Global forum on food security and nutrition

69.Lal Manavado, University of Oslo affiliate, Norway

Maximizing the Impact of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition
Before we proceed, I would like to ascertain what precise result of “UN Decade of Action on Nutrition” we intend to maximise. There would be a general agreement on undertaking suitable action to achieve this result, if it represents a significant increase in the number of people to whom a sustainable and adequate supply of wholesome food is made available at an equitable cost. This submission outlines a generic strategy for the purpose easily adapted to suit the local conditions.

If we intend “not to leave anyone behind”, it is necessary to change the modern food systems not only into a source of sustainable and an adequate supply of wholesome food available to everybody, but also making their use just and fair to all. This is not identical with increased agricultural production, but requires a holistic examination of what changes in and around the food systems are necessary.

Every social practice is governed by a set of norms. Some norms are common to several practices including the use of food systems. A food system is an array of tools designed and used by the people in order to satisfy their nutritional needs. Its use represents a social practice in use, even when a rare subsistence farmer may operate it from beginning to the end for his sole benefit.

However, before we take a look at the food systems, it is important to consider their operating ambience, i.e., the other practices in the society, for they may influence its structure and operation both directly and indirectly. Some of the most import among those are the political, legal, educational, trade, communications and transport practices of a country.

Politics determine the policies that govern these and the other practices like agriculture that are involved in constituting a food system. When it is possible to implement those policies with sufficient skill, their success depends on their appropriateness and adequacy. These depend on the competence of their formulators.

Their incompetence would result in policies that would result in inadequacies in a food system. However, inappropriate and inadequate policy formulation is not necessarily a consequence of frank incompetence, but it may also be due to a too rigid adherence to the notion of institutional autonomy, which manifests itself as ‘thinking in silos’. Sometimes, one’s desire to wield an unlimited power within an institutional domain may lead to the same undesirable result.

But, inappropriate and/or inadequate policies may also arise from incompetence due to corruption, nepotism, rigged elections, gaining and/retaining power by force, belief in some untenable political doctrine, etc. Unfortunately, there is little one could deal with this not uncommon problem at international level apart from mild verbal criticism or printed and signed resolutions of dubious effectiveness.

When it is possible to enhance the requisite competence, policy formulation should strive towards the greatest possible policy congruence in the areas relevant to achieving the optimal output from the food systems in use. The following non-exhaustive list may provide some pointers towards areas for further enquiry:

1. 
   Environment policy that protects and promotes the ecosystem services as well as aiming at environmental regeneration.
   
2. 
   Agriculture education and training appropriate to a country’s food culture, hence to its climate and geography, and with respect to its real need for employment, i.e., whether labour- or capital-intensive agricultural methods would provide the highest number of jobs.
   
3. 
   Legal policy, which when implemented would result in laws that demand and require policy congruence with respect to the food systems that will not leave anyone nutritionally behind.
   
4. 
   A health policy that promotes balanced nutrition in line with the local food culture as a remedy against the spreading of NCD’s and deficiency diseases.
   
5. 
   Trade policy that supports and promotes the local food systems, and resorts to ‘free trade’ only insofar as it supplements but not competes with the local food systems, or promote NCD’s and deficiency diseases.
   
6. 
   Communications policy that favours the use of waterways and railways extensively for transport while not forgetting the need for road networks.
   
7. 
   Transport policy to encourage haulage by waterways and railways rather than by road transport.
   
8. 
   Legal policies that lead to making laws to guarantee land tenure to farmers, sole forest harvesting rights to the original inhabitants of the area, fishing rights of small-scale fishermen, limiting large-scale harvesting of the seas, lakes, rivers, etc.,  by capital-intensive equipment, etc.
   
9. 
   Across the board policy assessment to cut down on weapons expenditure, prestige projects with a view to channelling resources to agriculture, health and education.
   
10. 
    An employment policy that takes into account the principle of non-discrimination, economic reality, achievable employment possibilities, etc.
    

Assuming that those policies are appropriate and adequate, their contribution to the success of a food system depends on how skilfully they are implemented. It is axiomatic that any tool may fail to serve its purpose for two main reasons, viz., problems related to its usage or to the defects in the tool itself. These may be called usage and structural problems respectively.

