WHY WE NEED TO FOCUS ON FOOD NOT FORGETTING NUTRITION!
As a small group of concerned nutritionist, we have, for long now, been uneasy about the fact that the discourse of our close allies in global and local fora has been dominated by a focus more on food issues to the detriment of equally important sustainable nutrition considerations. We decided to put our main concerns in writing.
This state of affairs may have several explanations.
Here is a call to remedy this situation giving all the needed justifications. What we propose, we are sure does not contravene the principles that guide the priorities of our strategic allies, but rather complement them as they bring to the fore aspects that we feel have been receiving less than needed attention in policy negotiations and sustainable policy making in the last few years. The idea is that the time has come to hopefully convince our strategic allies to make room, in their and our own work, to the concerns ventilated in this call.
What we think is falling through the cracks:
A review of key documents in our domain dating back a few years allows us to (non-systematically and not comprehensively) list, in no particular order, a couple dozen primarily nutrition issues that have not gotten sufficient attention in these important documents which gave greater attention to food-related concerns. More than anything, as an illustrative example, here is what we found not receiving the needed attention:
- The proper promotion of dietary diversity, of healthy eating, of breastfeeding and of proper infant and young child feeding (IYCF).
- Counteracting existing misinformation on IYCF.
- Labeling regulations as they relate to the growing global obesity and NCDs worries.
- Myth and fact in the micronutrients domain.
- Specific nutritional measures that address girls needs and the needs of the elderly.
- Addressing the nutrition needs of smallholder farmers and their families.
- Addressing the special dietary needs of people living with HIV (PLWHIV).
- Cracking down on International Code of Breastfeeding Substitutes violators.
- Our need to fulfill, not only the food, but also the nutritional needs of the population throughout the life cycle, i. e., food must ultimately sustainably fulfill nutritional requirements.
- Efforts to simultaneously increasing food AND nutrition knowledge, as well as engaging in lifelong learning and training activities.
- Focusing more on the cultural acceptability of food due to the nutritional implications of this.
- A much greater focus on maternal nutrition during pregnancy and lactation.
- An equal focus on food production and its consumption, because it is the latter that ultimately counts for sustainability.
- Bottle feeding and its nutritional consequences on marginalized urban and rural infants.
- Addressing key determinant of malnutrition as are water and sasnitation and health care.
- More forcefully exposing the problems of ultra-processed junk foods and beverages and their long term effects on nutrition and health.
- Measures to sustainably address stagnant breastfeeding rates in many parts of the world.
- Implementing community-based nutrition surveillance and monitoring schemes that sustainably track nutritional outcomes and, last but by far not the least,
- Treating the nutrition problems as part of the right to adequate food and nutrition with the correlative duties that go with it rather than treating them as a basic needs problem.
As appropriate and fitting, all these deserve explicit attention by all our strategic allies as much as (and not at all denying) all important food-related issues. It is only our joint efforts that will make headway on these issues.
What are the problems to overcome, what the solutions:
- We lack a ‘nutrition capacity’ in many of our strategic allies’ organizations; they employ no public health nutritionists so the critical mass needed to bring nutrition issues to negotiating tables is not there.
- What needs to become a consensus is that it is not nutrition or food as a focus; it is both. (Focusing on increasing production or the availability of macronutrients is for us a reductionistic solution).
- The market does not have the ability to resolve nutrition problems comprehensively and sustainably. At best it provides pat solutions since it ignores the social determination of the problems of malnutrition (both under and overnutrition).
- UN agencies are strapped for cash; they have ended up in a situation of increased financial dependence.
- Businesses now have a great say in UN bodies; they do not need to lobby any longer; they are in! This directly and indirectly affects the direction of food and nutrition policy and is eminently unsustainable.
- Food aid still has long term negative effects on local food producers.
- The world food crisis plays itself out primarily as a nutrition crisis (!).
- Global food policy fora still give nutrition considerations shortschrift.
- Increases in world food prices have serious effects on the levels of malnutrition and the prices of commodities are ultimately set by speculators.
- Abuse by TN actors often result in direct nutritional consequences with them getting away with impunity.
- Few colleagues proactively challenge different aspects of ‘nutritionism’, i.,e., the many single bullet approaches focused on solving one micronutrient issue at a time or pushing certain products or micronutrients in the battle against NCDs or aging. (e.g., Omega3…)
- The voluntary guidelines approach has been shown not to work.
- Interventions by TNCs are devastating livelihoods of entire communities with direct nutritional implications.
- Free trade agreements (FTAs) have shown to have negative nutrition consequences for the most vulnerable.
- The use of RUTFs for the prevention of malnutrition are a worry of growing numbers of public health nutritionists.
In this call, we do not want to be prescriptive or normative as regards solutions. Our main aim now is to create a consensus among strategic allies of the need to bring nutrition in ‘into the chess game’ and thus make it more sustainable. Which processes will be needed will depend on many circumstances and it is NOT for us, once again, to come up with packaged solutions. In the spirit of human rights, it is participatory processes that need to be set up to identify the problems and the actions to be taken, as well as the demands to be placed on the respective duty bearers. Only this with be empowering for sustainability.
We can foresee the need for all of us to become active to literally rescue the UN capture by private interests. Not only that. Also foreseeable is the need to reclaim governments from corporate capture –especially in the era of SUN.
World food system analyses will, from now on, have to always include nutrition considerations. We need to consistently speak of food and nutrition security (or of nutrition security since the latter includes food, care and health). We need to make sure that the links between agriculture and nutrition are urgently strengthened. We need to make sure nutrition becomes part of social protection and of social security schemes.
Jobs and decent wages will inevitably become part of the equation as will the diversification of smallholder agriculture.
Anyway, the list could go on and on and still not cover all the angles that local populations can cover much more aptly.
What are our hopes:
We would like to see the Right to Food and to Nutrition to go hand in hand in how it is dealt by all strategic allies.
If we had to state our vision in one paragraph on how things should be in our domain, we would say that people must be kept at the center of our endeavors; nutrition is part of people’s sovereignty and dignity. So we actually ought to be speaking of food and nutrition sovereignty. We cannot overlook that adequate nutrition is every bit as much a human right as food. Actually, nutrition per acre is a more accurate measure of agricultural productivity than the yield of a commodity in monoculture, somebody said. That sums it up nicely.
We are convinced that there are ways to move forward on what are now hopes. The point is that we need everybody to join-in to make it possible for changes to materialize.
Where we are where we need to go:
We know we are still in a minority among food and nutrition professionals. Unfortunately, some of our staunch strategic allies know little about nutrition and do not yet perceive the need for the incorporation we are asking for. There will be a learning curve that we will support. What is here ventilated needs widespread discussion among our strategic allies. Upcoming preparatory meetings for ICN2 are venues we expect will take these issues up. In one way or another, what is here discussed will find its way into the political sphere; and there is where it belongs.
Claudio Schuftan
Flavio Valente
Lida Lhotska
Stineke Oenema