To make investments in nutrition work for nutrition – you have to dress ‘nutrition’ in different clothes. Nutrition is really difficult to sell at face value; the mover-shakers of the mainly donor-funded development world need to be attracted into investing in some other way – and you also have to encourage recipients to think differently. Would you rather have a high dam, a new capital city or a national nutrition programme if you ran the government? How do you want to be remembered?
Reading some of the original contributions a first easy-to-make assessment is that there are simply too many nutritionists involved with the debate, and insufficient (may be none-at-all) contributors from the politico-financial and commercial sectors. When you have a firm viewpoint, and particularly where it has a platform that is >100% morally sound, it is hard to step back and see the ‘trees in the forest’; that ‘forest ‘is simply too large. But this is exactly what needs to be done.
Of course nutrition, human health, equality of choice, gender issues and similar are all deserving of investment. And, if your country is rich enough and has the right kind of leadership, the social issues/investments of the day will continue to play a role in national development. You, representing the public, will ensure that this is the case. (Well, in an ideal world that is).
But what do you do if you cannot get access to sufficient public funding because, for example, you live in a poor country, you come from an isolated community, your people are not represented in government and so on (and this not forgetting the >60% of humanity who are illiterate, female, handicapped, elderly, young, unemployed and more – and frequently double or triple disadvantaged). You have to mobilize resources as best you can; and you have to promote, badger, provoke, encourage those better placed to take an interest. In short you have to use stealth, cunning, ingenuity and brilliance - to dress up your nutrition proposals (and others) within a guise that will ‘sell’.
You have to advertise and sell your ideas. And if the recipient public sector where you live is not interested, then you have to sell into the donor community and/or the private sector (and, for best, both at the same time). Which means finding out what interests these sectors, and tailoring your proposals to meet their investment requirements. You need to get to know these people.
Allied to this is the need to ‘think differently’ – to put yourselves into the shoes/offices/Landcruisers of the people whom you need to meet; those whom you need to persuade to your point-of-view.
Access to funds
Earlier this year those of us in the development industries were presented with findings from a number of sources that showed of the order US$21T (i.e. $21,000,000,000,000 - say it slowly) was currently held off-shore in the international tax havens by the so-called ‘super-rich’. Even this staggering figure may be substantially under-estimated, and it could be as high as US$35T. Off-shore funds come from a number of sources – typically countries with mineral, oil and gas resources and, crucially, those that are controlled by minority cliques for which there is no redress at the ballot box. So, things are unlikely to change any time soon. These countries are led by Russia, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, respectively, with estimates of US$800B, US$340B & US$340B shifted off-shore during the past 20 years or so. The key issue here is simple to understand – once off-shore - these funds are no longer available for use within the country of origin.
So, what’s this got to do with nutrition and the FSN debate? Hang-on, we’re getting there, but you can probably already catch the drift of this particular contribution.
Ethiopia
Here is a short digression. Just on five years back I was involved with a food security project in Ethiopia – providing management from an office in Addis Ababa, working with the communities involved in the Northern Shoa and around Mekelle and generally trying to ensure delivery of socio-techno-economic packages for the estimated 90,000 target people involved. We had a budget of the order US$4.2M; and it was the largest project of its kind with the agency of the day. We did reasonably well, and follow-on activities continue to the present with new management, more communities, similar objectives and more – more funds too.
We undertook nutritional surveys of selected communities to help determine delivery and success with meeting objectives, etc. Summarizing findings in isolated hill country in what is one of the poorest countries on Africa, nutritional determinants were of the order 47%, 11% & 43%, respectively, for stunting, wasting & underweight for kids <5 years old. Terrible health/emergency results that we were able to target with our budgetary support for local investment – food, schools, sanitation, energy, clean water and more. Equally, we used our network of contacts to promote the project and its needs within our local donor community; no good being successful in the field if those in the capital city remain unaware of things. (This means networking, people, publications & promotion.)
