Member profile
BOSC Pierre-Marie
Organization:
CIRAD
Country:
France
I am working on:
Establishment of the Observatory for World Agricultures
Structural evolutions of Agricultural sectors regarding sustainable development and global stakes
Case studies on land grabbing
Supervision of PhD on Land reform in Madagascar
BOSC Pierre-Marie
Comments of the HLPE Report V0 draft
Data collection and analysis tools for food security and nutrition (Dec 2021)
By
Pierre-Marie Bosc, Cédric Gaillard, Sandrine Dury and Mathieu Roche
January 26th 2022
About the conceptual framework
In the setting the stage part, the macro factors are too narrow and limited to public national
policies. The role of international economic and political actors (public- States- or privatecorporations-) and their activities is missing.
The following activities related to food and agriculture have a direct impact on FNS of individuals
though availability, accessibility of products and should be mentioned.
- Trade of agricultural inputs and commodities and other agricultural products, + International & regional trade regulations and activities of private actors
- Foreign investments, both public and private. Ex : Land acquisitions for large scale production.
- Level of the debt
Other « distal » factors may also be mentioned, such as the level of the debt accepted by the IMF and
the global level of investment by international and other financial institutions. Recent expertise on the
effects of Covid-19 on FNS in southern Cameroon showed the key role of imports (of chemicals from
China) to the production stage of fruits and vegetables and the dramatic consequences of the border
closure (from other African countries) for farmers who are unable to export their produce and lead to
bankruptcy and poverty (Mathe et al, 2021).
Regarding the approach proposed page 17. We suggest to present together Meat, Fish and aggregate
with poultry as recommended by FAO and FHI (2016) because lack of micronutrient is one of the most
stringent nutritional problem. But even aggregate d it remains a “product” approach, which is not
holistic and therefore we suggest to develop another example about the lack of dietary diversity,
with a focus on rural settings and farming households. (as it is suggested to give an example).
Looking now at the proposed conceptual framework, we only see the levels of potential factors and
outcomes.
The framework seems lacking some key elements. The observation unit is the individual “citizens,
individuals” which means the report deals with the global population as a whole. But, as far as the
report has the ambition to deal with the food system globally, the production stage should deserve a
specific attention. Producers are often consumers of the food products they also sell. They are key
stakeholders of the system and most of the smallholders are considered poor and vulnerable
regarding food and nutrition security. The leads to some questions: What is the population from
which data is produced? What is the place of the agricultural / rural sector? Wouldn’t it be useful to
distinguish urban vs rural sector? What about the farm level, the smallholders [holding level] and the
household and their interrelations? In the agricultural / rural sector food and nutrition security does
not depend only on agricultural or natural resources-based activities.
The geographical dimension is not clearly apparent from the farm / household level with specific
territorial settings within national and regional levels. The territories present highly diverse
potentials that shape the possibility to achieve food security.
In the literature we can identify various conceptual frameworks developed on agriculture/food
linkages (or even those on sustainable livelihoods) that could be used to enrich the proposed
framework. We quickly identified three frameworks that the authors could consider. There might be
others and they are suggested for possible adaptation and fine tuning to the scope of the report. A
good example is in my opinion the FAO/FIVIMS (2008). It still seems difficult to integrate the agency
dimension in these conceptual frameworks.
Another example that could be inspiring is provided by Kanter and al. (2015) or by HLPE (2017) that
focused on Nutrition.
In these frameworks, we have potential impact paths and indicators at each stage of the process (or
for each observation unit). This is missing from the proposed framework.
About the indicators
One key and essential dimension for which FAO has a key role to play, is the use and promotion of
standard scientifically grounded indicators, in national or international surveys or even in the work of
researchers.
In the field of economics, indicators that measure household assets (agricultural or not), women's
empowerment (WEAI), wealth proxies (Wealth index). Indicators of perceived food security (such as
the HFIAS) or for nutrition, proxies of nutritional adequacy (such as measures of diversity with the
HDDS or MDDW indicators). This harmonization would also allow a better interoperability between
the different surveys without standardizing the surveys which would keep their specificity according
to the geographical areas and the research questions.
About the existing initiatives
The list of initiatives presented in table 2 is wide, heterogeneous (nutritious contents data bases) and
sometimes overlaps (50x30 is a funding mechanism to support Agricultural Censuses). Most of them
concentrate on individual levels. The are some missing initiatives such as LSMS (Living Standards
Measurement Surveys).