Assuming that a food system is structurally adequate, its optimal usage requires an adequate number of people to run it, which in turn depends on having access to a sufficient pool of its potential operators to renew its aging counterparts. Diminution of this pool is becoming a growing problem in many countries today as fewer and fewer young people take to agricultural pursuits.

Meanwhile, a food system may be ineptly used, or misused as any other tool and there is no a priori reason to assume that food systems are an exception. Therefore, maximising the impact of the “decade” will have to involve steps to ensure that the people’s access to food is not adversely affected either by those problems related to usages of food systems, or from the defects in them.

Once we have traced those possible inadequacies and rectified them, we should then ascertain whether we need to take steps to change the output of the food systems in use today. If this should be required, we should next ascertain the extent of the qualitative and the quantitative changes in the output of the food systems concerned. Finally, we can identify the optimal means of achieving our objective, and use them.

Achieving this requires understanding the generic structure of a food system. We can visualise it as a chain of generically identical sub-systems spanning the gap between a real producer of food and an end-user of his produce. Some of the sub-systems are used within the others, for example, storage and transport systems. This represents a recursive use of a system. Here is a list of some generic components of a food system (For more information, please see the end note.):

1. 
   Yielder system that actually generates food or animals.  It may be a forest, body of water, or a farm. It may be entirely dependent on natural ecosystem services, or partially depend on man-made substitutes, eg. irrigation, manuaring.
   
2. 
   End-user system that consists of two sub-systems:
   
   1. 
      Procurement system where food is procured for use, for instance harvesting one’s own food or by purchase.
      
   2. 
      Preparation system which may contain two sub-systems, viz., a refiner system to remove the inedible, clean and trimmed or cut, and then passed onto the culinary system where is made ready to eat.
      

1. 
   Storage system which may vary from the family fridge or a farmer’s grain bin to a very large modern storage facility.
   

1. 
   Transport system may range from a man’s back to ocean-going grain careers.
   

1. 
   Preserver system is intended to ensure the longevity of perishable items. It may resort to drying, salting, conserving, freezing, etc.
   

1. 
   Selling system resulting from the division of labour introduced by social evolution. It has given rise to several sub-systems:
   

1. 
   Packaging system purported to serve customer’s convenience.
   
2. 
   Commercialised procurement and preparation systems directly linked to a selling system. This may range from street sausage stall to a famed restaurant.
   
3. 
    A combination of procurement, refiner, storage and selling systems as seen in ready-cut meat and vegetable packages.
   
4. 
    A combination of procurement, preparation, storage and selling systems involved in industrial food manufacture and sales.
   

   V. Advertising system whose existence is supposed to be justified because it informs the public about the food items available for sale.

I have purposely avoided until now agricultural research and technology which has become an increasingly important adjunct to the yielder systems in use. Their basic purpose is twofold, viz., to understand how to improve the output of yielder systems with reference to some man-made standard, and then to develop technical means of achieving it.

Apart from steps to increase the physical mass, colour, etc., of the yield itself, this activity manifests itself as a supplement to the natural ecosystem services, on which agriculture historically had depended. Irrigation, use of fertilisers, biocides, etc., are examples of this. This adjunctive system is likewise prone to the shortcomings described earlier.

Obviously, the inept use of a yielder system would manifest itself as a lowered output, but it is not necessarily due to not using the most modern cultivars or breeds of livestock. In fact, their supplanting the traditional varieties could entail a price the farmers could not afford, may be unsuited owing to the local conditions, or users may not be skilled enough to manage them.

Introduction of high-yield cereals that depend on an extensive use of fertilisers and biocides during the “Green Revolution” of the 1960’ties is a classic example of this. It represents use of inappropriate materials and methods in agriculture. It represents an inept use of an adjunctive system.

Even when the physical components of a yielder system are adequate and suitable for a given locality, its users, i.e., farmers and labourers may fail to put them into their optimal use owing to their lack of knowledge and skill. This is not synonymous with their lack of familiarity with the most modern means of agriculture, but rather their lack of know-how and skills in tried and proven one’s compatible with their own food culture. Its resolution requires appropriate agriculture education and training.