We also looked sideways into private sector investment, for example, exploring wool production & sales with the largest blanket manufacturer in the country (who manufactured mainly on the basis of imported used fibres), use of fuel ethanol as an alternative to manure, baby-food production, dairy-cow/milk industries and foreign tourism – a day’s travel from Addis and the country provided pre-historic pristine walking opportunities (and the Ethiopian wolf Canis simensis); all it needed was a new rest house with clean beds and hot showers. And other opportunities.
Messages? You cannot sell the nutritional needs of your community easily when there are 80 million others in the country – most of whom face similar challenges. You cannot always plan on national-scale. But, all that said, Ethiopia country-wide has represented a success story for Africa during the past 10 years.
Country investment
But what if you need to plan nationally? Take a hypothetical country in West Africa - hypothetical remember. Consider an indigenous population of estimated 170M people with population increases of the order 2.5% pa and projected to be 475M by 2050 – already the issues are looking daunting. National planning is underway – always – and we know that GDP is rising of the order 7% annually (so, reasonable) on the basis of sector developments of which ‘agriculture’ dominates, but continues to trail manufacturing, services, oil&gas and others as a recipient of investment – yet estimated 70% of the population continue to depend upon agriculture for a living; and, coincident – coincident - 65% of the national population remains in ‘abject’ poverty – so, not just poor, but really poor (and this definitive sector is growing 5% annually).
Did someone mention ‘oil&gas’? Responsible for 19% of GDP, the sector provides 95% of foreign exchange and >80% of budgetary resources in support of a complicated national management structure that encompasses 36 state governments and one federal government. What options for those budgetary resources filtering down to the man/woman in the bush/street? The commercial sector, by contrast, impacts on just about everyone. Sure, people make profits by participating – sometimes really useful profits – from cement, telecom, banking, manufacturing and, of course, oil&gas. In our hypothetical country all these sectors have made money. Could these entrepreneurs with their assets and advisors shift into agriculture, agro-industries and agro-services? Some have done so already.
Investing in agriculture
But their investment is piecemeal, relatively low-key and sometimes high risk. Further, industrialization of agricultural production means investment in technologies, equipment, structures, water, etc. and, crucially, limited numbers of high quality people. What of the masses in the country that are already poor, imprisoned in rural subsistence systems and with little or no hope of change, but occupying that same land that is needed for larger-scale investment?
From here-on you can shift into the smallholder/organized agricultural production models or the larger-scale plantation models that carry less financial risk (but the much more difficult socio-economic risks of landless people migrating). And, the key element of this particular contribution? Here-in is the wardrobe of clothes required of nutrition development.
You shift into national, regional and zonal development that channel blocks of investment across the focus land areas; this is land-linked to producer-zones-linked to agro-industrial-parks-linked to markets-linked to towns, cities and/or ports. Sure, this has objectives to boost agro-production, improve socio-economic performance, rural well-being and just about everything else required of people; but you don’t bring nutrition in until the middle-game, when you need to count the number of school gardens, the number of kids attending secondary school, the number of buses linking producers to markets, the number of new jobs in the community and so on.
And if the title of the debate ‘Agriculture working for nutrition’ is too obvious – just think; with urbanization continuing apace worldwide that first generation born in the city will, like the majority of people everywhere see ‘agriculture at the supermarket’ – and then it simply becomes that much more challenging to convince kids (and their parents) that nutrition and dietary patterns begins with crops, livestock, fisheries and the rest of the natural world.
Get the point?
Key words: Private sector investment.
PS. And that off-shore money to which reference was made earlier? Governments in the countries concerned are unlikely to change over-night and thus the complexity and challenges of sharing national resources within the mass population will continue; but you can’t abuse, channel, cream and/or lose funds of this magnitude with agriculture as easily as you can with a ‘pump-it-and-shift-it’ industries like oil&gas. Don’t lose sight of the key role of agro-production & agro-industrialization in the race to boost nutrition.
