Open discussion on the first draft work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition
On 1 April 2016, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, through its Resolution 70/259, proclaimed 2016–2025 the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition (hereafter referred to as Nutrition Decade). Under the normative framework of the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Nutrition Decade marks a new ambition and direction in global nutrition action to eradicate hunger and malnutrition in all its forms and reduce the burden of diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in all age groups.
The Decade is a global effort driven by Members States of the United Nations and convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and including other UN bodies and other entities such as the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN).
To ensure an inclusive, continuous and collaborative process, building upon and connecting the independent initiatives of governments and their many partners, several rounds of consultation have taken place, including through the FSN Forum. These discussions were an attempt to better understand the critical activities that need to be included in the work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition. More specifically these discussions aimed at identifying the activities that would need to be accelerated in countries and how all partners can better work together to improve the ambition and specificity of commitments and their implementation. FAO and WHO have drawn upon feedback from many stakeholders to produce the first draft work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition. This work programme is a living document, building upon and connecting the independent initiatives of governments and their many partners and will be adapted according to needs and lessons learned.
We now invite you to comment on the first draft that is presented here:
https://www.unscn.org/uploads/web/news/First-draft-Work-programme-Nutrition-Decade.pdf.
French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese versions of this text will be available on Monday 6 February.
Specifically, we invite you to share your views on how best to strengthen the Decade’s first draft work programme. You may want to consider the following questions:
- Does the work programme present a compelling vision for enabling strategic interaction and mutual support across existing initiatives, platforms, forums and programmes, given the stipulation of Res 70/259 that the Decade should be organized with existing institutions and available resources?
- What are your general comments to help strengthen the presented elements of the first draft work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition?
- Do you feel you can contribute to the success of the Nutrition Decade or align yourself with the proposed range of action areas?
- How could this draft work programme be improved to promote collective action to achieve the transformational change called for by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the ICN2 outcomes? What is missing?
- Do you have specific comments on the section on accountability and shared learning?
Your comments will be added to those received at a forthcoming meeting of the CFS Open Ended Working Group on Nutrition at FAO HQ on 10 February 2017. The FAO and WHO will produce a final work programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition to discuss with their Member States during the World Health Assembly (May 2017) and the FAO Conference (June 2017).
We thank you for your valuable contribution to this exchange.
UNSCN Secretariat, in collaboration with FAO and WHO
- Read 75 contributions
Thank for the opportunity. A few missing points are suggested.
Under Action Areas (Page.16)
There is adequate indication of the need to have integrated actions among the key players of nutrition. However the issue of close relationship of climate variability, change on food and nutritional security is completely ignored in the draft. Unprecedented changes in the weather will affect the access to food, food intakes behaviour etc.. especially during heat waves and droughts. Tacking Nutritional insecurities during of Climate Change and related disasters.
- It’s a very well known fact that Climate change could affect amount of food produced, variety and nutritional value of food and the Cost of food, However there is no mention of all these factors are not all mentioned in the the action plans .
- Not only food , the availability Water -the key source for maintaining the metabolism of the body – gets affected by Climate changes and Disasters
- Air pollution (GHG emission) has a direct bearing on the iron absorption rates in the body
- Tacking Nutritional insecurities during Climate Change Disasters: The disruption of transportation and communication facilities may impact emergency responses with respect to food security and nutritional securities (other natural disasters- Earthquakes .will take longer recovery period).
- Risks in the access to health services and finance -including the most marginalized and most vulnerable – during disaster period (Emergency, recovery / response period )is needed ( Page .6)
Under The aim
- “to end all forms of malnutrition and leaving no one behind; Whether this is completely achievable ?
- It may be better to have achievable aims as its very difficult to end the all forms of malnutrition.
Action area 1: Sustainable, resilient food systems for healthy diets
The report should analyze the concern of nutritional security with a Cross-sectoral livelihood perspective. Not only the small and marginalized strata. The modern lifestyles are actually adding to the malnutrition among rich strata of the society and children and old aged are the mostly hit category.
Action networks
- There should be an National Action Plan on Nutritional security and state level action plan for better implementation. There need to be nodal centre working to coordinate the activities for better implementation.[The establishment of an action network should be communicated to the joint FAO/WHO Secretariat in writing by the convening country. The joint Secretariat will also disseminate the action network information, news and tools]
Technical Support for implementation
The Nutrition Decade will strive to improve synergies in the provision of technical assistance by governments and international organizations in the context of development aid, as well as by NGOs, philanthropic foundations and the UN system.
In the backdrop of National vulnerability to nutritional insecurity, Governments is implementing various programmes and schemes for education, nutrition and health care for the women .To evaluate the efficiency of the Social Welfare Department’s various schemes of Ministry of Health and family welfare in improving the health and social status in children and women through qualitative and quantitative assessments based on Key Performance Indicators (KPI) could also be done. An online portal dash board showing the performance and achieved targets and key milestones with respect to each nutritional components can be taken up.
Governance
The Nutrition Decade will not seek to establish new structures but will facilitate broad consultation among stakeholders to seek alignment of priorities, policy instruments, and monitoring mechanisms.
