accessible or appropriate. Thus, while the four principles proposed by Hop- kins for a new ‘development first’ food regime me likely to engender support within the USDA and foreign aid bureaucracy, all four would be vulner- able to what he terms ‘political over- ride’ in the event of unforeseen food or foreign policy emergencies.

The situation at the multilateral level is not much more encouraging. There have been a number of positive institutional developments since the 1974 World Food Conference, includ- ing the creation of the WFC and IFAD and reorganization of the CFA. But decisions taken within these are- nas encompass only a limited uni- verse, with donors such as the USA and the EEC reserving to themselves control over the majority of their capital and food aid resources. There is also the significant fact, noted by Hopkins, that the Soviet Union (and, for that matter, most of the countries of East Europe) does not carry a fair share of the aid burden. The Ethio- pian situation is again instructive in this regard. Despite the fact that that

country is a Soviet client state, the Soviet Union has pledged only about $3 million worth of food assistance compared with more than $45 million from the USA and more than $100 million from other Western donors. The Soviets also do not participate in the work of either the FAO or IFAD. Until these circumstances change, and as long as food aid continues to serve objectives related to the ongoing glob- al ideological struggle, it is difficult to conceive that the major donors will be willing to cede authority or submit themselves to serious scrutiny regard- ing the formulation or conduct of their food aid policies.

I do not mean to be excessively negative in my reaction to Hopkins’s proposal for a new development- oriented food aid regime. It is an idea that has now been under serious dis- cussion in one form or another for more than ten years; and given the growing evidence of damage that in- appropriately programmed food aid can cause ~ whether measured in nutritional, agricultural or economic terms - there is every reason to

continue both to seek modification in the specific application of the resource and to link food aid to the broader context of national and international food policies. But it is important not to lose sight of the realpolitik of food aid ~ ie why food is given. to whom, and for what ultimate purpose. Unfor- tunately, while developmental objec- tives have assumed a more prominent role in food aid policy decisions, they still are not considered matters of ‘high policy’ (ie national security). This could change. of course, as the world becomes increasingly inter- dependent, but it will require a fun- damental realignment of thinking ab- out the use of the food aid resource that so far has not taken place.

Mitchel13. Wailerstein International Food and Nutrition

Policy Program

MIT, Cambridge, USA

‘Raymond F. Hopkins, ‘The evolution of food aid: towards a development first regime’, Food Policy, Vol 9, No 4, Novem- ber 1984, pp 34562.

Rejoinder Nutrition programmes, politics and paradigms

future.

Barbara Harriss and Philip Payne in their rejoinder, ‘Magic bullets and the nutrition agenda’,2 appropriately cite the constraining nature of ‘existing social and political systems’ and the necessity for an ‘improvement of the distribution of entitlements to an effective demand for food’. The au- thors indicate that we overlooked these dimensions. This is an unfortun- ate reading of our intensions. We believe these issues were addressed explicitly in our article, as illustrated in the following excerpts:

In ‘Nutrition policies and programmes: a decade of redirection ‘, ’ we described what we saw as a new paradiim that emerged with the evolution of nutrition policies and programmes over the last decade, assessed the impact of those policies and programmes, and tried to identify the major challenges for the

Nutrition conditions are, of course, rooted in a country’s structure of inequities. In- come and land distribution patterns are key determinants. A nutrition community working at full energy may not he able to help many people if the country’s political logic is operating in the opposite direction.

poverty and purchasing power arc central to the malnutrition prohlcm.

Technical issues often pale in comparison to the political and economic issues sur- rounding nutrition.

Harriss and Payne also seem to sug- gest we neglect the ‘participative mobilization of targetted people’ and

80

the problems of the dependency of the poor on the state. We attempted to cover these points by stating that one of the major challenges is to:

mobilize local effort and resources to increase people’s own capacity to fight malnutrition communities clearly are hetter able to understand their problems than arc outsiders. and they almost always have untapped resources. Empowering communities to become more self-reliant is not easy but promoting local solutions reduces their exposure to the vagaries of outside political winds and economic forces over which they have no control.