Under FAOSTAT are multiple components which have various focus, various levels of data
collection…: what are the observation units? They are different and obviously not coordinated. These
systems are not handled by FAO but by the countries. Data are part of the sovereignty of each
country and collected by their respective administration. FAO produces guidelines like for the
Agricultural Census but the production of data is under the responsibility of each country. Analysis of
the existing data sets is missing. Are data sets up-to-date? Which countries produce data on a regular
basis? Are there countries without data? This could be a useful addition to Table 1. See Viberti and
Bosc (2020) for a review of actual data availability.
There is much more information on the constraints to data collection than on an in-depth analysis of
the existing data sets. Which is obvious is the total absence of coordination among all these
initiatives and the donor community is part this lack of coordination.
About capacity constraints (page 26)
The first paragraph underlines the insufficient capacity that exists… This is quite in contradiction with
the previous chapter showing the blooming initiatives and regretting the disconnection and lack of
use.
Concerning the whole document, we feel like there is a need to go further in the analysis of the final
users of the existing statistics. Who is using which statistics and for what purpose? this should be
added for example at minima in the table 1: two columns: 1. who are the users of the statistics. 2.
For which decision?
About the decision cycle
The decision cycle as proposed is very generic. Could it be more focused? In the decision cycle, I
could be important to enter into more detail, following "Define priorities evidence and question" to
define the availability of data. Even a partial availability of data can considerably alleviate the
strategy of collecting additional information.
About the new technologies
We agree that there are many new opportunities to collect data, monitor and inform on food
security and nutrition using new computing powerful methods. For instance, in order to
automatically predict food insecurity, new pipelines based on Artificial Intelligence approaches (i.e.
machine learning) can integrate multisource heterogeneous data like rasters (e.g., population
densities, land use, soil quality), GPS points (hospitals, schools, violent events), line vectors
(waterways), quantitative variables (maize prices, World Bank variables, meteorological data) and
time series (Smoothed Brightness Temperature (SMT), rainfall estimates, maize prices) (see for
example (Deléglise et al, 2022)).
Even if we agree that it is important to be forward looking, the balance of the report should
acknowledge the fact that there is still a lot to do to improve the existing tools – including the
introduction of the digitalization – before developing new tools.
Regarding Ethical issues
As it is mentioned, but we want to stress that point, here is a bias regarding the use of new
technologies. The most vulnerable have not the means to be connected and to be include in
the processes that became even more disconnected from these technologies that can be run
100% with no local inputs. Citizens and even public national bodies get out of control on
these technologies. However, as mentioned in one of the contributions, quantitative analyses
alone are insufficient to guide public policies. Understanding contexts, through
multidisciplinary approaches, partnerships and qualitative surveys, remains essential.
Governance
As for now the civil society organizations including farmers’ organizations are not part of the
governance of data production and use. As information is a key asset for strategic decision making
and in order to cope with this situation many of them tend to develop their own information system.
As the CFS is now open to CSO and farmers’ organization the report should address this issue.
References
Deléglise, H., Interdonato, R., Bégué, A., Maître d’Hôtel, E., Teisseire, M., & Roche, M. (2022). Food
security prediction from heterogeneous data combining machine and deep learning methods. Expert
Systems with Applications, 190, 116189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2021.116189
FAO and FHI 360. 2016. Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women: A Guide for Measurement. Rome:
FAO.
HLPE. 2017. Nutrition and food systems. A report by the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security
and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome
Kanter, R., Walls, H. L., Tak, M., Roberts, F., & Waage, J., 2015. A conceptual framework for
understanding the impacts of agriculture and food system policies on nutrition and health. Food
security, 7(4), 767-777
Mathé, S., Dury, S., Temple, L., Tata Ngome, P. I., Nsangou Njankouo, A., & Otou, M. (2021). Étude
d'impact socio-économique des effets de la COVID 19 sur les stratégies paysannes et l'adaptation des
filières agricoles et alimentaires au Cameroun. Résumé exécutif. Livrable 3 Cirad.
Thompson B., Cohen M.J. Meerman.J. 2012. World Food Insecurity and Malnutrition: Scope, Trends,
Causes and Consequences. In: The Impact of Climate Change and Bioenergy on Nutrition FAO
Springer. August 2012, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-0110-6_3
Originally published in: FAO, 2008. Bioenergy, food security and sustainability. Towards an
international framework. In Information paper n°3 for the High-level Conference on world food
security: the challenge of climate change and bioenergy (HLC/08/INF/3). Rome, FAO.
Bosc, P.-M., Viberti F., 2020. Updated data sets for more efficient investment strategies adapted to
the diversity of family farms. Agriculture for Development, 40 (2020): 15-17