations are respected. Apparently this refers to the national level, but the same could be said regarding the challenge of global governance.
(5) Regarding the preceding point, item 16 in the Zero Draft asserts that the principles set out in CFS-A4A are voluntary and non-binding. Nevertheless, the principles should recognize the need for recognition of clear extra-territorial rights and obligations with regard food insecurity in protracted crises. I discuss this in “Rights and Obligations in International Humanitarian Assistance.” Encyclopedia of Natural Hazards. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2013, pp. 851-855. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/RightsObligationsinIHA.pdf The essay has been republished in Disaster Management and Prevention, 2014, Vol. 23, No. 3. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/DPMRightsandObligationsinIHA.pdf
(6) Item 32(i) articulates the idea that national governments are primarily responsible for the food security and nutrition of their own people. It should be recognized that trade and other externally-oriented policies of both high- and low-income countries tend to undermine this concept. In international food trade, on balance the poor feed the rich.
(7) Item 33(i) speaks about the need to examine the underlying causes of food insecurity and malnutrition. This might be asking too much of this initiative. Instead, it might be better to conceptualize the strategy for dealing with the problem of food security in protracted crises as one of establishing a global food security safety net that deals mainly with symptoms, not underlying causes. Urgent needs should be addressed immediately, as recognized in FAO’s Twin Track approach. Other global programs can address the underlying causes. Focusing this effort on the idea of establishing a global safety net seems likely to result in a more effective program of action.
George Kent
University of Hawai‘i (Emeritus)
In the attached essay I call on the CFS to give attention to the food security of infants and young children, with a view to establishing new global regulations for processed baby foods and other measures.
The document is also available at
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/FOODSECURITYOFINFANTS.docx
Aloha, George Kent
Greetings –
At the beginning of this discussion, on 16.04.2014, I reflected on the similarities and differences between care farming and caring communities. Care farming is an expression of the broader caring that is found in strong communities.
There has been a rich exchange since then, so I would like to offer a few more observations.
We should give attention to possibilities for farming that is undertaken to produce farm products needed by particular groups. For example, one might imagine farms that are devoted to raising crops that would help to meet nutrient deficiencies that are important in the local area.
Some farms could be devoted to raising crops specifically to meet needs of young children for complementary foods, as they wean from their breastmilk diets. This would fit nicely with Kanchan Lama ‘s 17.04.2014 call for child care to allow women to be fully involved in farming. Instead of working on farms that serve the general community, perhaps they could work on farms that focus on producing crops that are of special interest to women, especially those who are pregnant or new mothers. Child care could be provided at the farm site, thus making it easier for mothers to breastfeed. Facilities could be provided to enable the women to meet together to discuss their concerns about child feeding, as they do in La Leche League meetings that are common in high income countries. They could also discuss how the farmed products should be prepared for their young children.
That sort of arrangement would ensure better child care than that illustrated in the photo provided by Hajnalka Petrics on 24.04.2014.
On 23.04.2014 PV Hariharan asked, what is empowerment? I suggest: Empowerment is the increasing capacity of individuals and communities to define, analyze, and act on their own problems. Empowerment can be facilitated by outsiders, and there are also possibilities for self-empowerment, based on local initiatives.
Using this concept, we could say that care farming is empowering if it increases its beneficiaries’ capacity to care for themselves. David Nkwanga provided a good example on 23.04.2014, when he explained the Nature Palace foundation helps children and youth with disabilities obtain the skills and other resources needed to engage in profitable market gardening.
On 24.04.2014 Gina Seilern provided some links to studies about well-being and its determinants. It does include references to the importance of social connections, but it does not speak specifically about caring, the desire to act to benefit others.
It would be interesting if some of the specialists on well-being were to focus their attention on the well-being of communities. They could then explore how the quality of life of individuals depends on the quality of their communities.
On 28.04.2014 Mildred Crawford shared the experience she and others in her country have had in sharing food, farming skills and other resources with others for free. These relationships, usually informal, probably are far more widespread than anyone has recognized. These are expressions of deep caring at the community level, something that seems to be invisible to most economists and government officials. More should be done to recognize and understand these relationships.
