III Towards Strategies for Inclusive Food Security and Poverty Reduction

The key issue then is how to bring about in a readily affordable manner an adequate consumption of an appropriate amount and variety of food amongst all those members of the population who are, sometimes unknowingly^[9], regularly living on a diet which does not allow them to lead a full, healthy and productive life. The concept is now increasingly accepted that a comprehensive programme to enable people to achieve full food security must move simultaneously on the twin tracks of bringing about sustainable long-term improvements in the livelihoods of poor people (including small-scale farmers) and of expanding the access of vulnerable people to a sufficient, varied and safe supply of food. This strategic approach is clearly enunciated in several FAO documents, including the Anti-Hunger Programme.^[10] It is also being promoted by the International Alliance Against Hunger, founded by FAO, IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), WFP (World Food Programme), IPGRI (International Plant Genetic Resources Institute) and some international NGOs (Non-governmental organizations).^[11] A higher level of food security opens the door for rapid progress in poverty reduction. It also contributes to better health, better learning, greater gender equality and a more sustainable management of natural resources, including biodiversity.

The first track addresses the need to create opportunities for food insecure people to attain sustainable improvements in their livelihoods wherever this is feasible. To the extent that most hungry people in developing countries live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihoods, it has long been recognised that improvements in the performance of small-scale farming can play a critical role in raising both farm production and food consumption, thereby contributing to both better household and national food security. There is also a growing awareness of the opportunities that urban and peri-urban agriculture offer for food-insecure city dwellers. However, even for rural people, not all solutions lie in agriculture, and hence food security programmes must also offer incentives and training, including literacy education, for people suffering from hunger and malnutrition to engage in employment in other sectors.

The second track recognises that, if the World Food Summit goal is to be met, safety nets of various kinds must also be put in place to enable people who are unable to meet their food needs either through increased production or through purchases to bring their consumption to adequate levels. Food-related safety nets may be required, as part of a broader social security programme, not only for the old, the disabled and the indigent, but also for infants and schoolchildren (especially orphans), for pregnant and lactating mothers as well as for the unemployed. Until comprehensive social welfare programmes can be put in place, each category may need to be served by tailor-made programmes.

Over and above such direct interventions, adjustments in macro-economic policy, especially policies affecting income and asset distribution including access to land, may be a prerequisite for success in cutting the incidence of hunger. Developed country policies on trade in farm products can also have major impacts on food security in developing countries, which will differ depending on the balance between urban and rural food insecure people.

The full benefits of such twin-track programmes can only be attained when they are designed and implemented in such a way that the two sets of activity become mutually supportive. By translating food needs into effective demand, programmes which expand food access can also stimulate growth in production through expanding markets. Similarly, when safety nets are conditional on beneficiary participation in educational programmes, whether formal (e.g. school feeding for children attending primary schools) or informal (adult literacy, skills training, farmers’ field schools, community learning groups etc), they open new opportunities in life for those who participate. For example, a school feeding programme based on local purchases can expand markets for poor farmers in the community and surrounding areas and, at the same time, improve the health, learning abilities and eventual employability of children, some of whom might otherwise not attend school. The effectiveness of such synergy will be greatest if programmes under each track are taken up simultaneously within the same communities.

The challenge is how to translate the persuasive concept of a twin-track approach to inclusive hunger reduction into large-scale but affordable programmes which can be adopted by the very low-income countries in which the incidence of food insecurity is high, markets are narrow, institutions are generally weak and fiscal resources - whether domestic or provided by donors - are horribly scarce.

Track One: Improving Livelihoods of the Poor, especially Small-scale Farmers

The focus of this section is on improving the performance of small-scale farmers, because this is recognised as being a central element in any food security strategy in countries in which poverty and hunger are heavily concentrated in rural areas. It is not intended to imply that structural measures aimed at reducing hunger through better livelihoods need necessarily be confined to rural areas nor that, even in rural programmes, there will not be an eventual need for very substantial investments in sustainable natural resources management, infrastructure and services. Nor does it imply that improving farm performance is the only route to enhancing rural livelihoods: creating opportunities for growth outside of primary production may be equally important.

