Food and Health 3- Stakeholders in food and health Flashcards
Why is global food security difficult?
-A significant share of the world’s population is malnourished
-The global population continues to grow
-Climate change and other environmental changes threaten future food production
-The food system itself is a major contributor to climate change and other environmental harms.
What are the main aims of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization?
-The eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition
-The elimination of povery and the driving forward of economic and social progress for all
-The sustainable management adn utilization of natural resources, incluing land, water, air, climate, and genetic resources for the benefit of present and future generations.
-In addition, it aims to increase the resilience of people to threats and crises.
The FAO’s work in Honduras
-The FAO set up a project in rural Honduras to promote entrepreneurship among rural youth.
-Over 2,000 young people were trained in farming skills, marketing and developing business skills.
What was the result of the FAO’s project in rural Honduras?
-More than 1,500 successful microenterprises
The FAO’s work in Bangladesh
-In Khulna, Bangladesh, the FAO operated a project to improve food safety among urban street vendors
-The aim was to minimize food contamination during preparation
-Street foods are cheap and an essential source of food and nutrition for people on a low income, and also for schoolchildren
-As a result of the success of this scheme, the project was extended to the capital city of Dhaka
What does the World Food Program (WFP) aim to do?
-End world hunger
-It focuses on food assistance for the poorest and most vulnerable people
What are the WFP’s plan’s four objectives?
-Save lives and protect livelihoods in emergencies.
-Support food security and nutrition and (re)build livelihoods in fragile settings and following emergencies.
-Reduce risk and enable people, communities and countries to meet their own food and nutrition needs.
-Reduce undernutrition and break the intergenerational cycle of hunger.
Food security analysis provides information to ___
-Identify the most food-insecure people to ensure the most effective targeting
-Identify the most appropriate type and scale of intervention, whether food distributions, school feeding or more innovative interventions such as cash or voucher programmes
-Ensure the most efficient use of humanitarian resources by allocating funding according to needs.
Why did many developing nations- including Brazil, China, and India- oppose agricultural subsidies in the US and EU at the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round in 2001? (National and multi-government organizations)
Because they argued that the high subsidies were artificially driving down global crop prices, unfairly unermining small farmers and maintaining povery in many developing countries
Why is subsidized agriculture in the developed world one of the greatest obstacles to economic growth in the developing world?
-These subsidies encourage overproduction.
-Markets are flooded with surplus crops that are sold below the cost of production, depressing world prices.
-Global subsidies may also lead producers to overuse fertilizers or pesticides, which can result in soil degradation, groundwater depletion, and other negative environmental impacts.
What were the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)’s main priorities in 1962?
-Increase agricultural productivity and self-sufficiency
-Ensure a fair standard of living for farmers
-Stabilize markets
-Ensure that food was available to consumers at a fair price
Work of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)
-Between 1958 and 1968 these aims were implemented: a single market existed in agriculture from 1962 and a common set of market rules and prices were introduced by 1968.
-At the center of the CAP was the system of guaranteed prices for unlimited production.
-This encouraged farmers to maximize their production as it provided a guaranteed market.
-By 1973 the EU was practically self-sufficient in cereals, beef, dairy products, poultry, and vegetables.
-Imports were subjected to duties or levies and export subsidies were introduced to make EU products more competitive on the world market.
What did CAP lead to?
Intensification, concentration, and specialization
What is intensification?
The rising level of inputs and outputs from the
land as farmers sought to maintain or increase their standards of living (or profit margins).
-The inputs included fertilizers, animal feed,
fuel, and machinery.
-Beef and butter “mountains” and “wine lakes”
typified the increased outputs.
What is concentration?
The process whereby the production of particular products become confined to particular areas, regions, or farms.
What is specialization?
-This is related to concentration and refers to the
the proportion of the total output of a farm, region, or country accounted for by a particular product.
-For example, wheat has become more concentrated in France and the UK as farmers have specialized in it.
More info about CAP?
What is the role of NGOs in combatting food insecurity?
-A number of NGOs help deliver food to those with insufficient access to food.
-Many of these are in low-income and middle-income countries, such as Operation Hunger in South Africa, but others operate in high-income countries such as the food banks in the UK.
Reasons for food banks in the UK
What is the WHO?
The part of the UN that deals with health issues.
Example of international NGO
-Oxfam
-Doctors without borders
What is the UN?
-A major global stakeholder in efforts to reduce hunger and combat food insecurity and disease.
Give an example of how some SDG goals are interconnected
To improve equitable food security there needs to be a focus on tackling climate change and gender inequality.
Which SDGs focus directly on hunger and health?
SDG 2 and SDG 3
What are the UN’s biggest organizations working on food insecurity?
The World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
What are the two approaches to solving food insecurity?
-Short terms efforts that manage either humanitarian disasters or chronic food insecurity (food aid).
-Broader structural support that might be focused on improving governance, finance and agricultural innovation and infrastructure as well trading efficiency. This aims to increase self-sufficiency and productivity at the national scale in order to increase resilience.
What are the three types of food aid?
-Program
-Project
-Emergency/humanitarian
Describe program food aid
-Subsidized deliveries of food to a central government that subsequently sells the food and uses the proceeds for whatever purpose (not necessarily food assistance).
-Program food aid provides budgetary and balance of payments relief for recipient governments.
