CFS policy process on the development of the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition
Combatting malnutrition in all its forms – undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, overweight and obesity – is among the most pressing global challenges that countries face today. Urgent actions are needed to address these challenges and the negative impacts associated with malnutrition.
Fostering discussion and debate around policy and institutional reforms are key to promoting sustainable food systems that improve nutrition and enable healthy diets.
The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is undertaking a policy process which will lead to the development of Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition. The preparation of the Voluntary Guidelines is informed by the scientific evidence provided by CFS High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) Report on Nutrition and Food Systems launched in October 2017.
The Voluntary Guidelines are intended to be a reference document that provides guidance to governments, as well as to specialized institutions and other stakeholders, on appropriate policies, investments and institutional arrangements needed to address the key causes of malnutrition in all its forms.
A comprehensive and systemic approach will be followed with a view to addressing policy fragmentation between relevant sectors with special emphasis on the food, agriculture and health sectors, while also addressing livelihood and sustainability challenges.
Following the endorsement by the Committee in 2018 of the Terms of Reference which include the main topics and issues to be addressed by this policy process, a Zero Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines has been prepared and circulated as the result of an inclusive process that involved a wide range of stakeholders.
The Zero Draft is made up of four chapters. The first one provides the context, the objectives and purpose as well as indications on the nature of the Voluntary Guidelines while the second deals with key concepts concerning food systems and nutrition and guiding principles. Chapter three includes descriptive text intended to inform the preparation of the Draft One of the Voluntary Guidelines. The language of this chapter does not represent suggested text for the Voluntary Guidelines but initial ideas regarding the issues and topics to be covered. Therefore, CFS stakeholders are not expected to provide proposals of amendments of the current text of Chapter 3 during the regional consultations. Both the current structure and content of Chapter 3 will change in the next version of the Voluntary Guidelines, based on the inputs received during the e-consultation. This will be an opportunity for CFS stakeholders to suggest the most appropriate policy areas and interventions to reshape and promote sustainable food systems that improve nutrition. The fourth and final chapter includes provisions regarding the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines and the monitoring of their use and application.
The e-consultation outcomes will contribute to the preparation of the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines, which will be negotiated in spring 2020. The final version of the Voluntary Guidelines will be then presented for consideration and endorsement by the CFS Plenary at its 47th Session in October 2020.
Through this e-consultation, CFS stakeholders are kindly invited to answer the following guiding questions using the proposed template:
- Does Chapter 1 adequately reflect the current situation of malnutrition and its related causes and impacts, particularly in line with the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda? What are the underlying problems that currently hinder food systems to deliver healthy diets?
- What should be the guiding principles to promote sustainable food systems that improve nutrition and enable healthy diets? What are your comments about the principles outlined in Chapter 2? Are they the most appropriate for your national/regional contexts?
- In consideration of the policy areas identified in Chapter 3 and the enabling factors suggested in paragraph 41 of the Zero Draft, what policy entry points should be covered in Chapter 3, taking into account the need to foster policy coherence and address policy fragmentation?
- Can you provide specific examples of new policies, interventions, initiatives, alliances and institutional arrangements which should be considered, as well as challenges, constraints, and trade-offs relevant to the three constituent elements of food systems presented in Chapter 3? In your view, what would the “ideal” food system look like, and what targets/metrics can help guide policy-making?
- How would these Voluntary Guidelines be most useful for different stakeholders, especially at national and regional levels, once endorsed by CFS?
- Read 103 contributions
I have carefully reviewed the Zero Draft and would like to offer the following comments for consideration.
1. First is what I consider a major omission in the total effort for improved nutrition which I will provocatively refer to as the Genocide Omission. I hope the title gets your attention.