Colleagues,
Investment in nutrition needs stealth to succeed
Thinking differently
To make investments in nutrition work for nutrition – you have to dress ‘nutrition’ in different clothes. Nutrition is really difficult to sell at face value; the mover-shakers of the mainly donor-funded development world need to be attracted into investing in some other way – and you also have to encourage recipients to think differently. Would you rather have a high dam, a new capital city or a national nutrition programme if you ran the government? How do you want to be remembered?
Reading some of the original contributions a first easy-to-make assessment is that there are simply too many nutritionists involved with the debate, and insufficient (may be none-at-all) contributors from the politico-financial and commercial sectors. When you have a firm viewpoint, and particularly where it has a platform that is >100% morally sound, it is hard to step back and see the ‘trees in the forest’; that ‘forest ‘is simply too large. But this is exactly what needs to be done.
Of course nutrition, human health, equality of choice, gender issues and similar are all deserving of investment. And, if your country is rich enough and has the right kind of leadership, the social issues/investments of the day will continue to play a role in national development. You, representing the public, will ensure that this is the case. (Well, in an ideal world that is).
But what do you do if you cannot get access to sufficient public funding because, for example, you live in a poor country, you come from an isolated community, your people are not represented in government and so on (and this not forgetting the >60% of humanity who are illiterate, female, handicapped, elderly, young, unemployed and more – and frequently double or triple disadvantaged). You have to mobilize resources as best you can; and you have to promote, badger, provoke, encourage those better placed to take an interest. In short you have to use stealth, cunning, ingenuity and brilliance - to dress up your nutrition proposals (and others) within a guise that will ‘sell’.
You have to advertise and sell your ideas. And if the recipient public sector where you live is not interested, then you have to sell into the donor community and/or the private sector (and, for best, both at the same time). Which means finding out what interests these sectors, and tailoring your proposals to meet their investment requirements. You need to get to know these people.
Allied to this is the need to ‘think differently’ – to put yourselves into the shoes/offices/Landcruisers of the people whom you need to meet; those whom you need to persuade to your point-of-view.
Access to funds
Earlier this year those of us in the development industries were presented with findings from a number of sources that showed of the order US$21T (i.e. $21,000,000,000,000 - say it slowly) was currently held off-shore in the international tax havens by the so-called ‘super-rich’. Even this staggering figure may be substantially under-estimated, and it could be as high as US$35T. Off-shore funds come from a number of sources – typically countries with mineral, oil and gas resources and, crucially, those that are controlled by minority cliques for which there is no redress at the ballot box. So, things are unlikely to change any time soon. These countries are led by Russia, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, respectively, with estimates of US$800B, US$340B & US$340B shifted off-shore during the past 20 years or so. The key issue here is simple to understand – once off-shore - these funds are no longer available for use within the country of origin.
So, what’s this got to do with nutrition and the FSN debate? Hang-on, we’re getting there, but you can probably already catch the drift of this particular contribution.
Ethiopia
Here is a short digression. Just on five years back I was involved with a food security project in Ethiopia – providing management from an office in Addis Ababa, working with the communities involved in the Northern Shoa and around Mekelle and generally trying to ensure delivery of socio-techno-economic packages for the estimated 90,000 target people involved. We had a budget of the order US$4.2M; and it was the largest project of its kind with the agency of the day. We did reasonably well, and follow-on activities continue to the present with new management, more communities, similar objectives and more – more funds too.
We undertook nutritional surveys of selected communities to help determine delivery and success with meeting objectives, etc. Summarizing findings in isolated hill country in what is one of the poorest countries on Africa, nutritional determinants were of the order 47%, 11% & 43%, respectively, for stunting, wasting & underweight for kids <5 years old. Terrible health/emergency results that we were able to target with our budgetary support for local investment – food, schools, sanitation, energy, clean water and more. Equally, we used our network of contacts to promote the project and its needs within our local donor community; no good being successful in the field if those in the capital city remain unaware of things. (This means networking, people, publications & promotion.)
