You say: ‘The Report shall consider food chains from farm to fork and all the sustainability challenges of food systems (in the economic, social and environmental dimensions) and how they relate to nutrition’.
I cannot comprehend why the political dimension is left out.
You say: ‘This calls for a report grounded on a multidisciplinary approach’.
But Attempts at acting in the context of the basic causes (you say root causes) of malnutrition departs from a flawed analysis of reality and have consequently mostly failed (and are doomed to continue to fail). Among the most prominent of these are Multidisciplinary Approaches to solve the problems of so many different human rights violations, the right to food included. There is nothing terribly wrong with this concept, but it just gratuitously assumes that looking at the problem of these violations from a ‘wider’ multi-professional perspective is going to automatically lead us to the better, more rational and egalitarian solutions.
The call for multidisciplinarity, for sharing paradigms amongst the different scientific disciplines where practitioners come from, falls under the same optic of my criticism all along. Just by putting together brains ‘sowed’ differently, without considering where they are coming from ideologically, is not going to, all of a sudden, make a significant difference in the outcome and the options chosen. They may well stay in the domain of addressing the immediate causes of malnutrition, only now everybody involved contributing a small monodisciplinary window to the package of (still pat?) solutions proposed. Multidisciplinary approaches --as opposed to a dialectical approach-- simply most often take the social and political context (i.e., the individual and institutional power relations) as given; they, therefore, end up being conservative in their recommendations.
You say: ‘The report shall examine issues across the human life cycle (including esp. pregnant, lactating women, children, and elderly), including marginalized and vulnerable populations’.
Yes, in the SDGs there are many calls to pay special attention to the most disadvantaged in society and to adequately meet the needs of mothers and their children, especially the most disadvantaged. But these calls reflect the philosophical position known as ‘prioritarianism’ which is favored by all those critical of any type of egalitarianism --the core basis of human rights. Prioritarianism is based on a misguided humanitarian concern, i,e., to help to improve the situation of people living in extreme poverty --but without any reference to the need to reduce the appalling disparities underlying it. According to prioritarianism, it is morally most important to help people who are worse off --but not addressing the degree of inequality in the society they live in. What is important from the moral and human rights point of view is not that everyone should have the same, but that each should have enough. If everyone had enough, it would be of less moral consequence whether some had more than others.
You say: ‘The Report shall improve the capacity to follow-up transitions and evolutions through the provision of a conceptual framework that might be used in the future’.
Don’t we already have a time-proven framework analyzing the three levels of causality of malnutrition. Will the HLPE be adapting it or will it be working on another (of too many) alternative, but not necessarily better frameworks?
You say: ‘There is a need for a multifaceted approach, including a need to understand the internal and external (e.g. socio-demographic, environmental, and global changes such as climate change) drivers’.
Again, why is the probably key political driver left out? Look at the determinants of the TNCs’ agribusiness food system: How can it be countered if not politically?
Finally, you say: ‘In addition to assessing what is new, the report provides an opportunity to examine what is promising – either as a continuation or revitalization of existing and long-standing food systems’.
I cannot understand why the HLPE leaves out the discontinuation option… It certainly is as important, isn’t it?
Claudio Schuftan