Aloha, George
CARE FARMING AND CARING COMMUNITIES
Care farming is a wonderful concept, based on that most human instinct, the desire to take action to benefit others. However, in much of the discussion of care farming, the assumption is that the caring goes from strong parties to weaker parties, from those who supply the caring to those who need the caring. The approach emphasizes the business opportunities in providing care to those who need it
However, in well-functioning communities, there is a great deal of caring that is not undertaken to produce incomes for those who provide the care. There is mutual caring, with no distinction between those who provide care and those who receive it. Most caring is driven by the desire to establish good human relationships. Strong caring communities function like large families. With sustained mutual caring of this sort, there is likely to be much less need for the unilateral kind of caring.
I would like to share two essays-in-progress that might help to provide context for this discussion on care farming and, more broadly, on the ways in which food systems might help to strengthen the caring. Ending Hunger in Caring Communities, available at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/EndingHungerinCaringCommunities.docx argues that hunger in the world would be sharply reduced if communities were more caring. The second essay, On Caring, available at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/OnCaring.pdf probes more deeply into the meaning of caring in various contexts.
Aloha, George Kent
The zero draft does not give sufficient attention to growing threats to the food security and nutrition of childen in emerging economies. I have essayed on this in The Food Security of Infants and Young Children. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/FOODSECURITYOFINFANTS.docx A copy is attached here.
Aloha, George Kent
Greetings –
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Eileen Omosa for opening this discussion of the role of social relations in establishing food security. I think the quality of the community in which individuals and families are embedded can have a big impact on food security, especially for people with low incomes.
Historically, there was a long period when cash income was of little importance. People lived close to the earth, and close to their communities. As Karl Polanyi pointed out, in what we sometimes describe as “primitive” communities, no one went hungry unless everyone was going hungry. That pattern continues today, in what some describe as “pre-modern” communities.
In recent work on this issue (current draft available at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/EndingHungerLocally.docx and also attached here) I highlight the importance of caring and social support systems not only in reducing hunger where it exists, but also in preventing it from ever happening. My observations are summarized in three major points:
There is little likelihood that the hunger problem can be solved through market activities based on narrow self-interest. Caring is essential. It must be recognized and nurtured.
Aloha, George Kent
Shambhu Ghatak has given us some interesting views on the costs of hunger and the status of India’s Integrated Child Development Service. I would like to offer alternative perspectives on these two themes.
I appreciate the many efforts to assess the human and economics costs of hunger. However, to understand its persistence, we need to recognize that while hunger produces great disadvantages for some people it also produces great advantages for others. I discuss this in:
“The Benefits of World Hunger.” UN Chronicle, Vol. XLV, No. 2/3 (2008), p. 81. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/BenefitsofWorldHunger.pdf
Regarding India’s ICDS, I agree that it provides important benefits for India’s children, but it falls far short of meeting the needs. I offer thoughts on how it might be managed to be more effective, in:
“ICDS: Steering an Ungainly Ship.” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLVII, No. 37, September 15, 2012. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/ICDS_Steering_an_Ungainly_Ship.pdf
Aloha, George
Greetings –
I am delighted to see this discussion of Social Protection to Protect and Promote Nutrition. It has been very good, but there is a point that deserves more attention: the first layer of social protection normally should be the informal protection provided by the local community. Social protection by governments of various levels is needed mainly when there is no effective local community.
Here is how I described this in Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food, beginning at p. 98. The book is available as a no-cost download at http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/freedom-want
“In some ways, all of us are vulnerable. We face threats to our families, our freedoms, and our resources. We aspire to take care of ourselves, but at times we need support from others. Thus we do not live as hermits, but as social beings who provide support to and draw support from the people around us. We aspire to a measure of self-sufficiency, but we are vulnerable, especially at the beginning of the life cycle and at the end.
Consider the example of children, those who are in training for independence. As highly dependent beings, small children need to have others take care of them. Who should be responsible for children? The first line of responsibility is with the parents, of course, but others have a role as well. In asking who is responsible, the question is not whose fault is it that children suffer so much (who caused the problems?) but who should take action to remedy the problems? Many different social agencies may have some role in looking after children. What should be the interrelationships among them? What should be the roles of churches, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and local and national governments?
