Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

India next  to Brazil  legislated access and availability of food as a right of its citizens(1250 million) by an act of Parliament in 2013(FSA-2013).It has a time tested food distribution system in states like Tamil Nadu,Kerala and Chattishgarh.The mid day meal scheme implimented in above states through primary schools(Anganvadi) is lauded and appreciated.One egg/day/student or one banana/day/student enriched the nutritive value of the food served mostly rice based.Recently millet based food packets are supplied free of cost.Efforts are made to make available clean drinking water.Immunisation against polio is done by recording infants in the locality and administering anti-polio vaccine.There are classes on personnel and family hygiene.Open defication is seldom and toilets are made available.Despite all the above measures India houses the largest population of anaemic, wasted and underweighed women and children.Protein deficiency is rampant.Mosquito transmitted diseases like chicken guniya and water borne dysentry are common.

In India we have the grass root level Panchayat system of governance.The ward councillors need to be empowered and made responsible for the nutritional and food security of the people around.

Please find attached a response to the online consultation on maximizing the impact of the Decade of Nutrition.  On behalf of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, I thank you for the opportunity to participate and respectfully submit these comments for consideration.

I could not disagree more with Erick (and I guess with IFPRI). Although he mentions diet diversification passing by, he puts an unwarranted emphasis on biofortification and less so on fortification. This moves the focus totally away from the social, economic and political determinants of malnutrition -- which is where the Decade should put most of its emphasis.

Sustainable solutions are not from the supply side. 

I wonder what the other contributors think.

Claudio in Ho Chi Minh City

There is nothing more important, nothing more effective, nothing more economical and long-lasting than educating the farmer in how to manage his ever-changing circumstances and environment  to achieve sustainability for his family.

Bill Butterworth

The Director

Land Research Ltd

Respected UNEP/FAO Members

Greetings from India.

This is our Innovation on "Village Knowledge Centre" at Grass root level to impart Knowledge from Ground level. Please share this innovation to make your world Knowledge Savy and strengthen your farmer friends.

Regards

Bibhu Santosh

Independent People's Scientist

Green College, Muniguda, Rayagada

English translation below

Здравствуйте уважаемые коллеги. Я хочу выразить благодарность организаторам за предоставленную возможность обмена мнениями по актуальным в настоящее время вопросам.

По первому вопросу:

В эпоху глобализации вопросы продовольственной безопасности, несомненно,  являются наивжнейшими. Положительное влияние будет в том, что все компоненты продовольственной безопасности на высоком уровне  будут определены и учтены, это- производство (сельское хозяйство, животноводство), просвещение в области правильного питания, использование, также экологические аспекты.

По второму вопросу:

Глобальные климатические изменения в целом ставят все новые вызовы. Изменение климата, резкое похолодание,  аномальная жара или  выпадение осадков снега в летний период, , ливни, заморозки и др. влияют на урожайность, плодоносимость селькохозяйственной культуры. Производители сельхозпродуций нуждаются в дотации.  Необходима Правительственная поддержка фермерских хозяйств в  льготном  и безпроцентном  кредитовании, финансировании, маркетинге, межправительственные договора. Использование органических удобрений. Борьба с деградацией пастбищ, соблюдение норм и требований использования псатбищ. Распространение использования капельного орошения, повышение урожайности с использованием  традиционных, натуральных, органических удобрений.

Разработка госпрограммы  и ее мониторинг, в которую необходимо включать пропаганду правильного питания, начиная с рождения, питание матери и ребенка. В этом направлении добавить экономический компонент, т.е. полезность, рациональность, сбалансированность и комплексность  вопросов .

Введение в школьную программу  «Продовольственная безопасность и экология» , как предмет . Увеличить посадку деревьев, в т.ч. плодовых деревьев -создание зеленого пояса.  

Необходимо освещать весь процесс по средствам массовой информации, для того чтобы все слои населения, а не только глобальном уровне, были информированы о важности продуктовой безопасности, которая напрямую влияет на здоровье и бюджет семьи, общества, страны.

По третьему вопросу:

Необходимо увеличить  темп  мероприятий по обучению, освещению и пропаганде здорового образа жизни В т.ч. вопросы ожирения человека, сахарный диабет, подвергание стрессам, алкоголизм, табакокурение. Финансирование мероприятий  - осуществление за счет госбюджета и донорских средств. Включить в международные  проекты ( по направлениям)  компоненты, касающиеся вышеназванных  мероприятий.

По четвертому вопросу:

Консультации, семинары, тренинги должны проводиться на регулярной основе на всех уровнях и сооществах.

 Чинара Абдыраимакунова

Dear colleagues,

I would like to thank the facilitators for the opportunity to exchange opinions on the most topical issues.

As for the first question:

There is no doubt, that in the era of globalization, food safety issues are crucial. The positive effect is that all the components of food security at high level will be identified and addressed, it means: production (agriculture, livestock), nutrition education, utilization, and environmental aspects.