Inept use of any other sub-system would result in waste of food. It is worth remarking that ‘targeted advertising’ of industrial food has reduced the sales of fresh fruits and vegetables leading to their wastage due to spoilage in shops. It is heartening to note that wastage of food has now begun to receive the attention it merits.

Unskilled use of adequate storage facilities, Inefficient running of otherwise ample transport and adjunctive systems as well as the commercialised sets of sub-systems of a food system (wastage of food in restaurants, ready to use packaging, and in industrial food factories) and the domestic wastage of food, all contribute to this undesirable result.

Now we come to the misuse of some component of a food system. This may appear to be a controversial postulate at the first glance, but it is not. We invented food systems, and the sole justification of its invention is that its use is believed to enable the people to secure an adequate and balanced diet in a sustainable fashion at an affordable cost.

Nutrition is one of our most important fundamental needs, while money is only a secondary tool whose justification in this instance, is in that it enables us to use the food procurement system, replacing the barter system of yore. So, the use of yielder system to grow cash crops or to use seller system to earn foreign exchange by selling a national dietary ingredient likes pea nuts (eg. Senegal and Cameroons) while malnutrition is a problem, represents a misuse of a part of a food system.

A familiar insidious misuse of a seller system involves dumping surplus produce in another country’s food market, and thereby undermining the long-term well-being of its own yielder system. Another misuse of the seller system is its encroachment into foreign food markets to sell products of dubious nutritive or gastronomical value claiming it to represent free trade.

Now we come to the situation where all the operators possess adequate know-how and skill while the food system fails to yield the intended result. Obviously, this arises from some structural problem in it. As a food system is under the dual control of political authorities and private sector to varying degrees, and it consists of several sub-systems, there are several opportunities for structural problems.

Consider now, political authorities opting to implement a policy of promoting modern agricultural practice, but not able or willing to implement a commensurable policies in communications and energy. As a result, yields will be adversely affected. This is an often seen example of policy incongruence due to reductive planning.

Using the same example, the authorities may promote the same agriculture policy when it is totally unsuitable to the local climatic, geographic and economic conditions. This will have the same consequences as those which arise when the operators lack the requisite know-how and skill. It represents a case of inappropriate policy.

The same result would obtain if policies concerning the other components of a food system should display the same flaw. Huge grain losses due to inadequate transport and storage systems in the Soviet Union are the classic example of policy inappropriateness.

Meanwhile, transport system is frequently in private hands motivated by the desire for profit. Even when the communications are adequate, means of transport may not always have sufficient capacity or speed. Its effect on the final output of a food system is clear, and represents a drop in the output due to sub-system incompatibility. The end-user will experience the same result if it should occur in any other sub-system of a food system.

Holistic and congruent policy formulation and their efficient implementation, addressing the problems related to inept use of food systems and their misuse, and overcoming the political obstacles to leave advising on decision-making in competent hands, and a willingness to confine oneself to decisions that leaves no one behind rather than opt for ‘cutting edge’ in agriculture and other areas then, are the most significant ways of making our food systems help us to move towards our objective.

I do not believe that we need more research or any other fancy technology to feed the current global population adequately, rather we need to take a pause for breath and rational evaluation of the tools already at our dispose I am convinced at some of the ‘cutting edge’ tools can be discarded with real benefit to the hungry millions and our environment.

On the other hand, what we need to do is to rearrange our food systems in line with our national needs with respect to a given food culture, and cease to think of food in terms of mere commodity open to every kind of commercial speculation. We should always recall that none can live without food, and money is merely just one of the tools that could be used to procure it. It is the inherent value of food that gives a value to the tokens that represent

Everybody knows the size and profits of food advertising including colourful packaging. But now is the time to understand that it is the end-user who foots that expenditure when buying food. It is time to think its effect on the affordability of food especially to people

Finally, enhancing the competence to build and run just and fair food systems need a pool of competent young people to replace aging agricultural population everywhere. However, youth’s attitude to agriculture is undeservedly negative owing to irrational social values propagated by entertainment industry, ‘media’, education, etc. I think we need a radical change in the social perception of the value of agriculture and food, for without a wider public appreciation of its vital importance not much can be achieved.

Best wishes!

Lal Manavado.

End note:

For a more comprehensive and a justifiable description of a food system, do please see: http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/cfs-hlpe/node/992