On 1 April 2016, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, through its Resolution 70/259, proclaimed 2016–2025 the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition (hereafter referred to as Nutrition Decade). Under the normative framework of the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Nutrition Decade marks a new ambition and direction in global nutrition action to eradicate hunger and malnutrition in all its forms and reduce the burden of diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in all age groups.
The Decade is a global effort driven by Members States of the United Nations and convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and including other UN bodies and other entities such as the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN).
To ensure an inclusive, continuous and collaborative process, building upon and connecting the independent initiatives of governments and their many partners, several rounds of consultation have taken place, including through the FSN Forum. These discussions were an attempt to better understand the critical activities that need to be included in the work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition. More specifically these discussions aimed at identifying the activities that would need to be accelerated in countries and how all partners can better work together to improve the ambition and specificity of commitments and their implementation. FAO and WHO have drawn upon feedback from many stakeholders to produce the first draft work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition. This work programme is a living document, building upon and connecting the independent initiatives of governments and their many partners and will be adapted according to needs and lessons learned. We now invite you to comment on the first draft that is presented here https://www.unscn.org/uploads/web/news/First-draft-Work-programme-Nutrition-Decade.pdf
Specifically, we invite you to share your views on how best to strengthen the Decade’s first draft work programme. You may want to consider the following questions:
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Does the work programme present a compelling vision for enabling strategic interaction and mutual support across existing initiatives, platforms, forums and programmes, given the stipulation of Res 70/259 that the Decade should be organized with existing institutions and available resources?
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What are your general comments to help strengthen the presented elements of the first draft work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition?
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Do you feel you can contribute to the success of the Nutrition Decade or align yourself with the proposed range of action areas?
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How could this draft work programme be improved to promote collective action to achieve the transformational change called for by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the ICN2 outcomes? What is missing?
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Do you have specific comments on the section on accountability and shared learning?
Your comments will be added to those received at a forthcoming meeting of the CFS Open Ended Working Group on Nutrition at FAO HQ on 10 February 2017. The FAO and WHO will produce a final work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition to discuss with their Member States during the World Health Assembly (May 2017) and the FAO Conference (June 2017).
We thank you for your valuable contribution to this exchange.
UNSCN Secretariat, in collaboration with FAO and WHO
Contributions received
George Kent, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii, United States of America
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
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