Executive Summary

The Context

World agriculture has been highly successful in increasing average food availability per person by about 20% while the population has more than doubled in less than 50 years to over 6 billion people. Global food supplies are ample to meet everyone’s essential needs, yet over 800 million people are chronically undernourished. At the other end of the spectrum, over-consumption of food, reflected in a rapidly rising incidence of obesity, is now regarded as a major cause of ill health.

Much of the increased food output has been from small farmers in developing countries, especially in Asia. Even, however, in those countries which have been most successful in raising smallholder output, such as India and China, many millions of people, both rural and urban, continue to be chronically undernourished. The failure to make significant progress towards hunger eradication since 1996, when governments attending the World Food Summit (WFS) committed themselves to halve the number of undernourished persons by 2015, suggests that either the wrong measures are being used or that the size of interventions is simply too small. The fact that some countries have been successful in making rapid cuts in hunger implies that the Summit goal remains attainable. However, this will require changes in tactics and in the sequencing and scale of actions by countries which continue to be faced with widespread food insecurity.

A much more determined effort to reduce hunger and malnutrition can be justified on moral grounds. But the economic justification is also strong because improvements in food security, especially in food energy consumption, open the way for faster economic growth and poverty reduction. Measures to reduce hunger are thus an essential ingredient of any Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Hunger reduction also plays a vital role in the achievement of other Millennium Development Goals, especially those relating to poverty reduction, health, education, gender and the environment.

Hopefully, those who now enjoy the benefits of global prosperity will come to recognise that it is also in their self-interest to invest in fast-track hunger eradication, given the potentially destabilising impact of the apparent links between hunger, extreme poverty, social exclusion, conflict and terrorism.

Increasingly, developing countries are signalling their determination to embark on national-scale food security programmes and are seeking guidance from FAO on how to approach their formulation. This paper touches on a number of key programme design issues.

Towards Inclusive Approaches to Hunger Reduction

Success in achieving the WFS goal requires the adoption by committed countries of an inclusive approach to hunger reduction, which addresses all the main underlying causes of the different manifestations of food insecurity and malnutrition. If fast progress is to be made in hunger reduction, this will normally require simultaneous large-scale action along two main tracks. The first track involves creating opportunities for food insecure people to make sustainable improvements in their livelihoods wherever this is possible. Given that most food insecurity in developing countries is in rural communities, measures which enable small-scale farmers and landless people to raise their household food energy consumption and the quality of their diet through improving farm productivity and product diversity are an essential ingredient of any food security strategy and bring both household and national level benefits. However, even for rural people, not all of the solutions lie in agriculture. Hence food security programmes also need to offer training and incentives for people suffering from hunger, whether country or city dwellers, that expand employment opportunities in other sectors.

The second track must ensure immediate access to adequate food for those who cannot in the short term acquire the means either to produce or to purchase the food needed for a full and healthy life. Safety nets are required not just in emergency situations. Ideally they should be part of a broader social security programme, not only for the old and indigent, but also for infants, school-age children and pregnant and nursing mothers as well as the unemployed, linked where possible to training opportunities so as to reduce the creation of dependencies.

When these two tracks to improved food security are applied simultaneously, especially within the same communities, they can be mutually reinforcing. For example, school feeding programmes, based on local procurement of food, not only have the immediate effect of improving children’s nutrition and learning abilities but also generate an expanded demand for local products which, in turn, opens new earning opportunities for the rural poor.

Some Issues in Programme Design

The challenge is to translate these concepts into programmes which match the scale of the hunger problem, which respond to the urgency of addressing the needs of the hungry and which are fiscally affordable for poor countries. The impact of current international programmes, such as FAO’s Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS) and Sasakawa Global 2000, is undoubtedly positive but still very small vis-à-vis the sheer magnitude of the hunger problem. Although their scope is broadening, the main focus of such programmes has been on raising small farmer production rather than specifically on improving household food security. They are convincing in confirming that, at a pilot scale, small-scale farmers can make large productivity gains. However, they are relatively expensive per participating family, heavy in their demands for support services and, as they expand, quickly run into market and institutional constraints which can only be addressed through very substantial investments in infrastructure and services. Paradoxically, the more impressive the yield gains achieved by a few farmers in pilot programmes, the more difficult their large-scale replication may become. Indeed, one of the problems is that the growth in demand for farm products within most countries is too slow to sustain the high rates of agricultural growth perceived as being necessary for rural poverty reduction. With liberalisation, farmers tend also to be confronted with long-run declines in commodity prices and a progressive rise in input costs. This suggests that the aggregrate food security impact of agricultural improvements may be greatest if quite modest advances in performance are achieved by very large numbers of the most needy households who themselves will utilise at least part of any incremental output in improving their own household nutrition standards and hence their productive capacity.