Several programmes have successfully set out to show that it is possible to bring about substantial improvements in the performance of small-scale farming systems. These, in turn, can contribute to better household and community food security, to increases in national food availability and to greater local prosperity. When small-scale farmers’ production goes up and their incomes improve, they spend the money locally (unlike large farmers who spend much of it elsewhere) on labour-intensive goods and services that come from the rural non-farm sector. This can lead to improvements in the incomes of the rural population as a whole, including landless labourers who make up, in many countries, a large proportion of the rural poor. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that not all types of smallholder performance improvement necessarily trigger substantial local food security gains.^[12]

The strategy adopted by such programmes as FAO’s Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS) and Sasakawa Global 2000, has been to pilot approaches to improving small-scale farm productivity, with the intent that, once shown to be successful on a small-scale, they should be expanded to a national scale. These programmes have confirmed that, all around the world, small-scale farmers are prepared to innovate and can achieve rapid increases in agricultural production when provided with an appropriate mix of incentives and services.

Even though, however, these programmes are usually viable in their own right, their impact on the overall problem of food insecurity has so far been quite limited. There appear to be several reasons for this.

• First, they implicitly assume that all approaches to improving small-farmer performance and food security in rural areas have to be piloted. However, in most situations there are good opportunities to apply known solutions immediately on a large-scale while simultaneously piloting new approaches. Piloting, unfortunately, tends to encourage small-scale thinking and it is often difficult to break out of pilot mode, even when this is successful in demonstrating new and better ways of farming. The number of participants in these programmes can be counted in thousands whereas the problem of chronic undernourishment envelopes hundreds of millions.

• Secondly, the replicability of some piloted actions may be limited. Even though the intent in the SPFS and analogous programmes is to demonstrate the feasibility of simple, low-cost technology changes with wide potential applicability, a natural desire amongst their promoters to show convincing results tends to encourage a focus on innovations that lead to highly visible performance improvements. Gains in yield tend to be given more attention in reporting than improvements in net benefits and in household-level food consumption or reductions in vulnerability. Typically, performance improvements are attained by only relatively few farmers, who tend to be the more dynamic members of readily accessible communities and not representative of the poorest and most food-insecure amongst the population. The replicability of some pilot programmes may also be limited by their dependence on the intensive provision of technical advice by skilled and mobile technicians, on privileged access to inputs and productive assets, on relatively generous funding per beneficiary and on access to remunerative markets for incremental production. Paradoxically, the more impressive the performance gains attained by individuals in pilot programmes, the greater are likely to be the constraints in replicating them, if only because their achievement by large numbers of farmers places huge demands on services and requires more market "space" than is likely to be available, especially for high-value products.

• Thirdly, there is an implicit assumption in these programmes that almost any type of change which contributes to the better performance of small-scale farmers will result in improved food security in the rural population. There is room for sharpening their impact on hunger reduction by deliberately targeting the most food-insecure communities and households, focusing in the first instance on improving their self-provisioning capacities.

Taken together, these three observations suggest that there is room for enhancing the hunger-reduction impact of production-based programmes. The need is to look especially at the options for greatly increasing the number of people benefiting and for bringing down the costs per household affected. Where market-driven opportunities exist for improving food security, these should be given priority, as is the case in many of the more advanced developing countries and where there are large concentrations of urban population. However, especially in Least Developed Countries, many of the most food-insecure rural households are effectively cut off from functional input and output markets,^[13] even if demands for cash force them to sell and buy food on disadvantageous terms in markets where transaction costs are high and competition limited.

This suggests that increasing attention needs to be addressed to empowering food-insecure communities to identify the locally specific causes and incidence of hunger and to apply solutions which lie, in the first instance, largely within their own capacity - solutions which are not strongly dependent on functional markets or cash availability within the household and which place only limited demands on technical support services which, in many countries, are in a state of near-collapse. The aim would be to engage, within the shortest possible time, as many food-insecure communities as possible in a process which leads to the emergence of greater institutional self-reliance, and a higher level of self-provisioning where this provides the most efficient means of improving household food security and nutrition.^[14] As the process moves forward and communities gain confidence and are invigorated by better nutrition, they will increasingly articulate their requirements for externally provided services, the capacity of which will have to be progressively strengthened to respond to the growing demand.