I come from an agronomy perspective with a primary concern for farmers to be able to produce the crops needed for a quality diet. In this regard I think we have done an excellent job of determining what constitutes a quality diet but have implied that accepting or rejecting a quality diet is 100% discretionary to the individuals and households. I seriously doubt this and think most decisions are highly compromised. Thus, the important concern now is to integrate the recommended improved diet into the economic situation of the beneficiaries. Unfortunately, most of the people with suffering severe malnutrition are poor with their economic opportunity heavily dependent on hard manual labor and proportional to the ability to undertake that manual labor. However, in your Zero Draft no mention is made of the dietary needs to optimize economic opportunities. I think this needs to be corrected.
As best I can estimate this, to do a full day of manual labor, be it agronomic field work or other manual labor, requires a diet of at least 4000 kcal/day. Any think less and the economic opportunity and ability to produce or purchase the recommended quality nutrition will be compromised. The calorie needs are rarely included in any nutritional reports I have seen. The best I have seen is dismissing the need by comparing it to an “active” person requiring 2800 kcal/day. This would be a FAO office worker with healthy exercise regime such as taking an extended lunch break for a walk around the Forum, Circus Maximus, and perhaps out to the Colosseum and back. Far short of what is needed for a full day of manual labor.
As this applies to smallholder agriculture there is suppressing little referenceable data available on the calories available to smallholder famers. The limited data I have found indicates between 2000 and 2500 kcal/day. Allowing 2000 kcal/day for basic metabolism and recognizing that hard manual labor such as land preparation with a hoe will require 300+ kcal/hour, the work day can be limited to a couple diligent hours perhaps paced over a couple more. The result will be a prolonged crop establishment period extending to 8+ weeks with declining potential yield as the delay progresses. The end result is if relying on manual labor you will never be able to cultivate enough land in a sufficiently timely manner to meet food security needs. Thus, improving quality nutrition will be impossible as basic economics of survival will force you to concentrate on high calorie crops. The bottom line will be if you want food security and quality nutrition the key will be facilitating smallholders access to mechanization, so they can get their crops planted in a sufficiently timely manner to have a chance at food security.
Please review the following webpage from the https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/ website I manage.
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/integration-an-under…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/calorie-energy-balan…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/ethiopia-diet-analys…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/1028-2/
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/affordability-of-imp…
2. Part of the above concern is to look more at household needs than individual needs. That to improve the nutritional need of children, adolescent girls, nursing mothers s etc. who cannot be fully involved in economic activities someone in the household needs to be involved in heavy manual labor. To do this you need to aggregate the dietary needs for the entire household. The tendency is to look mostly at individuals.
3. The other concern is administrative overhead you are proposing in the Zero Draft. Please note that most of the countries you are concentrating on are what I refer to as Financially Suppressed Economies in which about 80% of earnings or food production is used just to feed the family. Thus, there is essentially no discretionary funds to provide a tax base for government to obtain the revenue to provide the services you are proposing. No taxes, no services. To expect a government to provide services beyond what they have the financial resources to fully fund, including the operations funds for officers to move about and diligently do their jobs, can quickly become a disservice to the general population. Too often it results in services being declared as provided based on the “honor/gratuity/baksheesh” system. This would limit the reliability of the service as I think is the case of the certified seed program in Keno, Nigeria. Unfortunately, no service is better than an unreliable service. Please be careful with the administrative overhead you are suggesting are affordable to host countries or make some notations about the financial viability of providing these services.
It should also be noted that administrative costs are far more associated with the number of people you must deal with rather than the volume. Thus, supervising food safety for large farms marketing produce in large 18-22-wheel trucks may be cost effective as was shown some 20 years go for the insecticide contaminated watermelons in Kern County, California. But would be prohibitively expensive for each ox-cart of produce being marketed by individual smallholders. Please be cautious with these administrative concerns.
Please review the webpages:
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/financially-suppress…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/financially-stalled-…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/impact-of-financiall…
https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/informal-income-oppo…
Thank you,
Dick Tinsley
Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to a most interesting process.
