Is Food the Answer to Malnutrition? - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 416

Food: A Resource in Search of a Cause
The first thing that governments and international organizations think of in their efforts
to combat undernutrition is food. Quite simply, the history of public action to com-
bat malnutrition, in developed and developing countries, has frequently conflated the
problem with issues of food security and access to food, and more generally the per-
formance of the agricultural sector and related issues such as food delivery, distribu-
tion, and subsidy programs. This is not entirely irrational since food, as noted earlier,
is a potentially important constraining input in the nutrition production function. But,
certainly, food is not always the answer. Nonetheless, consider the institutions that are
primarily responsible for raising nutritional standards: the United States Department of
Agriculture in the United States, and the Food and Agricultural Organization and the
World Food Programme of the United Nations among the U.N. agencies in the develop-
ing world. Or, historically, the Office of Food for Peace in the United States Agency for
International Development was an agency purportedly motivated by the objective of
better nutrition among the most needy populations. Programmatically, these institu-
tions have one thing in common: the imperative of responding to the needs of their pri-
mary constituents: farmers, those engaged in the marketing of food, and agribusiness,
as well as achieving the humanitarian goal of promoting access to food and improving
food security. The reality is that the “need” that food aid donors and food distribution
and subsidy programs are responding to is not reducing malnutrition, and their pri-
mary constituents are not the malnourished; instead, food surpluses was a resource in
search of a “cause,” and fighting malnutrition has proven quite convenient in that regard.
A first case to consider is the U.S. Food Stamp Program.5 The modern Food Stamp
Program has its genesis in the Food Stamp Act of 1964, although earlier iterations of the
program date back to the period of the Depression in the 1930s. Much of the political
rhetoric that justified and sustained this program revolved about improving nutrition.
Even in its enabling legislation and earliest years of application, however, there was an
understanding that the objectives of supporting agriculture and agribusiness were given
primacy over the needs of improving nutrition among the poor. Thus, the initial Food
Stamp legislation and the political support necessary for its passage was garnered from
U.S. farmers and the agribusiness lobby primarily concerned with supporting the agri-
cultural sector (Paarlberg 1963).
Regardless of its origins, the question has been and remains whether the Food Stamp
Act and subsequent modifications of the legislation constitute an effective nutrition
program, consistent with the stated objective of the program. Economists, nutritionists,
and other social scientists have searched for the answer for decades. The preponderance
of the evidence seems to point to the stark reality that the Food Stamp Program has not
been a cost-effective modality for combating malnutrition. This is not something that
has been realized only in recent years. Among the seminal studies was the early work
of Kenneth W. Clarkson (1975), who concluded that, “the failure of the food stamp pro-
gram comes generally from the inability of a single policy instrument to solve two or