Is Food the Answer to Malnutrition? - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 420

frameworks. And the third is the related role of Codex Alimentarius, which is focused
on protecting consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in food trade and developing
and promoting food standards ( http://www.fao.org/ag/agn/index_en.stm ). Although
the latter two roles are certainly of great importance, the focus of the work on human
nutrition is the domain of the Human Nutrition group. The question is how much pri-
ority FAO accords to direct measures to improve nutritional status is indeed a difficult
question to address. It is possible to gain some insights from looking at staffing and the
organization's budget. In 2006, the most recent year for which I could get reliable data,
the NCPD consisted of a staff of 21 members and 10 consultants. The overall budget for
the unit was less than $2.5 million. This number needs to be put into perspective, given
that FAO's budget exceeds $1 billion. Thus, only a couple of tenths of 1% of the total bud-
get is allocated to the nutrition division.
Of course, this does not mean that other units throughout the organization ignore
nutrition-focused programming and research. For example, there is the Special
Program on Food Security (SPFS) that was started in 1994/1995. The motivation for set-
ting up this special unit, however, was to address problems of food insecurity by assisting
farmers to increase the intensity of production and raise productivity. Similarly, there
are research units within FAO, such as the Agricultural and Development Economics
Division, which have an interest in issues related to nutritional improvement but whose
main focus tends toward issues of food production and food security. Perhaps the unit
that has paid most attention to nutrition at FAO is the small Global Perspective Studies
Unit which has been tracking dietary changes and examining the implications, espe-
cially in terms of the emerging epidemics, obesity, and chronic disease. Although this
is, again, a rare example of a unit that has gone beyond a focus on the supply side of the
food and agricultural system and related issues of marketing and the supply chain, it
is a very small group that does not reflect the mainstream programming and research
efforts of FAO.
The fact that improving nutritional status is not the core mission of FAO does not in
any way denigrate the institution's possible contribution to promoting a more robust
agricultural sector and achieving food security. This is similar to the story of programs
like the Food Stamp Program, which may indeed be very effective in improving the
economic well-being of the poor, an objective that is of paramount importance. My
highlighting of examples such as food stamps and the activities of FAO is intended to
underscore the general point that although raising incomes and promoting food secu-
rity are instrumentally valuable in the longer-term efforts to alleviate malnutrition,
including overnutrition that is often the result of poor food choices, these activities are
not synonymous with cost-effective strategies to reduce malnutrition over the near-term
horizon. Instead, there is a shorter and more direct path to improving nutrition, which
is often neglected at the expense of other initiatives that have captured the attention
and resources of a range of governmental institutions and stakeholders in interna-
tional and nongovernmental organizations. Instead of a continued focus on meeting
the needs of producers, agribusiness, and the farm lobby first, we need to understand
that the fight against malnutrition begins with a set of principles that have, in fact, been