Most children have two vigorous advocates from the moment they are born, and even before they are born. Their parents devote enormous resources to serving their interests. These are not sacrifices. The best parents do not support their children out of a sense of obligation or as investments. Rather, they support their children as extensions of themselves, as part of their wholeness.
In many cases, however, that bond is broken or is never created. Fathers disappear. Many mothers disappear as well. In some cities hundreds of children are abandoned each month in the hospitals in which they are born. Bands of children live in the streets by their wits, preyed upon by others. Frequently children end up alone as a result of poverty, disease, warfare or other sorts of crises. Many children are abandoned because they are physically or mentally handicapped. Some parents become so disabled by drugs or alcohol or disease that they cannot care for their children.
In many cases the failures are not the parents’ own fault, but a result of the fact that others have failed to meet their responsibility toward the parents. For example, there are cases in which parents are willing to work hard, and do whatever needs to be done to care for their children, but cannot find the kind of employment opportunities they need to raise their children adequately.
In some cases others look after children who cannot be cared for by their biological parents. In many cultures children belong not only to their biological parents but also to the community as a whole. The responsibility and the joy of raising children are widely shared.
In many places, especially in "developed" nations, that option is no longer available because of the collapse of the idea and the practice of community. Many of us live in nice neighborhoods in well-ordered societies, but the sense of community–of love and responsibility and commitment to one another–has vanished. In such cases the remaining hope of the abandoned child is the government, the modern substitute for community. People look to government to provide human services that the local community no longer provides.
As children mature the first priority is to help them become responsible for themselves. So long as they are not mature, however, children ought to get their nurturance from their parents. Failing that, they ought to get it from their relatives. Failing that, they ought to get it from their local communities. Failing that, they ought to get it from the local governments. Failing that, it should come from their national governments. Failing that, they ought to get it from the international community. The responsibility hierarchy looks something like this:
Child
Family
Community
Local Government
State Government
National Government
International Nongovernmental Organizations
International Governmental Organizations
. . . this can be pictured as a set of nested circles, with the child in the center of the nest, surrounded, supported, and nurtured by family, community, government, and ultimately, international organizations. Of course there are sometimes exceptions. For example, there are many cases in which central governments provide services to the needy directly, bypassing local government. Often this is based on an agreed division of labor, and an understanding that services are likely to be distributed more equitably if they are funded out of the central treasury. Similarly, some programs, such as immunization, cannot be completely managed locally. Nevertheless, the general pattern is that we expect problems to be handled locally, and reach out to more distant agents only when local remedies are inadequate.
This is straightforward. The idea that needs to be added is that in cases of failure, agents more distant from the child should not simply substitute for those closer to the child. Instead, those who are more distant should try to work with and strengthen those who are closer, in order to help them become more capable of fulfilling their responsibilities toward children. Agencies in the outer rings should help to overcome, not punish, failures in the inner rings. They should try to respond to failures in empowering, positive ways. To the extent possible, local communities should not take children away from inadequate parents but rather should help them in their parenting role. State governments should not replace local governments, but instead should support local governments in their work with children. The international community should help national governments in their work with children.
Government’s responsibilities with regard to ordinary children in ordinary circumstances should be limited. The family should provide daily care and feeding. However, for children in extreme situations who are abused or who suffer from extremely poor health or serious malnutrition, governments have a role to play. If there has been a failure in the inner rings of responsibility and no one else takes care of the problem, government must step in.
Empowerment--or development--means increasing one's capacity to analyze and act on one's own problems. Thus, empowerment is about gaining increasing autonomy, and decreasing one's dependence on others. The concept applies to societies as well as to individuals.
There are similar rings of responsibility for others who cannot care for themselves, such as victims of disasters, the physically disabled, and mentally ill. These responsibilities need to be clarified so that the care of those who are unable to care for themselves is not left to chance. Thus this framework may be used in relation to all individuals who need protection and support, and not only children.”
The main point here is that we should not just automatically assume that it is government, at various levels, that should solve our problems. We should first do what we can locally, with our own resources. Both local people and governments should do what they can to increase local communities’ capacity to take care of themselves. That is better than having governments function as substitutes for failed communities.