So we share the concerns of Harriss and Payne. What we find surprising, however, is their consideration of political dimensions and participative mobilization as new phenomena a new ‘paradigm’. These phenomena have long been present: from early Marxist analysis linking economic sys- tems. class structure, poverty and hunger to the widespread mobilization efforts found in the community de- velopment movement of the 1950s and 1960s to the advocacy for human rights and basic needs of the 1970s. For us, these political elements have

FOOD POLICY February 1985

risk of misinterpreting them (and, if

so, with apologies), but the issue has

surfaced in other forums and thus merits comment. Crudely put: be- cause political reform and structural social change are so important for the eradication of malnutrition, ‘technical inputs’, as they refer to them (for example, macroeconomic analysis, systematic planning, improved man- agement), are largely irrelevant. We hold that this is a false dichotomy. Political change and technologies should be viewed as mutually reinforc- ing. Revolutions do not eliminate resource scarcity. Populist govern- ments with strong commitments to- wards eradicating malnutrition should be greatly concerned with using their very limited resources in the most cost-effective ways to achieve the maximum good within their economic constraints.4 Political advocacy with- out adequate concern for these re- source utilization issues verges on the irresponsible, whether the loci of that advocacy is at the village or national level. Political change and commit- ment, when viewed in isolation, are simply another ‘magic bullet’.

long been in the nutrition equation. They do not constitute a new para- digm. But lest our response be misin- terpreted, we applaud the authors’ emphasis of this dimension; it is essen- tial that those committed to reducing malnutrition keep the political change variable clearly in sight.

We also believe that Harriss and Payne did not accurately interpret or capture the essence of the paradigm we presented. At its heart is a holistic view of malnutrition that recognizes that the causes are multiple: biologic- al, social, political and economic. The solutions will come from actions in- volving all these areas at both macro and micro levels. Far from being ‘simply an extension of the range of technologies being applied’ or new ‘magic bullets’, this paradigm recog- nizes the inescapable linkages among the causes and the necessity to address the malnutrition problem across sec- tors, disciplines and policy levels. Fuelling the process is politics; it is integral to the paradigm. But rather than being a separate paradigm, we view it as an essential element within the holistic paradigm.

Harriss and Payne also refer to our discussion of what they call the ‘selec- tive food supplementation’ project in

Tamil Nadu. (Actually, selective feed- ing is, and was described in our article as, only one facet of the programme, eg the process of weighing children and involving mothers in the detection of growth faltering is itself a critical part.) We had used this as an example of progress in nutrition programming and how a relatively low cost delivery system can bring about nutrition im- provement for children despite de- clines in family income. Harriss and Payne compare this project to, and chastise us for omitting mention of, a massive populist-motivated sup- plementary feeding scheme that costs over 10% of that same state’s budget. The omission was conscious. Studies by others have not been able to show that the Noon Meal scheme has had

positive impact upon nutrition, health or has succeeded in reaching the poorest or the seriously malnourished. The issue we were addressing in our example was not whether a given programme was good politics, but whether it was good nutrition.

We also were scolded for not men- tioning or considering as a nutrition intervention the public distribution of subsidized rice in Tamil Nadu. As reflected extensively in our earlier writings” (and touched on in our Food

Policy article in the concern we ex- pressed about the consequences of cutting such programmes), we consid- er subsidized food distribution prog- rammes as well within the ‘territory of nutrition’. The Tamil Nadu food ra- tion programme clearly has potentially important nutrition implications, albeit to our knowledge un- documented. But so do similar prog- rammes or variations thereof in perhaps 50 other countries. Our dis- cussion, however, was not intended to catalogue all nutrition interventions, but rather to offer a few examples that show something nutritionally useful can be done. In this context, it can be argued that the beneficiaries of the Tamil Nadu food ration system prob- ably are being penalized in the form of lower subsidies than previously be- cause of the high cost of the Noon Meals Scheme. Our view of this is that a programme without demonstrated nutritional impact may be robbing resources from their alternative use in higher potential impact programmes. Perhaps the malnourished are the losers. In short, rather than ‘condone and maybe even help fund’ this type of untargetted effort, as was suggested of us by Harriss and Payne, the types of analyses presented in our paradigm are aimed at avoiding such resource misallocation.

This leads us to a final area where we wish to take particular issue with the Harriss-Payne position. Because of problems we had with the clarity of intent of their statements, we run the

James Austin and Alan Berg

‘Food Policy, Vol9, No 4, November 1984, pp 304-l 2. ‘Food Policy, Vol9, No 4, November 1984, pp 313-16. 3For examples see: James E. Austin and Marian Zaitlin, eds, Nutrition intervention in Develop&q Countries. OG&H. Cambridae. 1981; James E. Austin, ‘Strategies &d mechanisms for urban and rural subsidiza- tion: the case of Conasupo’, in N. Scrim- shaw and M. Wallerstein, eds, Nutrition Policy Implementafion, Plenum, New York, 1982; Alan Berg, Malnourished People: A Policy View, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 1981. 4James E. Austin, Jonathan Fox, Walter Kruger, ‘The role of the revolutionary state in the Nicaragua food system’, World Development, forthcoming; Walter Kruger and James Austin, ‘Organization and con- trol of agricultural state-owned enterprises: the case of Nicaragua’, Harvard Business School Working Paper HBS 84-19, August 1983.

FOOD POLICY February 1985 81