According to this draft comprehensive implementation plan, the World Health Organisation acknowledges that nutrition challenges are multi-faceted, effective nutrition actions exist but are not expanded sufficiently and new initiatives have been launched to address nutrition, such as the Scaling Up nutrition movement. The plan sets five global targets and a time frame. The plan aims to alleviate the double burden of malnutrition in children, starting from the earliest stages in development. It contains five key actions. 1. To create a supportive environment for the implementation of comprehensive food and nutrition policies. 2. To include all required effective health interventions with an impact on nutrition in national nutrition pans. 3. To stimulate development policies and programmes outside the health sector that recognise and include nutrition. 4. To provide sufficient financial resources and staff for the implementation of nutrition interventions, 5. To monitor and evaluate the implementation of policies and programmes.
Poverty and health
This report by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change contains its recommendations to policy makers on how to achieve food security in the face of climate change. The Commission’s recommendations are designed to be implemented concurrently by a constellation of governments, international institutions, investors, agricultural producers, consumers, food companies and researchers. They call for changes in policy, finance, agriculture, development aid, diet choices and food waste as well as revitalised investment in the knowledge systems to support these changes. The Commission recommends significantly raising the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems in the next decade; sustainably intensifying agricultural production on the existing land base while reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and reducing losses and waste in the food system. The Commission urges governments attending the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012 to make financial commitments for regionally-based research, implementation, capacity building and monitoring to improve agriculture and food systems.
Brazil has agreed to assist South Africa on social development issues, particularly in fighting against poverty and hunger. Brazil is aiming to help 16.2 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty with its comprehensive national poverty alleviation plan, ‘Brasil Sem Misera’. The plan includes cash transfer initiatives, and increased access to education, health, welfare and sanitation. South Africa has expressed a desire to learn about Brazil’s national alleviation plan and its successful Zero Hunger programme.
In this report, the authors argue that food security in Southern Africa needs to be "mainstreamed" into the migration and development agenda and migration needs to be "mainstreamed" into the food security agenda. They set out to promote a conversation between the food security and migration agendas in the African context, focusing on the connections in an urban context. Four main issues are singled out for attention: the relationship between internal migration and urban food security; the relationship between international migration and urban food security; the difference in food security between migrant and non-migrant urban households; and the role of rural-urban food transfers in urban food security. Findings indicate that most poor households in Southern African cities either consist entirely of migrants or a mix of migrants and non-migrants. Rapid urbanisation, increased circulation and growing cross-border migration have all meant that the number of migrants and migrant households in the city has grown exponentially. This is likely to continue for several more decades as urbanisation continues. Policymakers cannot simply assume that all poor urban households are alike. While levels of food insecurity are unacceptably high amongst all of them, migrant households do have a greater chance of being food insecure with all of its attendant health and nutritional problems.
Many African countries and regions have programmes to boost their agricultural productivity to ensure food security, with the pan-African Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) being the most comprehensive. On 5 March 2012 members of the CAADP Development Partners Task Team met in Brussels to discuss and explore how to facilitate and support greater involvement of regional stakeholders that are important for CAADP implementation at the regional level. Participants discussed how to achieve faster progress on implementing the programme and stressed the need to identify concrete regional actions for faster progress. They also emphasised the importance of deciding on roles and responsibilities of different regional actors, and of improving coordination among development partners, and between development partners and Regional Economic Communities. Although these ideas do not represent formal positions, they could be used to guide discussion between development partners, Regional Economic Communities and other actors during the Eighth CAADP Partnership Platform meeting, due to be held 3-4 May 2012.
In this study, a cohort of 100 HIV-unexposed, 203 HIV-exposed (HIV negative children born to HIV-infected mothers) and 48 HIV-infected children aged six weeks to one year were recruited from an area of high malaria transmission intensity in rural Uganda and followed until the age of 2.5 years. All children were provided with insecticide-treated bed nets at enrolment and daily trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole prophylaxis (TS) was prescribed for HIV-exposed breastfeeding and HIV-infected children. Monthly routine assessments, including measurement of height and weight, were conducted at the study clinic. The researchers found overall incidence of malaria was 3.64 cases per person year. Mild stunting and moderate-severe stunting were associated with a similarly increased incidence of malaria compared to non-stunted children. Being mildly underweight and moderate-severe underweight were not associated with a significant difference in the incidence of malaria compared to children who were not underweight. There were no significant interactions between HIV-infected, HIV-exposed children taking TS and the associations between malnutrition and the incidence of malaria. The researchers point out, in conclusion, that they were unable to disentangle the relationship between malnutrition and the incidence of malaria, and their findings do not necessarily indicate any causal connections between malaria and malnutrition.
The World Bank is preparing a new agriculture action plan to cover 2013-2015. This paper argues that its market liberalisation focus has been criticised, pointing to strongly critical reports on World Bank agriculture projects such as in Peru and Papua New Guinea, and crtique of its lack of gender focus. Critics argue that the Bank is too narrowly focused on private equity investment in agriculture, instead of taking an approach that includes local communities and smallholder farmers. At the same time, the Bank has failed to acknowledge the impact of financial speculation on volatility in food prices, despite many analysts suggesting this is a major contributor to food insecurity. By promoting investor access to land, the authors argue that Bank threaten rather than improve food security and local livelihoods in developing countries.
In 2003 the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) was established by the assembly of the African Union (AU) aiming to raise agricultural productivity by at least 6% per year and increasing public investment in agriculture to 10% of national budgets per year. This paper evaluates progress in CAADP negotiations in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region. There is in general full support in the region for an effectively multidimensional regional CAADP, anchored in ongoing programmes implemented by COMESA. But so far, there has not been enough consultation with relevant non-state stakeholders, like farmers’ organisations, and the authors urge government to include them in the process, as well as to address past failures to communicate effectively and timeously with regional stakeholders about CAADP. They also call for greater integration between regional and national stakeholders and development partners to help mainstream CAADP into ongoing regional programmes and other sectors relevant to food security. More regular dialogue is needed between COMESA, AUC-NPCA and DPs around the implementation of regional CAADP plans. The authors argue that it is very important to ensure coherence between regional policies and investments in food security and in other sectors of regional cooperation.
While all stakeholders acknowledge the importance of regional food security, most agree that introducing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) at the regional level has not been a priority for East African Community (EAC) countries in the past. Institutional capacity and financial resources are argued to have placed limits on the role of the EAC Secretariat in driving the CAADP process. Most external funders have concentrated on national efforts at food security, overlooking the role of regional support and integration. The EAC Secretariat’s relations with development partners is perceived as good, but this has not yet translated into visible improvement in regional agriculture, largely, the authors argue, because implementation remains a challenge. Slow progress in regional trade, infrastructure and other related regional initiatives have impacted negatively on regional food security and agricultural development, and national interests tend to take precedence over regional ones. The authors also call for greater consultation with all stakeholders if CAADP is to succeed.
Countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have never formally launched a regional Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) process as they are currently developing their own Regional Agricultural Policy (RAP). The authors argue that SADC governments should mainstream CAADP principles into the RAP by, for example, enlarging the range of stakeholders regularly involved in the regional preparations (especially non-state actors like farmers), as well as including accountability mechanisms governing regional food security, and ensuring policy coherence at national and regional levels. So far the major criticism of the RAP process is lack of multi-stakeholder consultation. In addition, SADC development partners are reported as not having adequately supported regional food security measures. The authors argue for more institutional support for the SADC Secretariat, given its key role in the CAADP process.