Amongst the advantages of the approach outlined above are that it focuses directly on the most food-insecure families and that its costs and institutional demands are relatively light, since it requires little or no immediate investment in high-cost infrastructure or in large-scale permanent institutions within the public sector. While not denying the State’s ultimate responsibility for enabling citizens to enjoy the Right to Food, this approach also shifts the immediate responsibility for ensuring food security in the first instance from the government towards communities and individuals, thereby diminishing the risks of creating dependencies. It has potentially widespread applicability in situations in which food insecurity and malnutrition are essentially problems facing subsistence producers who lie beyond the reach of most services - and are likely to remain so for many years to come because of physical isolation and the prohibitive cost of overcoming this. It is particularly relevant for the many communities where hunger is essentially seasonal, with food stocks being lowest at the time of peak labour demand for planting and tending the next crop. Sub-optimal food consumption at this stage (which, because of the onset of rains, also often coincides with a high incidence of malaria and diarrhoeal diseases) negatively impacts on areas planted and on early crop care (and hence yields), locking farmers into a perennial hunger trap (see Box 1).

This is not to imply that such an approach is without risks. Communities are far from homogenous and comprise different groups with their special interests. Moreover, local élites may not be unduly concerned about the food security of their fellow villagers. Because of this, there are bound to be failures in any programme aiming for nation-wide coverage, but, as long as costs are kept low and the risk of anyone becoming more seriously food insecure as a result of the programme is minimal, the justification for seeking to maximise the reach of the programme and its inclusiveness would seem to be high.

Surprisingly, the perennial and seasonal nutritional problems faced by farmers living close to or below subsistence level have seldom been deliberately addressed in national food security programmes, but clearly have to be if these are to be effective in bringing about rapid reductions in the incidence of hunger. In many situations, very small farmers are more motivated and more open to changes than bigger ones, which may be explained by the fact that their survival is at stake and they have stronger incentives to reap extra gains.

It may be useful, therefore, to draw a distinction when designing production-related programmes for hunger reduction between situations in which farmers’ livelihoods can truly benefit from market access and those in which distress sales of food products under unfavourable market conditions may reinforce rather than alleviate food insecurity. The situation is far from static and there will be a growth in the number of the former in response to the general processes of economic development and growth, including conventional agricultural development programmes and the emergence of an effective private sector. However, the many rural people who will continue to lie beyond the impact of markets require programmes which:

• Deliberately aim to engage, on a voluntary basis and within the shortest possible time, the majority of rural communities in which there is chronic or seasonal hunger, targeting their poorest and most food-insecure members^[15], with the immediate aim of progressively improving the volume and the quality of their home-based food production and consumption in order to achieve a higher standard of nutrition. This will, in turn, imbue them with the physical and mental strength to become increasingly productive, resilient and able to take greater risks;

• Encourage processes of innovation by food-insecure households, derived principally from empowering them to raise and diversify food production and consumption by making better use, in the first instance, of the production factors and skills available within the community, combining these with a mix of indigenous and introduced knowledge. While the ultimate goal should be to develop stronger market linkages, the growth of self-reliance would be emphasised, at least initially, rather than greater dependence on finance, markets, services and inputs whose supply lies outside of the influence of the village and may, in any case, be very scarce nationally and not fiscally affordable;

• Induce these processes of change principally through participatory learning and skill development rather than "technology transfer". This would include improving school attendance and children’s learning, for instance by combining school feeding with introducing food and nutrition education into the curriculum, using school gardening and other practical food and nutrition activities as a platform for "learning". It would also involve rapidly expanding the capacity of adult education/extension systems to build competence at community level to cope better with both the production and consumption dimensions of food insecurity and to increase life-skills generally. Nutrition education, linked to the production, preparation and consumption of a greater variety of nutritious foods by all household members and especially the most vulnerable, would be of critical importance in such programmes. To be affordable, these must use systems in which the main actors are facilitators who are provided by and resident within the participating communities, backed by access to specialist advice and the use of modern mass communication technology, especially radio.