By offering essentially market-based agricultural responses to the problems of chronic hunger and malnutrition, current programmes provide good opportunities for families served by functional markets to improve their livelihoods. They do not to respond, however, to the particular needs and opportunities facing those members of the rural population who themselves suffer most from food insecurity - the many small-scale farmers and landless people who live close to subsistence level. These lie largely outside the influence of effective trading and exchange systems and beyond the reach of technical services which, themselves, may be weak. They may produce enough food to meet the year-round needs of their families but have insufficient cash earnings to meet obligations - a situation which often forces them to make "distress sales" at harvest time of the food that they need for survival, only to assume new debts to buy food as well as seed at a higher price to meet needs during the "hungry season". Here, there is a need to extend the reach of programmes so as to empower such vulnerable families to attain a higher and more stable level of nutrition through taking up low-cost measures which make the fullest possible use of locally available resources (including land and water resources, family labour and local knowledge), converting these into expanded output and a better diet which, in turn, offers a foundation for further livelihood improvements. There are many convincing examples of sustainable improvements in small farm performance which have relied little on purchased inputs. They have, however, received far too little attention in extension work which has focused most attention on promoting purchased inputs including seeds of improved varieties, fertilizers and pesticides as the keys to improved farming methods.^[1]

The need for safety nets is growing because of the collapse of many traditional family and community-based food security mechanisms largely because of emigration, urbanisation and changes in cultural values. This has left large numbers of people, in both rural and urban areas, extremely vulnerable to food shortages. Wherever countries have suffered from prolonged conflict, displaced and disabled persons as well as orphans are particularly susceptible to food insecurity and require tailored interventions.

Probably the most challenging task is to design and implement safety nets in such a way that they are targeted on those most in need, that the benefits actually reach the intended beneficiaries and that they do not create long-term dependencies. Initially these issues can, to a certain extent, be circumvented by the use of essentially self-targeting safety nets, such as school feeding programmes, supplementary feeding for pregnant and lactating mothers, soup kitchens or food-for-work. But as more comprehensive safety nets are put in place there is a need to create and continually update reliable registers of social security programme beneficiaries, which take account of changing family circumstances (employment, family size, age of children etc) and which are perceived as just and fair in their selection. Secondly, there is a requirement for reporting and monitoring systems which successfully identify and make it possible to address any problems of maladministration. Thirdly, training programmes need to be built up which ensure that young people and potentially able adults benefiting from safety nets can acquire knowledge, literacy and skills which will reduce risks of dependence and expand opportunities for their gainful employment. The institutional capacity to meet these three requirements may be a limiting factor on the potential scale and reach of safety nets.

It is equally important to make the most of the potential synergy between the livelihood improvement and safety net dimensions of inclusive food security programmes, especially at community level. This implies a need for excellent coordination between the main institutions responsible for different aspects of food security which, in most countries, have worked independently from each other, except during food emergencies. Working within a decentralised environment, they need to engage communities in ways which empower them to assume responsibility for improving the food security of their members in an inclusive manner, falling back on extra-community assistance only when the task exceeds their capacities.

A further major issue to be addressed in developing national food security programmes is to create an institutional means of engaging very large numbers of communities and families, both rural and urban, in the quest for better food security and nutrition. This is a particular challenge, given the virtual collapse of agricultural extension systems in many developing countries. Other problems include the general lack of decentralised institutional mechanisms for interdisciplinary action, involving both government and civil society, and the relatively limited experience in the use of participative approaches to diagnosing problems and finding solutions.