Describe project food aid
-Provides support to field-based projects in areas of chronic need through deliveries of food (usually free) to a government or NGO that either uses it directly (e.g. Food For Work and school feeding).
-Increasingly cash-voucher schemes are being used by NGOs.
Describe emergency/humanitarian food aid
Deliveries of free food to GO/NGO agencies responding to crises due to natural disasters or conflicts.
What is the World Food Program (WFP)?
-It’s the biggest organization working on food security.
-It provides the largest quantity of food aid in the world.
-It runs the most school feeding programs and it also works on cash transfer schemes and knowledge transfer based on a stakeholder approach.
Where does the WFP’s funding come from?
-Individual governments
-The USA is by far the biggest contributing country providing more than 40% of its budget in 2020; more than double the second-largest contributor, Germany.
EU role in humanitarian food aid
-The EU is one of the biggest contributors to humanitarian food aid in the world and has a broad approach to food assistance.
-Its Humanitarian Food Assistance Policy uses a food assistance ‘toolbox’ that offers ways of safeguarding availability, access, and consumption of safe and nutritious food.
Outline the EU’s ‘toolbox’ approach to humanitarian food aid
-Before
-During
-After
-Ongoing
EU toolbox approach: before
-In the months before a crisis when markets are still well-stocked and functioning, it can be more effective and cheaper to provide cash or vouchers, rather than food.
-Doing this allows beneficiaries to buy food according to their individual needs, protect their livelihoods and boost the local economy.
EU toolbox approach: during
-Depending on the nature of the crisis, little food may be available in local markets during the crises themselves. In this case, it may be necessary to provide food commodities directly.
-If food is available, cash interventions are preferred to ensure access to basic needs, including food.
EU toolbox approach: after
-In other contexts, people can best be helped by protecting or supporting their existing livelihood activities (e.g. farming, livestock herding).
-This can be done, for example, by providing seeds and tools, or by delivering veterinary care, which allows people to continue to feed themselves and their families.
EU toolbox approach: ongoing
In places where acute undernutrition is widespread, the priority is to treat acutely undernourished children and at the same time prevent other children and vulnerable people from becoming acutely undernourished.
What needs to be done to find real long-term solutions (EU humanitarian food aid)?
Undernutrition needs to be addressed from different angles and through a wider approach, for example by reducing public health risks by ensuring access to safe water or by improving mothers’ knowledge and awareness about their children’s health and nutritional needs.
Undernutrition needs to be addressed from different angles and through a wider approach, for example by reducing public health risks by ensuring access to safe water or by improving mothers’ knowledge and awareness about their children’s health and nutritional needs.
The USA through its USAID Food for Peace program is the biggest single provider of food assistance in the world.
What are the two key strategies of the USAID Food for Peace program?
-The first is to maintain its efforts for reducing hunger poverty through food aid.
-The second is to improve food security and sustainability with a particular focus on improving ‘nutrition security’.
Why has the USA long been criticized for its program aid?
-Although this is one of the largest sources of food aid in the world, it is generally based on low quality and low nutritional value.
-Some go further to suggest that US food aid is more about subsidizing US farmers and supporting US shipping jobs than it is about improving or reducing food insecurity.
How does the USA send the vast majority of its food aid support?
-The USA continues to send the vast majority of its food aid support through shipped aid from the US.
-This is an outdated approach and is inflexible and unable to respond fast enough to dynamic food insecurity problems.
-Shipment orders typically take 3-5 months.
-In contrast, cash transfers or purchases within a country’s region would be instant and boost the local economy.
-Large shipments of food aid rather than supporting local economies can actually undermine it.
-Local farmers are undercut by cheaper US imports and so actually suffer increased food insecurity of their own.
-Some refer to this as ‘food dumping’.
How is the US slowly changing its approach to humanitarian food aid?
It is slowly changing its approach to adopt more holistic approaches to food that include greater scrutiny on the nutritional value of food aid, the growing importance of cash transfers, and broader structural support that aims at increasing nutrition security through improving community resilience.
What is health care in many HICs based on?
Curative medicine and the use of high-technology techniques
What is healthcare in LICs base don?
-Low-technology, preventative measures
-Primary health care (PHC) is preventative rather than curative
How much of the world’s population lacks basic healthcare?
Just less than half
Different health care systems
-The Beveridge Model
-The Bismarck Model
-The National Health Insurance Model
-The Out of Pocket Model
Describe the Beveridge Model of health care
-Named after William Beveridge, the social reformer who designed Britain’s National Health Service.
-In this system, health care is provided and financed by the government through tax payments.
-This system tends to have low costs per capita, because the government, as the sole payer, controls what doctors can do and what they can charge.
Examples of countries using the Beveridge plan or variations on it
-Great Britain, Spain, most of Scandinavia, and New Zealand.
-Cuba represents the extreme application of the Beveridge approach; it is probably the world’s purest example of total government control.
Describe the Bismarck Model of healthcare
-Named for the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck it uses an insurance system —the insurers are called “sickness funds” —usually financed jointly by employers and employees through payroll deduction.
-Unlike the US insurance industry, though, Bismarck-type health insurance plans have to cover everybody, and they don’t make a profit.
-Tight regulation gives the government much of the cost-control clout that the single-payer Beveridge Model provides.
Diagram showing the interaction of global and local food value chains