Aloha, George
Greetings –
The project on “Remuneration of Positive Externalities (RPE): Payments for Environmental Services (PES) in the Agricultural and Food Sectors” is very worthwhile because it leads to more complete accounting for resources and other concerns that had not been valued adequately.
As the title indicates, the focus is on environmental services. This should lead us to ask, what other externalities are there? Are there other important issues that should not be ignored?
For example, are there cultural resources in the communities of food producers and food consumers that ought to be recognized?
Educational services to farmers, both formal and informal, surely are important.
Should the ability to pass debt to future generations be recognized as an externality?
Should the services of regulatory agencies be recognized as external factors that really ought to be paid for? Aren’t they required in any comprehensive view of food systems?
If attention is given to the ways in which industrial modes of food production can lead to environmental depletion and pollution, shouldn’t attention also be given to the ways in which those modes of production tend to concentrate wealth?
Shouldn’t attention be given to the fact that modern agriculture preferentially serves high income consumers?
Oliver De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, argues that food systems ought to have three major objectives:
· First, food systems must ensure the availability of food for everyone, that is, supply must match world needs.
· Second, agriculture must develop in ways that increase the incomes of smallholders.
· Third, agriculture must not compromise its ability to satisfy future needs (De Schutter 2010).
Environmental services, one part of the third category, certainly are important, but they should be viewed in a broader context in which many different kinds of values are taken into account.
We have choices regarding how the products of agriculture ought to be valued. For a moment, imagine that agricultural produce was paid for on the basis of its nutritional value, its value in correcting inequities, and its value in protecting the physical environment. What would our food systems look like then? If these were the things we cared about deeply, the world would be a very different place.
Some methods used to take account of concerns about the physical environment might be adapted to take account of other types of issues that have been neglected. The first task would be to identify them. Then there is the need to weigh their importance.
We should also recognize the reality that different people would weigh the issues differently (Kent 1993). Often the environment is harmed because no one speaks for the environment. Similarly, hunger in the world persists partly because the hungry have little voice in deciding what should be regarded as important in modern agriculture.
Aloha, George Kent
FSN Friends –
As the opening statement by Juan Carlos García y Cebolla and Mauricio Rosales reminded us, The State of Food Insecurity in the World for 2012 shows that economic growth “can be a powerful driver for increased food security when translated into agricultural growth and in particular when it is inclusive and reaches smallholder farmers and women.”
This language acknowledges that the linkage between economic growth and increased food security is not tight. It depends on whether those in power are genuinely motivated to increase food security, especially among the poorest sections in the population. And it depends on the successful implementation of programs favoring the poor. Thus, as Juan Carlos and Mauricio have emphasized, their third question is particularly important:
"How can we mobilize the political will necessary to put policies for hunger reduction and improved nutrition higher on the list of political priorities?"
This challenge is especially difficult when the political will of the central government to end hunger is completely absent. However, where the will is present but weak, there are options. It might be possible to find means for addressing hunger that are not difficult or costly for the central government.
This approach could mesh nicely with ideas that emphasize local food sovereignty and self-reliance. Instead of thinking in terms of central governments providing food directly to needy people or organizing large-scale projects, the emphasis could shift to having the central government facilitate local initiatives.
To illustrate, central governments could encourage the creation of local food policy councils that would take initiatives to improve local food systems. This practice is already widespread in several high income countries. Central governments could also encourage local exchanges of information on farming practices, marketing, household food production, nutrition education, etc. The policies of central governments could shift to place greater emphasis on local rather than national food systems.
Many things could be done, at little cost, to encourage community-based nutrition security, so that people come to depend more on each other than on the central government. Many different kinds of food and nutrition projects could be implemented locally, and also managed locally, through programs that would build local capacities.
Food insecurity at the local level could be diagnosed, and ways might be found to strengthen communities so that serious nutrition problems do not arise. Rather than designing projects to fix problems, it might be possible to make changes in communities so that basic nutrition is no longer a problem. Achieving this would mean that the hunger problem has been attacked at its roots.
Aloha, George Kent
Greetings –
This discussion is on “Making agriculture work for nutrition: Prioritizing country-level action, research and support.” It is guided by positions taken by various international development institutions. Thus we have recognition of the national and global levels, but there is little articulation of the role of the local level in this framework. The local level is supposed to benefit from national and global action, but whether it has any role beyond that is not so clear. Sometimes it seems that the local level is simply expected to wait for instructions and benefits from above.