When financial resources are limited, the greatest aggregate gains in rural food security are likely to come from inducing rapid but relatively modest production and consumption gains where they are most needed. This implies a focus on very large numbers of small-holders rather than on achieving more visible yield improvements by fewer (and probably less hungry and malnourished) people. Undoubtedly the greatest challenge is to develop a low-cost and effective means of engaging the majority of rural food-insecure communities very rapidly in such a programme. Both the increasing experience being gained by many developing countries in the use of participatory farmer-driven approaches to adult education for empowering rural families to take greater charge of their livelihoods as well as the emergence of increasingly structured movements which represent the interests of small-scale farmers would seem particularly relevant to this challenge (see Box 2).

The full benefits of increased food availability and access at household level can be translated into good nutritional status only if the food is nutritionally adequate (i.e. in terms of both quantity and quality, providing sufficient energy, protein, vitamins and minerals), if it is safe and available at all times of the year, and if individuals are free from disease and therefore able to ensure the effective biological utilisation of the foods consumed. Knowledge and skills are necessary to acquire, prepare and consume nutritionally adequate diets, including appropriate care and feeding practices to meet the special needs of young children and women. Indeed, many people who show up in the statistics as chronically undernourished or malnourished may not be aware that, in following customary food consumption habits, they are not eating adequately for a healthy and fully productive life. This implies a need for food security programmes to include components for education in nutrition, food preparation and basic food safety and hygiene, as well as ensuring access to clean water and primary health care actions including, in many countries, education on reproductive health as well as diarrhoea, malaria and HIV-AIDS prevention. Nutrition education is relevant not only in situations in which there is widespread chronic undernourishment and malnutrition but also where obesity is emerging as a significant manifestation of malnutrition.

Track Two: Safety Nets

In considering safety nets, a distinction has to be made between acute and chronic hunger. There have been impressive advances in the development and implementation of early warning systems to detect potential acute food shortages and in the speed with which emergency safety nets can be put in place. Indeed, it can now probably be claimed that there are sufficient safeguards to prevent any large-scale famine occurring anywhere in the world in the foreseeable future, unless there is a catastrophic fall in global farm output. It is significant that, in recent years, donors have invested more in emergency food safety nets than in long-term agricultural and rural development.

In contrast, experience in developing countries in creating safety nets which ensure that the whole population is adequately fed at all times is still quite limited. Many governments look upon such programmes as unaffordable. Some may also consider them as dependence-inducing - though surely no condition can induce greater dependence or undermine human dignity more than hunger. In many cases, reliance has been placed on traditional coping systems, often based on mutual support within extended families, to ensure the survival of those who are unable to claim entitlements to adequate food supplies. But, because of changes in cultural values and migration as well as shifts in dependency ratios (for instance in communities affected by high HIV/AIDS incidence), many of these community and family-based protection systems are collapsing.

Countries such as Sri Lanka and Brazil which have put inclusive non-emergency food safety nets in place have made significant progress in reducing the number of hungry people. This suggests that such safety nets need to be part of food security programmes of countries committed to achieving the World Food Summit goal, which could otherwise remain out of reach. It is also likely that they are essential for the success of poverty reduction programmes more generally.

Many people tend to think of safety nets being required only when famines threaten or to protect only the indigent members of the population, especially the old, the disabled and the sick. In most developing countries, however, there are also many children, young people and potentially able-bodied adults who lack regular access to adequate food and whose ability to survive, learn, work and escape from poverty is thus seriously compromised. In countries which have experienced war or civil conflict, the most deeply food insecure may be disabled and handicapped people, single-headed households and individuals left without family and social support networks, including orphans and the elderly. Children are amongst the most vulnerable. WHO (World Health Organization)/FAO recently estimated that some 5 million deaths each year of children aged under 5 years in the developing world are associated with malnutrition.^[16] Inter-uterine growth retardation, due largely to poor maternal nutrition, affects 23.8% of babies or about 30 million children each year, profoundly influencing growth, survival, and physical and mental capacity in childhood and also increasing the risk of developing diet-related chronic diseases in later life. Measures which successfully address these manifestations of under-nourishment and malnutrition, including micro-nutrient supplementation, seem bound to generate very significant welfare and economic benefits.