To have a Micro level planning framework for monitoring and evaluation for the priority scheme/ area/district and ensure success in each plan is necessary.
NUTRITION WORK PROGRAM
Comments on draft January 2017
Diana Lee-Smith, Mazingira Institute, Nairobi
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on this important document. Additions are suggested to the Action Areas as follows:
1. SUSTAINABLE RESILIENT FOOD SYSTEMS FOR HEALTHY DIETS
In para 19, the definition of the food system should encompass production, processing, storage, transport, marketing, retailing, consumption, waste management and soil regeneration, to form a continuous system loop
2. ALIGNED HEALTH SYSTEMS PROVIDING UNIVERSAL COVERAGE OF NUTRITION ACTIONS
This action area should include practical measures on improving dietary diversity which is shown to be linked to obesity from overconsumption of fewer food groups specifically starches and sugars and lack of access to affordable fresh fruit and vegetables as well as other food groups.
These measures overlap with Action Area 1 on food systems, as well as Action Areas 3, 4 and 5.
These measures are: access to fresh foods through own production in rural and urban areas, plus support to small scale farming and ensuring affordable distribution through food networks in urban and peri-urban areas as well as rural to urban linkages.
3. SOCIAL PROTECTION AND NUTRITION EDUCATION
This links directly also to the dietary diversity measures proposed.
4. TRADE AND INVESTMENT FOR IMPROVED NUTRITION
The human right to adequate food links to the rights of small farmers to produce for their own subsistence as well as to trade locally. This is also linked to dietary diversity. In fact the right to dietary diversity and measures to achieve it should be included in the right to food through a new general comment by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
5. SAFE AND SUPPORTIVE ENVIRONMENTS FOR NUTRITION AT ALL AGES
Add a note on linking the improvement of sanitation and water supply to waste management and linking that to the safe recycling of solid and liquid wastes to soil improvement for better food production and thus improved dietary diversity in food systems.
Please find attached GOAL Global’s responses to the consultation on the decade of nutrition work programme. Please let me know if you would like any additional clarifications on the attached.
Kind regards
Sinead
PRESERVATION OF NUTRITIONAL CONTENTS OF FOOD IS VERY IMPORTANT.
It is very important, most especially in the rural area. The awareness of preserving food nutritional content in all aspects of food preservation, cooking and processing.
Ordinarily, after cooking, when the pot is left on the heat of the charcoal stove or hot plate that has been off, because of the volatility of some nutrients and vitamins, it will easily be destroyed. There is need to be careful when applying heat e.g roasting, grilling, toasting, baking, blanching etc. so as to retain all the nutritional content of the food products that is essential for the development of growth of the body.
Most rural area and even urban areas lack this knowledge and it is one of the major causes of malnutrition or nutritional deficiencies.
ASPIRATIONS versus GOALS
This is a comment on the first draft of the Work Programme of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition, 2016-2025, accessed at https://www.unscn.org/uploads/web/news/First-draft-Work-programme-Nutrition-Decade.pdf
The draft confuses long-term aspirations and concrete goals. Aspirations are about moving toward something, while goals are about actually getting to some well-defined destination by a specific time.
Paragraph 2 says that at the second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), “the global community committed to eliminate malnutrition in all its forms . . .” That is a good aspiration, but as presented in this draft, the actual plan is to reduce malnutrition in all its forms, not eliminate it. Eliminating all forms of malnutrition is not a realistic goal.
Paragraph 1 points out that there are many forms of malnutrition: “undernutrition, vitamin and mineral deficiency, overweight or obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).” Grouping them all together could lead to very diffuse assignments of responsibility, limiting the potential for holding any agencies accountable with regard to goal achievement. In pooling these issues together, there is a risk that resources would be shifted to favor goals that are achieved more easily, reducing attention to ones that are more important.
The FAO and the Committee on World Food Security generally focus on food insecurity, roughly equivalent to undernutrition or hunger. Given its great importance, a serious commitment and plan could be formulated to eliminate this one form of malnutrition by a specific date, while calling on the global community to reduce the other forms of malnutrition.
Accepting this would mean retaining the sentence in Paragraph 3 that speaks about ending hunger by 2030, but modifying the following sentence so that it speaks about reducing other forms of malnutrition.
With this approach, it would be useful to establish separate lines of responsibility for the ending part of the overall agenda, and others for the reducing parts. Different UN agencies could be designated to take the lead for different parts.
This would be a radical change in the Work Programme. It would lead to a far more serious approach to addressing the challenge of widespread and persistent hunger.
If the consensus is that ending hunger is not a realistic goal, that should be said and it should be explained. Speaking as if it is a realistic goal when key actors are convinced it is not would be unfair to all concerned.
George Kent
Professor Emeritus,
Department of Political Science
University of Hawai'i
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822
USA
Author, Caring About Hunger
http://www.lulu.com/shop/george-kent/caring-about-hunger/paperback/product-22919316.html
This activity is now closed. Please contact [email protected] for any further information.