The concept of food sovereignty can be understood as referring to the localization of control in communities, based on increasing local self-reliance. In this perspective, the center of decision-making should be local. The higher levels should facilitate and support local decision makers in doing what they want to do, based in their own understandings of their interests. Under the principle of subsidiarity, the higher levels should serve the lower levels, and not the reverse.
There is room for debate about the wisdom of that food sovereignty approach. It could introduce what many would regard as inefficiencies in the system. However, the more critical questions are about who benefits, and who is harmed. Viewed globally, food is abundant, yet there are around a billion people who are food insecure, hungry. That certainly is a type of inefficiency.
We are asked, “What are the main approaches we collectively see as most important? What are some practical recommendations that can more effectively promote, support, and guarantee the integration of nutrition into agriculture and food security investments? What research is needed?”
People at ground level might ask how to establish stronger links between nutrition and agriculture, but they are not going to ask about it in terms of investments or research. Investments and research are likely to be under someone else’s control, and serve interests that are not the interests of the people at the ground. Why should the question be framed in terms of research and investments from above?
Maybe the linkage between nutrition and agriculture is something that should be built at ground level, not at the national and global levels.
Thinking about how these issues might look at ground level should lead us to reflect on how nutrition and agriculture got separated. After all, in pre-modern times, before the dominance of markets and before wealth accumulation became so important to so many, agriculture was undertaken to produce food, not wealth.
The separation can be illustrated by the shift from taro to rice production in Hawai'i in the 1860s. Taro and other foods were produced to meet people’s needs. One can eat just so much taro. Then settlers came along, and decided to produce rice for profit. Rice exports, mainly to California, reached more than 13 million tons in 1887. Long before that level was reached, the rapid displacement of taro by rice led the local newspaper to ask, “where is our taro to come from?” The disconnect between farming for food and farming for money became clear. The people whose taro supply was threatened were not the people who profited from rice exports.
If we are interested in restoring the linkage between agriculture and food, national and global agencies certainly should have a role, but maybe the main action should be at the local level, in the communities. The reconnection might come not from market forces but from the fact that people care about each other’s well being. If the purpose of communities’ food systems was to ensure that all their people were well nourished, we would have a world without hunger. There are now many people working to envision what constitutes a healthy food system, beginning at the local level.
If that makes sense, then the main role of agencies at national and global levels should be to do what they can to strengthen local communities, and ensure that people in those communities have the capacity and the motivation to take care of one another. This might look like a step backward toward pre-modern times, but maybe it is the right way to get beyond our flawed present to better post-modern times.
Aloha, George Kent
Greetings –
Here is a discussion of terminology from pp. 21-23 of my book, Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005. A no-cost download of the book is available at http://press.georgetown.edu/sites/default/files/978-1-58901-055-0%20w%20...
“FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY
Words like hunger and starvation have strong emotional impact, but are rarely used as technical terms by specialists in the field. There are no measures and no published data on starvation as such. The experts prefer to use terms such as food insecurity or malnutrition.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:
Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
Food security is concerned with questions relating to the food supply, but nutrition status depends not only on suitable food but also on good basic health services and, particularly for children, adequate care. Malnutrition generally results not from a lack of food in the community but from the skewed distribution of the food that is available. That skew results because some people are too poor or too powerless to make an adequate claim on the food that is available. . . .
The FAO equates food insecurity with the more popular concept of hunger. It also distinguishes between undernourishment and undernutrition. Undernourishment refers to an inadequate supply of food, and is assessed by estimating food supplies. Undernutrition, however, refers to the physiological consequences, and is assessed on the basis of anthropometric measures, that is, people's weights and heights. . . . [N]utrition status, as an outcome, results not only from the quality of food but also from the qualities of care and health services, as inputs. Food status is one major factor determining nutrition status. The other two major factors are care and health services. Thus, we can say that nutrition status depends on food status, care status, and health status.
There is now increasing attention to the concept of nutrition security. This term has been defined as the "appropriate quantity and combination of inputs such as food, nutrition an health services, and caretaker’s time needed to ensure an active and healthy life."