The fiscal costs of safety nets depend very much on the accuracy with which they can be targeted on those who are vulnerable to food insecurity. Creating and continuously updating accurate information on eligibility is of critical importance for cost containment and ensuring that programmes succeed in benefiting those most in need. The selection of intervention measures can also contribute to an element of self-targeting - for instance if supplementary feeding is provided to women during pregnancy only when they visit pre-natal clinics or to workers who attend factory canteens. Costs can also be reduced to the extent to which they are shared by non-state parties, such as the beneficiaries themselves, employers, communities, families or NGOs. Devolving the responsibility for provision of safety nets in this way has the added benefit of reducing the risk of creating undue dependency on the state. It may also reduce risks of corruption. Finally, fiscal costs can be reduced by setting limitations on periods of eligibility to receive benefits, for instance through racheting down unemployment allowances over time.

Amongst the great advantages of safety nets in reducing hunger is that, in contrast to "developmental" approaches, especially ones requiring large-scale investments in infrastructure, they can have an immediate impact on nutrition and tend to be less institutionally demanding and cheaper, at least in the short term, per person benefiting. These advantages are partially offset by the risk of creating dependencies.

The more inclusive safety nets are intended to be, the wider the range of instruments needed, tailored to the particular needs of persons suffering from undernourishment or malnutrition induced by different causes. While this may complicate the design of comprehensive national food security programmes, it has the advantage that it is possible to build up safety net programmes progressively. It might be feasible, for instance, to begin with a pension system for the aged and infirm, then to add school feeding programmes linked to school gardens for children (Box 4) and micro-nutrient supplementation programmes for pregnant women and infants, and perhaps subsequently set up food banks and soup kitchens for the urban destitute.

There is considerable debate as to the relative effectiveness of the use of food (or food stamps) and cash allowances in contributing to improved nutrition and livelihoods. But there is an emerging consensus that all safety net programmes aimed at ensuring adequate food access for non-indigent populations should have built-in exit strategies, leading to a strengthening of not only the physical but also the intellectual capacity of the beneficiaries. In some cases (for instance for school feeding) these are self-determined, whereas others may involve conditionalities, for example when unemployment benefit payments are dependent on enrolment and regular attendance in skills training or adult literacy programmes. The institutional capacity to provide adult education and vocational training may, in many cases, be a limiting factor on the potential scale of safety net programmes to which training conditionalities are attached.

Food-for-work, inputs-for-work and food-for-training offer alternative approaches to improving food access which are largely self-targeting. Food-for-work is particularly attractive if used for the purpose of creating or maintaining valuable assets, such as feeder roads or irrigation schemes, constructed largely with manual labour during seasons in which the demand for farm labour is low. To the extent that food for such programmes can be purchased locally, this has the added advantage of stimulating local production and trading systems. In China, for example, provinces which have a comparative advantage in grain production have been targeted for procurement programmes to supply food-for-work in provinces which are served by the Poverty Reduction Programme (Box 4).

Joining Up the Tracks at Community Level

All too often, safety nets and production-improving approaches to food security are designed and operated in institutional isolation from each other, thereby losing valuable opportunities for synergy. The concept of a twin-track approach to hunger reduction at national level, as described above, is equally valid in a local context. Substantial and lasting progress in reducing chronic hunger and malnutrition is more likely to be attained if a twin-track approach is applied simultaneously at community level, with a deliberate effort to exploit the potential synergy between the two tracks. This implies a need for excellent coordination between the main responsible institutions, working within a decentralised environment and engaging communities in ways which reinforce their capacities to assume responsibility for all aspects of their own food security. Rural peoples’ organizations can play an important role in these processes.

Solutions are bound to be highly location-specific, built on each community's understanding of the nature, incidence and causes of its food insecurity, its knowledge of available resources, and its capacity for organising collective action, as well as the extent to which its members are persuaded of the need to eradicate hunger. The aim, at least in the first instance, would be to promote actions which can be undertaken by community members, acting individually and collectively, without substantial dependence on external assistance.