As for the second question:

Global climate change, in general, pose new challenges. Climate change, drastic frosting, heat waves or snowfalls in summer, heavy rains, frost etc. affect yields and crop productivity. Agricultural producers need subsidies. Government support to farmers is required in regard to soft lending and interest-free loans, financing, marketing, inter-governmental agreements. Organic fertilizers usage. Fight against pasture degradation, observance of standards and usage requirements for pastures. Mainstreaming drip irrigation usage, increasing yields using traditional, natural, organic fertilizers.

State programme design and monitoring, that should include promotion of proper nutrition since birth, maternal and child nutrition. The economic dimension should be added here, i.e. usefulness, rationality, sustainability and complexity of the issues. To integrate Food Security and Environmental Studies into the school curriculum as a separate subject. To plant more tree, including fruit trees – to create the “green belt”.

This whole process should be covered by the media, in order to inform all sections of population (and not only at the global level) about the importance of food security, which directly affects the health and the budget of families, the society, and the country.

As for the third question:

It is necessary to accelerate activities on training, coverage and promotion of healthy lifestyles, including such issues as obesity, diabetes, exposure to stress, alcohol, smoking. Financing should be covered by the state budget and donor funds. To include the components related to the aforementioned activities into international projects (activity-specific).

As for the forth question:

Consultations, workshops and trainings should be conducted on a regular basis at all levels and communities.

Chinara Abdyraimakunova

To significantly improve nutrition and food security, nationally representative and standardized dietary intake data from high disease and undernutrition countries would be indispensable.   An assessment of such data vis-a-vis the data on coverage of other nutrition interventions within these countries would be central to for the development of concerted plans and action to improve nutrition and food security outcomes. Such information would help the governments of high-burden countries to understand the ‘state of the nation’ or baseline status of their populations, and help prioritize and target actions required to address malnutrition.

Another necessary step towards the eradication of hidden hunger at scale is the improvement of foods most widely eaten by poor people around the world. Staples like wheat, maize, rice, cassava, beans, and sweet potato provide needed dietary energy; however, they are often lacking in essential micronutrients, particularly after milling and other industrial processing methods. There are several effective strategies to improve micronutrient status of populations. Among those commercial food fortification and supplementation are the most effective ones, yet they are often inaccessible to the most vulnerable farming households in rural areas and/or unsustainable for most countries without passing additional costs to consumers (in the case of fortification), or without significant help from international donors (in the case of supplementation). Biofortification, a process by which the density of vitamins and minerals is increased in food crops through plant breeding, agronomic practices, or by genetic engineering is a complementary strategy to fortification and supplementation, as  it targets rural households, who may not have easy access fortified foods and/or supplements. Moreover, unlike supplements, which are targeted to certain segments of the population, biofortification improves the daily supply of essential nutrients for all household members. Since biofortified crops are also bred to be high yielding and resistant to pests, diseases, and climate change, they also bring with them the added advantage of improved harvests. In short biofortification pragmatically links agriculture and nutrition. 

Biofortification programs are targeted at countries with persistent micronutrient malnutrition and high consumption of locally grown staple foods. National biofortification programs are sustainable because after crops have been developed and officially released for planting, improved seeds and planting materials are delivered in direct partnerships with governments and through the already existing delivery platforms Biofortification is a truly intersectoral and interdisciplinary approach that involves a wide range of stakeholders: the public and private sectors, plant scientists, nutritionists, economists, civil society, and more, depending on particular context or each target country. Improving the vitamin and mineral nutrient content of foods that people already produce and consumer in significant quantities through biofortification is not only culturally acceptable but also politically attractive, and the cost-effectiveness of this approach justifies the investment.

Alongside the promotion of dietary diversity, nutrition education, women’s empowerment, and other essential actions, biofortification is an approach governments are integrating into their policies to achieve their commitments to the Scaling Up Nutrition and 1,000 Days movements.

A WHO Cochrane review committee is currently reviewing the scientific evidence and country experiences of scaling up biofortification (Read more: http://www.who.int/elena/titles/biofortification/en/). We are hopeful that biofortification will soon become one of WHO’s globally recommended complementary strategies to tackle malnutrition, and more specifically to tackle micronutrient malnutrition (also known as hidden hunger) caused by lack of essential vitamins and minerals.

Finally, we are very encouraged by the inclusion of fortification in the Framework for Action adopted by the Second International Conference on Nutrition. Biofortification is one means of fortification by which foods can be enriched sustainably, letting ‘nature do the work’ for the most part.

Erick Boy

HarvestPlus

In order to maximise the impact of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition, food security and food production systems, and availability of methodological capability to monitor progress and evaluate programme effectiveness will be very important. The IAEA can make contribution by providing comparative advantage in the deployment of objective, specific and sensitive nuclear techniques to evaluate nutrition and nutrition-sensitive programmes. The following specific issues will require attention.