Food security focuses on the food component of nutrition security. Thus, food security and nutrition security are different. The FAO's Sixth World Food Survey showed that while food inadequacy is more prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia, the incidence of malnutrition (or, more precisely, undernutrition) based on anthropometric measures is higher in South Asia. The study suggests that the discrepancy is largely due to differences in disease patterns. Most life-threatening malnutrition occurs among children, but children do not require very large amounts of food. There can be widespread malnutrition in a population even while food security measures indicate the food situation is relatively good. Millions of children worldwide die each year as a result of diarrhea, for example, but this has little to do with the level of food supply in their communities or even in their households.
There are many different aspects or dimensions of human security. Food security is one component of nutrition security, together with health security and care security. . . .
The literature often fails to make a clear distinction between status and security. The understanding proposed here is based on the idea that, in its most general form, security means freedom from fear of harm. Particular kinds of security refer to freedom from fear of particular kinds of harms. Thus, physical security refers to freedom from fear of physical harm, environmental security means freedom from fear of environmental harm, and so on. In this understanding, status refers to current conditions, while security refers to anticipated conditions.
It would have been useful if FAO consistently used the term food inadequacy, rather than food insecurity, to describe the condition of inadequate food supplies when they are assessing conditions that are current at a given point in time, not conditions that are anticipated from that moment in time. This terminology would make it easier to distinguish between food status and food security.
Just as we can say that nutrition status depends on food status, care status, and health status, we can also say that nutrition security depends on food security, care security, and health security.
The distinction between nutrition status and nutrition security is particularly useful when assessing different kinds of interventions intended to respond to nutrition problems. Straightforward feeding programs may be very helpful in improving people's current nutrition status. However, they do nothing to improve their nutrition security. Such interventions respond to symptoms, and not to the underlying sources of the problem. Indeed, if people come to depend on such feeding programs, these programs may in fact weaken their nutrition security. In a perverse way, feeding programs, responding only to symptoms, may actually help to sustain problems, rather than end them. You don’t solve the hunger problem by feeding people.
Improving nutrition security would require introducing some sort of change in the local social and institutional arrangements, or providing training or tools or some other resources that could change things over the long run. Nutrition interventions should be assessed not so much on the basis of their immediate impact but on the impacts they are likely to have over the long run, long after the interventions have ended.
The difference between nutrition status and nutrition security may seem slight, but the significance is that the security concept takes account of the institutional measures that come into play. To illustrate, you are interested not only in whether your house is currently on fire, but also in whether there are adequate institutional arrangements in place to put out a fire if and when one should occur. Or, to offer a more appropriate illustration, if you have washed up on a desert island and just eaten your last can of beans, your nutrition status may be alright, but your nutrition security is bleak.”
I would add here that, despite FAO’s sometimes equating food security with hunger, I feel that food security should be understood as a more comprehensive concept, important to people at all levels of income. For example, issues of food safety and food supply in disaster situations are food security concerns for everyone. The question of whether infant formula is nutritionally adequate is a food security question that is relevant everywhere.
Aloha, George Kent
Friends –
Thanks to Géraldine Tardivel for her excellent summary of our conversation on innovative financing mechanisms.
The “Preliminary List of Innovative Financing Mechanism for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition” that Géraldine provided describes four broad categories of funding sources. Perhaps a fifth, Community-based Funding, could be added? Imagine an area in which there are many small farms, and a local population that obtains much of its food from those farms. A local credit union could be created, based on deposits from those farms and that population. Its rules could limit it to lending only to local small farms.
In my previous contribution I spoke about the need for discussion of how the proceeds from any innovative funding mechanism would be managed. Géraldine said, “a mechanism could be identified where resources collected by national taxes on currency transactions would be matched with a number of uses and needs in various sectors like health, education, food security.” This could be done, but it is really not easy. In far too many cases, nice sounding efforts have been hijacked by managers who steer the new resources to serve their own interests. Very often programs intended to meet the needs of the poor end up serving the wants of those who are relatively well off.
