Is Food the Answer to Malnutrition? - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 419

Over the decades, food aid programs have continued to evolve from their origins to
place greater emphasis on humanitarian relief and development programs. In fact, as
expected in light of the enormity of the resource, there are examples of positive impact
of food aid programs, particularly in response to drought, on nutritional outcomes (See,
for example, Yamano, Alderman, and Christiaensen (2005), and Quisumbing (2003)).
Nonetheless, the fact remains that there rarely is a compelling rationale to rely on food
aid rather than financial aid. The common perception that malnourished people need
food aid, not cash aid, is an idea no longer in good currency. Nonetheless, many non-
governmental organizations and food distribution organizations continue to perpetuate
such myths, even if well intended. Indeed, a range of actors involved in food aid pro-
gramming espouses the imperative of feeding the hungry and reducing malnutrition
through food distribution programs. But there is little evidence that they have done so
in a cost-effective manner that avoids deleterious unintended consequences, such as
disincentives to local producers and discouraging needed policy reforms and invest-
ments in the agricultural sector. Indeed, a range of stakeholders are reliant on food aid
as a resource to sustain their programs, and, thus, have been complicit in promoting
food aid and food-based assistance programs as the answer to the hunger problem. This
will not change until many misconceptions that underlie food aid programs are dis-
pelled. These include that poor people are less likely to waste food than money, and that
food aid, instead of financial aid, will help households avoid making bad consumption
choices; that food aid is a way of avoiding market inefficiencies that arise from greedy
monopsonist traders; and that when you give people food aid, they eat it instead of sell-
ing it to get cash that they need for a range of other purposes, such as schooling, health
care, and investment in small enterprises.
The lack of consistency between rhetoric and reality is not limited to the institutional
behavior of the U.S. government and aid agencies, where food programs have conflicting
objectives and are often promoted as nutrition programs despite that not being their pri-
mary purpose. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) serves as
another example of what could be characterized as an organization that espouses a pri-
mary focus on nutrition to motivate its work but, instead, has a number of other over-
riding objectives. According to its mission statement, “FAO's mandate is to raise levels
of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and
contribute to the growth of the world economy.”6 Despite this laudable statement, by all
indications, FAO falls far short of one of its central organizing themes of prioritizing
improved human nutrition.
Organizationally, the concern with human nutrition is primarily the domain of the
Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division (NCPD), which is organized into three
major groups. The first is Human Nutrition, whose mandate revolves around promot-
ing sustainable improvements in nutritional status, particularly of poor households,
through “actions to address local causes of malnutrition, improvements in national and
sectoral policies and programmes; support to civil society institutions . . . and enhance-
ment of education and public information.” The second is Food Safety and Quality,
which is charged with maintaining and improving food safety by establishing regulatory