General comments :
In the context of Agenda 2030, we cannot afford to loose any more time. Limiting the VGs to healthy diets (e.g. para 18 p.4), rather than sustainable diets means we are missing a major opportunity to explicitly address livelihoods and environmental issues. Sustainable food systems should be designed to deliver sustainable diets; and sustainable diets can provide the entry point to reorient failing food systems
What do we intend by evidence-based practice? For decades «evidence-based in the nutrition world has been equated to biomedical research. We need - and lack – practice-based evidence on successful practices at local/territorial level.
Catering should be explicitly mentioned as it is a key source of livelihoods, in particular for women and youth, it influences people’s diets (chefs are playing a key role in promoting diets), and together wih public procurementy, it provides an excellent entry point to integrate relevant food supply chains (see para 29., p. 6)
In the guiding principles, we may want to make more explicit reference to governance. In this perspective the work carried out on urban-rural linkages https://urbanrurallinkages.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/url-gp.pdf and territorial approaches https://collaboratif.cirad.fr/alfresco/s/d/workspace/SpacesStore/6daa60e1-d89e-4a59-9bfd-ff5f66a93130/TP4D_vENG.pdf could be useful.
On section III, we should not parcel out the food systems approach into three “constituent elements” (i.e. sub-systems which are actually not even complementary). This will eventually allow institutions to remain within their comfort zones and pay lip service to the need for an integrated vision (as has been the case for decades). We should avoid introducing and/or supporting yet more jargon and potentially confusing concepts (e.g. food environment)
It is regrettable that the importance of a territorial (bio-regional) approach and related traditional diets for sustainable food systems is not acknowledged. The importance of local markets as a key element of local economies should be spelt out.
Food safety and quality standards, and related legal and regulatory tools and procedures should be reviewed in terms of local relevance and impact on sustainable development (including environment and social justice)
The work carried out by the CFS in other work areas (e.g. on the Urbanization and Rural Transformation working group) could provide useful insights.
Specific comments
I 1 para 6 p. 2
This paragraph should come higher up: understanding the causes of malnutrition is essential to understanding food systems and provide a planning basis.
What about inadequate food–related practices (not limited to child feeding)? Changes in such practices are often responsible for changes in nutritional status.
P. 7, para 32 : according to this definition contaminated foods could contribute to healthy diets?
P. 8, para 36
b/ Sustainable development can best be addressed at local/territorial level. The order should be reversed with national and international institutions explicitly facilitating local action
c/ the present focus on « healthy diet , healthy planet » by and large disregards the social dimension, which is essential to sustainable development
e/ should aim to sustainable dietary practices and start with consumers. Only a demand driven approach can help correct the dysfunctions generated by the classical supply-driven approach
g/ capacity building should explicitly mention interdisciplinary (in particular food and health) and inter-institutional collaboration
p. 10, para 43,
this looks very much so far as a business-as-usual shopping list (and this is probably unavoidable if we keep these three distinct sections)
f/ the title should be reworded: schools have a key role to play to promote sustainable diets and sustainable food systems, this of course is not limited to production.
I of course remain available for any clarification or further discussion.
Ms. SOFIA BOUJIDA
A- Focus Monde rural, basé de fourniture d’aliments sains nutritifs :
1- promouvoir la recherche au niveau rural (lien entre pratiques agroécologiques durables et la recherche et résultats sur les apports en nutriments)
2 - inclusion financière du monde rural
3- Rapprochement université et monde rural
4- éducation financière et nutrition du monde rural
5- Focus sur les activités, sujets traités et impacts des ONG ou associations locales dans le développement des régions (actions de forestation, de gestion des bassins versants, gestion de l’eau, gestion des sols, niveau de renforcement des capacités)
6- promouvoir l’économie circulaire, d’utilisation des déchets comme source de nutriments
B- Action de recensement des pratiques agricoles durables et les diffuser au niveau national et régions, les digitaliser
C-Actions gouvernementales également pour limiter l’utilisation des pesticides, promotion des investissements ( économie circulaire, traitement des eaux usées, privilégier les eaux non conventionnelles)
This activity is now closed. Please contact [email protected] for any further information.