The idea of a transaction tax has been around for a long time. Perhaps it has not been implemented because, under many of the proposals, the powerful would not control the revenues. Another example is the global negotiations on the law of the sea. Many analysts think there is great economic potential in mining the seabed, but countries such as the U.S. do not want to have those resources managed as our common heritage. The powerful want those resources to belong to whoever has the power to take them.
The top of p. 3 of the Preliminary List says, “Preserving and enhancing food security requires agriculture production systems to change in the direction of higher productivity . . . “It is important to make a clear distinction between addressing the issue of overall food supply for the general population over the long run, and the hunger problem, which is the distinctive food security problem faced by people with little income. They require different sorts of policy responses. I carry on about this point at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-kent/achieve-sustainability-or_b_66...
Near the bottom of its third page, the Preliminary List says, “Malnutrition remains widespread, with market failures due to lack of competition and poor information . . .” This implies that malnutrition results from markets not functioning the way they are supposed to function. I don’t agree. I think that in any normally functioning market there is a steady flow of value from the bottom toward the top. This helps to explain the steadily widening gaps between rich and poor, both within countries and among countries. New investments can help the needy, but that is only likely where there is a strong element of caring about the needy. That caring is outside the market mechanism. These views are explained in my recent book, Ending Hunger Worldwide.
To summarize: while market-oriented programs, including strengthened investment programs, may be effective in increasing food production, one needs to look to other motivations and other mechanisms to ensure the food security of the poor.
Aloha, George
FSN Friends --
We are asked to suggest innovative financing mechanisms (IFMs) “as a means to complement the lack of investment in agriculture and decreasing ODA [Official Development Assistance], with the aim to provide reliable and predictable financing for development in the area of agriculture, food security and nutrition.”
Before pushing ahead to answers, perhaps we should pause to parse the question. The core concern here seems to be some sort of deficit. What is the main motivator here? Is it the problem of hunger in the world today? Is it concern about overall food supplies at some time in the future? Is it lagging profitability in particular industries?
What type of IFMs are we talking about? Large-scale? Small-scale? In low-income countries, high-income countries, or everywhere? Maybe the concern is that certain groups have less access to credit than others?
There are big differences between investments for agriculture and for basic nutrition. Much of agriculture is not for food, and much of the food production is for luxury foods such as coffee and chocolate. Much of the food that is produced goes to people who are not particularly needy.
What evidence do we have that there is a lack of investment in agriculture? What are the key indicators? Some might argue that agriculture, viewed as a business, generally does get the amount of investment it should be getting. That is, maybe agriculture is already getting the investments that would be expected given the prevailing risks and rates of return.
So what exactly is the problem to be addressed here?
Once we have decided what is the main problem we want to look at, we should spend some time explaining it. Why is there not enough investment in agriculture, or the particular type of agriculture that interests us?
We should think about whether finding IFMs is likely to be a good way to address the problem that interests us. Maybe there are other good approaches. Maybe the focus on IFMs is too locked in to the conventional market perspective, and thus too narrow in its vision.
Suppose we agree that the main problem we want to focus on is the widespread hunger in the world. This is not due to an overall global food shortage. It is due primarily to the fact that many poor people do not have enough money to access the food supply that is out there, and they do not have adequate resources to produce their own food. New investments in conventional agriculture are not likely to help them very much. However, well-designed investments in the poor could be very helpful.
Maybe thinking of hunger as a global economic problem takes us down the wrong track. Suppose we look at the hunger issue at the level of families and small communities. With decent opportunities, and freed of exploitation by others, every family and every community would find ways to provide for itself. With decent opportunities, they would produce their own food, or they would earn enough money to purchase their food. If that is so, then the investment that is needed would be to ensure that every family had those opportunities.
Do the powerful people of the world care enough about poor people’s well-being to ensure that they have those opportunities? Or are they indifferent? Or maybe those who are better off are actively opposed to improving the lot of the poor because they value the cheap labor and cheap goods that the poor provide?
There are abundant resources in the world that could be directed to ensuring decent opportunities for the poor, but those who control those resources obviously have other priorities. New sources of funding could be proposed, but is there any reason to expect that those who control those funds would prioritize the poor? Yes, one could imagine innovations such as a small tax on currency transactions, but how would those revenues be managed? Would the powerful accept such a tax if the revenues were used primarily for the benefit of the poor?