1. Ensure improved soil quality – replenish lost nutrients including, through inter-cropping in addition to known methods that work.
2. Guarantee water availability for cropping, livestock and fishery
3. Address land availability and farming systems
4. Design safer food processing and  storage, and affordable distribution systems, especially so in the case of landless populations
5. Identify and promote crops and livestock that work and are acceptable in specific contexts keeping in mind circumstances related to shifts in food preferences, gender sensitivity  and climate change
6. Ensure that food production guarantees dietary diversity and that food processing and preparation at the household level maximise nutrient bioavailability from foods
7. Create factors that enable farming and food access such as subsidies to farmers and price subsidies on basic  foods
8. Empower farmers, including women to enable better bargaining for farm produce prices; encourage cooperatives around focal crop/livestock production/fisheries  and communal approach to food production, pricing and marketing
9. Include income generation activities to avoid food being sold for subsistence e.g. in some African contexts cotton was a key cash crop that was grown alongside food and households did not need to sell food to meet their basic needs
10. Design behaviour change communication and social marketing strategies to help communities adopt new dietary patterns or revert to hitherto abandoned indigenous eating practices
11. Ensure gender equity in all aspects
12. Develop capacity and methods/tools to objectively monitor and evaluate the impact of 1-11 above and conduct good social research to understand why people eat the way they do and understand the underlying causes of dietary behaviour changes.
13. Multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral working teams will be needed at levels to achieve the above

You can not talk about nutrition without first addressing the problem of food insecurity. The vulnerable group (both women and children) in the poverty riddened society hear no language of balance diet; they are after getting their daily meal to survive first. Hence, agricultural programmes of the country should be reviewed and government should be able to develop the political will to achieve increase food production, organise food policy that will incorporate small scale farmers into government programmes. A sustainable solution that encourages and create incentives for people to produce more food for themselves is also advocated; this, i think can be achived through subsidizing the basic inputs ( such as fertilizer, improved seeds and seedlings) and timely dessemination of innovative technologies to the small scale farmers that are scattered all over the country.

Thank you all for your contributions. 

As for Uganda, I would suggest three key areas of human resource capacity, having a full implementation team in place and engaging high level decision makers. 

1. Support Uganda to strengthen human resources in the nutrition secretariat for strategic oversight and coordination: In Uganda, the task of operationalize multisectoral nutrition through Uganda Nutrition Action Plan (UNAP) at national scale is a monumental undertaking that involves attention to many components of the system.  The oversight and coordination of all the necessary activities – involving interactions, advocacy and negotiations with a large number of government and non-government stakeholders and organizations – requires the full-time effort from a Multisectoral Nutrition coordinator located in an institution that enables effective oversight and coordination.

2. Support the country to create a full-time implementation team to support cascading and on-going support to sub-national levels: The task of orienting and training the 115 districts and lower local government levels, and supervising and supporting them in a responsive fashion over time, requires a mobile implementation team dedicated to those functions.  Currently, Uganda does not have such a team but the Country has recognized the need.

3. Effectively engage high level decision makers in government and partner organizations in addressing critical bottlenecks, through candid reporting from the technical secretariat, the use of real-time progress markers and the establishment of clear lines of accountability.  

The rationale for singling out these three actions from the much larger set of challenges facing the country is that all or most of the other challenges can be addressed if there are dedicated staff and clear procedures in place to do so.  The most compelling lesson from our project is that the task of building and maintaining a MSN system is much too large for the human resources currently dedicated to it.  And the most encouraging lesson from is that it is well within the power, the resources and the good will of the partners in the country to alleviate this constraint. In addition to these high leverage, strategic actions, which might apply to other countries, there are some additional specific actions needed in Uganda.  Some of these can be initiated or accomplished while the three strategic actions are being pursued, but all of them would be addressed in a more effective and sustainable manner if the MSN coordinator and implementation team could be put in place in a timely manner.

Specific Actions:

1. Put in place formal procedures on how things should be done. This is best done by having MSN implementation guidelines to be used at all levels (national and district implementation teams)

2. Need to have a phased work plan for the implementation of Uganda Nutrition Action Plan

3. Cultivate a culture of collaborative decision making/planning for activities and how to communicate internally (within districts, Sectors and Government, CSOs, development partners) and externally with global nutrition agencies such as SUN.

4. Need to conduct institutional capacity assessment for the implementation of MSN at the national and sub national levels

5. Build strategic partnership with all development partners supporting MSN in the country including agreement on key strategic directions for moving forward the country MSN nutrition agenda.

6. Continuous capacity building of all stakeholders involved in MSN implementation at all levels, in the areas of strategic capacity, adaptive management, documentation and sharing of experiences

I’m sorry, I focused more on Uganda, in the next sharing, I will attempt to pay attention to the global picture.

Thank you,

Jackson