We also looked sideways into private sector investment, for example, exploring wool production & sales with the largest blanket manufacturer in the country (who manufactured mainly on the basis of imported used fibres), use of fuel ethanol as an alternative to manure, baby-food production, dairy-cow/milk industries and foreign tourism – a day’s travel from Addis and the country provided pre-historic pristine walking opportunities (and the Ethiopian wolf Canis simensis); all it needed was a new rest house with clean beds and hot showers. And other opportunities.
Messages? You cannot sell the nutritional needs of your community easily when there are 80 million others in the country – most of whom face similar challenges. You cannot always plan on national-scale. But, all that said, Ethiopia country-wide has represented a success story for Africa during the past 10 years.
Country investment
But what if you need to plan nationally? Take a hypothetical country in West Africa - hypothetical remember. Consider an indigenous population of estimated 170M people with population increases of the order 2.5% pa and projected to be 475M by 2050 – already the issues are looking daunting. National planning is underway – always – and we know that GDP is rising of the order 7% annually (so, reasonable) on the basis of sector developments of which ‘agriculture’ dominates, but continues to trail manufacturing, services, oil&gas and others as a recipient of investment – yet estimated 70% of the population continue to depend upon agriculture for a living; and, coincident – coincident - 65% of the national population remains in ‘abject’ poverty – so, not just poor, but really poor (and this definitive sector is growing 5% annually).
Did someone mention ‘oil&gas’? Responsible for 19% of GDP, the sector provides 95% of foreign exchange and >80% of budgetary resources in support of a complicated national management structure that encompasses 36 state governments and one federal government. What options for those budgetary resources filtering down to the man/woman in the bush/street? The commercial sector, by contrast, impacts on just about everyone. Sure, people make profits by participating – sometimes really useful profits – from cement, telecom, banking, manufacturing and, of course, oil&gas. In our hypothetical country all these sectors have made money. Could these entrepreneurs with their assets and advisors shift into agriculture, agro-industries and agro-services? Some have done so already.
Investing in agriculture
But their investment is piecemeal, relatively low-key and sometimes high risk. Further, industrialization of agricultural production means investment in technologies, equipment, structures, water, etc. and, crucially, limited numbers of high quality people. What of the masses in the country that are already poor, imprisoned in rural subsistence systems and with little or no hope of change, but occupying that same land that is needed for larger-scale investment?
From here-on you can shift into the smallholder/organized agricultural production models or the larger-scale plantation models that carry less financial risk (but the much more difficult socio-economic risks of landless people migrating). And, the key element of this particular contribution? Here-in is the wardrobe of clothes required of nutrition development.
You shift into national, regional and zonal development that channel blocks of investment across the focus land areas; this is land-linked to producer-zones-linked to agro-industrial-parks-linked to markets-linked to towns, cities and/or ports. Sure, this has objectives to boost agro-production, improve socio-economic performance, rural well-being and just about everything else required of people; but you don’t bring nutrition in until the middle-game, when you need to count the number of school gardens, the number of kids attending secondary school, the number of buses linking producers to markets, the number of new jobs in the community and so on.
And if the title of the debate ‘Agriculture working for nutrition’ is too obvious – just think; with urbanization continuing apace worldwide that first generation born in the city will, like the majority of people everywhere see ‘agriculture at the supermarket’ – and then it simply becomes that much more challenging to convince kids (and their parents) that nutrition and dietary patterns begins with crops, livestock, fisheries and the rest of the natural world.
Get the point?
Key words: Private sector investment.
PS. And that off-shore money to which reference was made earlier? Governments in the countries concerned are unlikely to change over-night and thus the complexity and challenges of sharing national resources within the mass population will continue; but you can’t abuse, channel, cream and/or lose funds of this magnitude with agriculture as easily as you can with a ‘pump-it-and-shift-it’ industries like oil&gas. Don’t lose sight of the key role of agro-production & agro-industrialization in the race to boost nutrition.
Peter Steele
Consultant
Rome
20 September 2012