“Investing” in the poor is not going to provide secure economic returns on investments comparable with other more conventional investment opportunities. Whether they use old or new sources of funds, we would have to find investors who would view the relief of human misery as a good return on their efforts.
Aloha, George
--
Professor George Kent (Emeritus)
Department of Political Science
University of Hawai'i
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822
USA
Проф. George Kent
Alwin Kopse, the facilitator of the consultation on One Planet’s draft on “A Sustainable Food System” said, while the ultimate goal is food security, it will not be achieved while the economic, social and environmental bases for food production and consumption are being compromised. In other words, the shift towards sustainable food systems is a precondition for global food security.”
This appears to be a response to my questioning the high priority placed on the sustainability of food systems, on November 24, available at http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/comment/9230 I would like to clarify my position.
I see sustainability as just one item in the list of desirable qualities in many things. When I buy a car, for example, I would like it to last a long time, but that is just one consideration among many. Sustainability is important in food systems, especially those that function well. However, I don’t see how it is a precondition for global food security.
Attention to sustainability seems to be displacing attention to the need to make serious efforts to end hunger in the world. I have yet to see a serious plan to end hunger, one that can realistically be expected to succeed. I would like to see a more serious commitment to ending hunger in the world. When we design a system that works well for everyone, we can talk about how to sustain it.
Проф. George Kent
In November 2018 the One Planet organization released a draft on the sustainability of food systems. It says, “A sustainable food system (SFS) is a food system that ensures food security and nutrition for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition of future generations are not compromised (One Planet 2018).”
That sounds good, but some might read this as suggesting we already know how to ensure food security and nutrition for all, and the major challenge is find ways to find ways to keep it going over time. The reality is that we are far from solving the global hunger problem.
Every September a group of United Nations agencies release their annual report on food security in the world. According to the 2018 report:
For the third year in a row, there has been a rise in world hunger. The absolute number of undernourished people, i.e. those facing chronic food deprivation, has increased to nearly 821 million in 2017, from around 804 million in 2016. These are levels from almost a decade ago. (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO 1018)
The document acknowledged that, “Without increased efforts, there is a risk of falling far short of achieving the SDG target of hunger eradication by 2030 (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO 1018, iii). Sustainable Development Goal 2 is to achieve zero hunger in the world by 2030 (SDG 2 2018).
A risk? I am certain that the goal will not be achieved. There is no plan of action that would be likely to result in achievement of the goal, a pattern that has been repeated many times in the past (Kent 2011, 154-169). Why is there so much concern about sustainability? That preoccupation draws attention away from the more urgent issue of persistent and widespread hunger (Kent 2010). Why worry about the sustainability of food systems that don’t work very well?
Why discuss sustainability as if it was the primary goal, the apex, the goal to which other objectives should be subordinated? And why focus on “key approaches, concepts and terms?” when the real underlying question is, how should food systems be designed and improved? The core objective should be the improvement of people’s lives, especially poor people. Concerns about sustainability can be set aside while more serious work is done on designing the food system that is required to address the global hunger problem with serious diagnoses, commitments, and plans of action.
Surely much of the explanation for hunger’s breadth and persistence is related to the dominant economic system. By its nature, it produces inequality. Much of the apparent production of wealth is really about the steady transmission of the fruits of people's labor upwards through the socio-economic hierarchy. As we can see from the United Nations system’s annual reports on food security in the world and the flow of documents from the UN’s Committee on World Food Security, the system turns a blind eye to the political economy of hunger. That is not likely to be fixed if we are not willing to look at it.
REFERENCES
FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2018. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018: Building Climate Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/3/I9553EN/i9553en.pdf
Kent, George. 2010. “Achieve Sustainability or End Hunger?” Huffington Post. August 3, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-kent/achieve-sustainability-or_b_669304.html
---. 2011. Ending Hunger Worldwide: Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.
One Planet. 2018. Towards a Common Understanding of Sustainable Food Systems: Key Approaches, Concepts and Terms. One Planet. November 22. http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/sites/default/files/files/155_understanding-sustainable-food-systems/Draft_SFS_Glossary_v22NOV2018.pdf
SDG 2. 2018. Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 2: Zero Hunger. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/