Examples of actions lying within the power of most rural communities include enabling poor households to have access to more water and land or to be given usufruct rights to grazing, forests or fishery resources. Similarly, in many situations, opportunities exist to convert family labour - especially out of the main crop season - into productive assets (e.g. water harvesting systems, pond construction, drainage, soil conservation) or productivity-increasing inputs (e.g. compost-making, mulching, better weeding, intercropping, fallow enrichment with agro-forestry species, or tree plantations). Without any dependence on external resources, these inputs can make a highly significant difference to food availability. Alternatively, from a nutritional and biodiversity conservation perspective there may be advantages in putting some labour and land resources aside for the production of crops which are rich in vegetable oil, protein, minerals or vitamins and for small-livestock species, in place of staples. Under yet other conditions, the goal may be to improve labour productivity, for instance, through shifting towards minimum tillage systems or improving hand tools. It may also lie within the capacity of communities to engage in various forms of collective action including, for example, to reduce pest damage both for standing and stored crops (e.g. through rat eradication drives). (Box 5).

As organisational skills develop within the community, the capacity to plan and manage investments will grow, increasing the potential viability of external funding, whether in the form of matching grants or credit.

Communities may also be in a position to set up various forms of safety net, largely with their own resources. One option is to provide leadership in reinforcing traditional coping systems, such as the use of "zakat" or tithes to ensure adequate food for the indigent. Parents may be able to contribute in kind or with their labour to school feeding programmes, especially if these can be kick-started with food grants. Farmers’ groups may see opportunities for reducing the length of seasonal food insecurity through organising for bonded storage of grains, or through arriving at collective decisions on adjusting planting calendars to provide for additional harvestable production during lean periods.

In addition to improvements in farming and the development of community-managed safety nets, food security would benefit from other changes at the household and community level that would contribute to overall improvements in livelihoods, including low-cost improvements to housing, water supply and sanitation.

Community empowerment is probably best facilitated and encouraged through an adult education and skills development process, including participative demonstrations and technology development, farmer-to-farmer extension, study circles and field schools, reinforced by radio or TV, all aimed at progressively building up local human capital assets. Of particular relevance is the experience of self-financing farmers’ field schools which has evolved spontaneously in IFAD/FAO programmes in East Africa, whereby the sales of produce from experimental and commercial plots managed by farmers’ groups generate sufficient income to meet the costs of future field schools including the eventual cost of any purchased inputs (Box 2, above).

If such approaches are to be followed, four important sets of action are required.

• The first and most challenging is to translate the political commitment to reduce hunger into a truly national effort in which everyone is encouraged to take part. This implies: (a) Sensitising people to the advantages that hunger eradication brings to the well-being of the nation, (b) Creating a mechanism to record, publicise and track commitments to action made by government ministries, civil society and individuals, and (c) Encouraging communities to take charge - to the extent possible - of their own food security.

• Second is the need to deepen an understanding of the incidence and underlying causes of food insecurity within countries as a basis for improved targeting. Many countries are already engaged in such processes through their participation in FIVIMS (Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping Systems), but most have still to make the connection between their growing awareness of food insecurity, the design of strategies, programmes and projects, and improved targeting.

• Third is the creation of a capacity for facilitating adult education/empowerment processes in very large numbers of rural communities over a short period without unduly increasing the size of the public service. This requires setting up large-scale training-of-trainers programmes, aimed principally at training facilitators for community-based learning, selected by and resident within concerned communities. Beyond this, it is necessary to address other key institutional factors including linkages with service providers, including the private sector and farmers’ organizations, and cooperatives. Further benefits can be obtained through the use of mass communication methods, especially rural radio programmes. Training would cover a range of technical subjects relevant to improved food security, including problem diagnosis, improved agricultural methods; family planning, nutrition, hygiene, intestinal parasites, malaria, HIV/AIDS; safety nets; literacy; gender empowerment; formation and management of self-help groups; and the development of secondary industries.

• Finally there is also a need to create or reinforce a programme planning and management, monitoring and technical support capacity, relying, to the extent possible, on modern communications systems.

Communities should be encouraged to meet the costs of food security programmes, to the extent possible, from their own resources. Some external financial support, however, may be required, especially to meet the start-up costs of safety nets until these begin to create an increased productive capacity as a result of better nutrition within the community. In many countries, this need has been met through food aid, but often with the risk of reducing incentives for expanded local production. To the extent that adequate financing can be identified, provision of funds for purchase of food on the local market seems bound to have a greater multiplier effect than internationally sourced food aid, by shifting substantial amounts of additional resources into the local economy.^[18]