A number of developing countries have, however, gained encouraging experience in developing and implementing adult learning systems such as farmers’ field schools, which, instead of following a linear approach to technology transfer, empower groups of people to diagnose problems and to find and apply solutions. While originally developed to promote integrated pest management (IPM), these systems have been adapted to enable people to address many other aspects of their livelihoods and food security. There are now enough precedents to suggest that they can be used effectively to enable rural people to diagnose the location-specific nature and causes of food insecurity and to test and apply practical solutions.

The effectiveness and reach of such systems can be increased and the costs brought down through the training and use of facilitators drawn from within the communities in which they serve. This not only increases ownership and makes important savings in transport costs but enables them to be expanded very rapidly. Recent experience with farmers’ field schools shows how fiscal costs can be further reduced and programme sustainability increased by using sales from jointly managed test and commercial plots or small livestock units to meet future facilitation expenses and costs of materials. This low cost approach makes it affordable to build up and maintain programmes with a very large outreach. The key to success, however, is that farmers should wish to participate in such learning opportunities, and hence the maintenance of high quality facilitation services is central to their success. The principal investments are in training-of-trainers, development of linkages with sources of relevant technical expertise and creation of supportive mass communications systems, such as rural radio. Farmers’ organizations can play a leading role in promoting such approaches amongst their members and in monitoring the quality of training.

Common Features of Successful National Programmes

There is a healthy diversity in the approaches being taken by developing countries to the launching of nation-wide food security programmes. Some see these as being the product of the scaling-up of the many initiatives which are already making a contribution to food security in their countries. Others take the WFS goal of halving the number of chronically undernourished persons by 2015 as a starting point and include all the elements required for this. In countries which subscribe to the concept of the Right to Food, the driving force becomes the need to ensure that this right is fulfilled.

Whatever the starting point and strategic goal, successful NFSP necessarily have several common features, including:

• Strong and visionary leadership which makes the elimination of hunger a truly national goal, in the attainment of which all citizens feel that they can play a part.

• Good governance, economic and social stability, and peace.

• The full engagement not only of governments but also of civil society institutions within alliances whose members combine forces to work jointly on an interdisciplinary basis to undertake very practical actions towards eradicating hunger.

• A supportive policy and legal environment which addresses such issues as subsidies, tariffs, exchange rate, decentralisation and access to land and water resources, as well as the right to food.

• A monitoring and evaluation system, able to generate reliable information on programme impact and costs as well as to minimise risks of corrupt administration.

Possible Programme Components

Components of national food security programmes will vary from country to country, responding to local needs and opportunities. Where programmes are intended to be inclusive, they are likely to involve many of the following elements.

When, as is often the case, resources are too scarce to adopt all components, priorities need to be set. In most countries, it will be necessary to focus on measures which can bring about rapid improvements in household food security even in the absence of good infrastructure and services. This will usually imply a focus on a combination of sustainable small-holder development aimed at improving local food consumption using participative learning processes, and safety nets for mothers, infants and young children.

International Support

The concept that hunger eradication is a shared responsibility for all nations is central to the WFS and Millennium Development Goals processes. In line with this, a situation must be created in which low-income developing countries which show their determination to achieve the WFS goal can feel confident that they will be able to call successfully on international technical and financial support as needed to complement their own resource commitments. One of the major tasks facing the International Alliance Against Hunger (IAAH), created in 2003, is to put this concept of reciprocal responsibilities into practice.

As food security programmes are scaled up, FAO must deliberately assume a less dominant role than in pilot phase SPFS projects, leaving ample space for national ownership and effective partnerships to emerge. FAO can catalyse the process through offering to assist in advocacy for the emergence of National Alliances Against Hunger; in assessing the nature, extent and location of hunger; in helping to prepare strategic plans for hunger reduction and assisting in national food security programme design; engaging partners, including through South-South Cooperation; training and building institutional capacities for programme implementation (including monitoring and evaluation systems), and networking between programmes.

There is a danger of underestimating the difficulties of setting up and implementing large-scale national food security programmes - and, indeed, they are formidable, not least because of the need to motivate all the key players, many of whom have to live and work under very difficult conditions. To the extent, however, that leaders succeed in having the goal of getting rid of hunger accepted as a national challenge, involving everyone and not just the state, the chances of success increase greatly. Boldness in the quest for an end to hunger is well justified, given the lifelong damage it inflicts on millions of fellow-humans, even if results may sometimes fall short of expectations.