On Tuesday the 4th of June the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) held an Event on Nutrition at Westminster panelled by leading nutrition experts. The event presented an all-round assessment of official development funding on nutrition as well as the policy and financial issues facing the effort to improve under-nutrition. It was organised with the intent to engage, inform and discuss this worldwide challenge to parliamentarians. This event was held by The All-APPG on Agriculture and Food for Development in collaboration with Institute of Development Studies and Action Against Hunger.
On Tuesday the 4th of June theAll Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) held an Event on Nutrition at Westminster panelled by leading nutrition experts. The event presented an all-round assessment of official development funding on nutrition as well as the policy and financial issues facing the effort to improve under-nutrition. It was organised with the intent to engage, inform and discuss this worldwide challenge to parliamentarians. This event was held by The All-APPG on Agriculture and Food for Development in collaboration with Institute of Development Studies and Action Against Hunger.
The APPG was established in October 2008 to bring together Parliamentarians concerned withagriculture, nutrition and wider food security in the developing world. The group has been promoting informed debate within and beyond Westminster mainly to narrow the gap between policy makers’ and practitioners in the field whilst magnifying the vice of the 450 millionsmallholder farmers who feed 2 billion people worldwide.
The event has invited three nutrition experts as panellists: Lawrence Haddad (Institute of Development Studies), Sandra Mutuma (Action Against Hunger) and Mariella Di Ciommo (Development Initiatives) and lord Cameron was the chaired the event. It has tried to answer “what can the UK do to help put an end to the current nutrition crisis?”
Mariella Di Ciommo fromDevelopment Initiatives presented key points from their new report. She showed that how insignificant Official Development Assistance (ODA) funding allocated to nutrition, which is only 0.4 percent of total ODA. There is a mismatch between financial need and ODA allocation in regional (continental) level, with South Asia receiving less additional aid and sub-Saharan Africa getting more. She also pointed that Under-nutrition is concentrated in 36 countries and overall ODA targets them well with 72percent of basic nutrition ODA funding goes to these countries where 90 percent of the world’s stunted children live. We also learned that Canada is by far the largest contributor to ODA out-spending all other countries followed by the Gates foundation. Counting only countries, the UK comes second in ODA spending.
Lawrence Haddad from the Institute of Development Studies spoke about the launch of Hunger And Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI)which weighs the overall political commitment of donor countries to tackling hunger and under-nutrition. He stressed other factors such as of domestic agricultural markets and the sensitivity of other aid programmes to nutrition should weigh more on the measurement of a donor nation’s commitment to nutrition. He argued that the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) should leverage its position as a global leader on issues of under nutrition and a focus on the causes of under-nutrition is needed.
Sandra Mutuma from Action Against Hunger (ACF) outlined the challenge that under-nutrition presents for developing countries and described ACF’s recommendations for the UK government’s policies to help address the issue. She described the scale of the problem of under-nutrition in children. The 56 million children under 5 who are wasted have a 9-10 times higher risk of death than a non-wasted child. Overall 35 percent of all deaths of children under 5 have under-nutrition as an underlying cause. According to ACF, the ODA that is recorded as basic nutrition interventions; about half the spending has no relevance to reducing under-nutrition.
Overall the panellists presented a comprehensive review of nutrition funding, financial commitments and each showed the need to tackle the global challenges of under-nutrition poses. They were unified that there is a need for higher levels of funding for nutrition, focus on the causes of under nutrition.
The full Development Initiative report on nutrition can be downloaded here and a film of the event can be found here.
http://www.appg-agdev.co.uk/15-news/27-event-what-can-the-uk-do-to-help-put-an-end-to-the-current-nutrition-crisis
http://www.appg-agdev.co.uk/15-news/28-appg-event-on-nutrition-for-growth