Jump to... Introduction Nutrition focus Gender-sensitive analysis Inter-agency programme Enabling environment What next? Conclusions Appendix

Prepared as IFAD's contribution to the 1996 World Food Summit, this document outlines the Fund's policy and strategy concerning household food security (HFS) and explores various options for strengthening the HFS and nutrition focus in IFAD's policy and project approach.

Executive summary

The world has been facing a paradox of widespread food insecurity and malnutrition amid net food surpluses. Increased food supplies do not automatically enhance access to food by the poorer groups of society. Food security measures alone may have a limited effect on the nutritional well-being of individuals, unless the reinforcing detrimental linkages between food insecurity, disease, poor sanitation and inadequate education are addressed.

IFAD was established in 1977 with the mandate to alleviate poverty and improve the nutritional level of the poorest populations in developing countries. For a financing institution such as IFAD, nutritional improvements are an investment in human capital, which not only enhances people’s welfare but also increases their productive capacity and contributes to the growth and development of their national economies.

IFAD’s experience and strategy on household food security and nutrition

During the past two decades, IFAD has initiated many project activities designed to improve implicitly or explicity household food security (HFS) and the nutritional status of individuals through improving overall food availability, increasing income-earning opportunities in farm and non-farm employment and reducing production and marketing risks. IFAD projects have improved smallholder farmers’ access to agricultural inputs, water resources, irrigation, markets and storage facilities. They have expanded opportunities for poor rural households to generate income through off-farm microenterprises by strengthening financial services, credit and training. Since its inception, the Fund has emphasized the targeting of services and investments to the rural poor and to marginal or naturally less favoured regions, primarily serving those population groups that were commonly most vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition.

But over time, IFAD has realized that increased agricultural production and rural incomes alone do not necessarily translate into more stable, sustainable and adequate food consumption at the household level or into the improved nutritional well-being of individual household members. At its Fifty-first Session in April 1994, IFAD’s Executive Board adopted a comprehensive strategy to move its rural investment projects further towards improved nutrition. The strategy squarely defines IFAD’s entry point and comparative advantage to contribute to nutritional improvements through focusing on targeted agricultural and rural sector development. It highlights the critical role of HFS as a ‘guiding principle’ for project design, and that of health and sanitation-related interventions for nutritional security, which should be sought mainly through inter-agency cooperation.

Over the past few years, IFAD has strengthened its collaboration with other United Nations agencies whose mandates cover complementary aspects of HFS and nutrition security. A number of IFAD projects now include collaborative arrangements with UNICEF, and several regional HFS and nutrition workshops and national sensitization seminars have been organized jointly. IFAD projects are being increasingly carried out together with parallel project activities undertaken by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Since the enacting of IFAD’s nutrition strategy, significant efforts have been made to adopt the HFS concept in operational terms and to test and further refine it. A review of selected new IFAD projects revealed that, in most cases, HFS benefits were yet to be expressed in practical terms and that communities needed to be more actively involved in project design, monitoring and evaluation.

How can the basic concepts and goals of household food and nutritional security be more effectively translated into relevant field activities? IFAD recognizes that there are no easy solutions to the multifaceted problems and causes of household food insecurity and malnutrition. The goal is rather to develop better and more user friendly analysis and strategy development tools and systematically to sensitize staff, collaborators and policy-makers on relevant concepts and practical ways of addressing HFS and nutritional concerns in IFAD projects. Budgetary constraints increase the urgency of identifying cost-effective instruments for improved analysis, planning and implementation. While a number of instrumentalities are already available for food security and nutritional assessments and the planning of interventions, further work is needed to identify, field test and refine more appropriate and operational instrumentalities.

Priority areas for action

In collaboration with its partners in development, IFAD intends to strengthen its HFS and nutrition orientation through multiple approaches:

Coordination and collaboration among agencies with regard to HFS, health and nutrition issues should be envisaged as a long-term task, insofar as it is based on the expansion of existing activities at three different levels: (i) the project or programme design and implementation level; (ii) the country policy and strategy planning level; and (iii) the international inter-agency policy level.

At the project and programme design and implementation level, IFAD is increasingly complementing its own agricultural and rural income-generation focus with components that specifically address health, sanitation, population or child care issues, implemented by UNICEF or UNFPA, and seeks their assistance in planning, awareness-raising or monitoring and evaluation of HFS and nutrition-relevant aspects. Cooperation with WFP should be particularly useful where transient or chronic household food insecurity may require safety nets through labour-intensive public works or food-based emergency relief operations. IFAD seeks to establish strategic linkages in a more systematic manner and at much earlier stages of policy articulation and project design.

UN agencies should be encouraged to place greater emphasis on collaboration at the country policy and strategy level, particularly through: (i) the formulation of better-coordinated policies, programmes and strategies in the areas of HFS, health and nutrition, with a particular focus on marginal areas; (ii) a clearer distribution of responsibilities among the various actors; (iii) the promotion of HFS and nutritional well-being as a central strategic development goal; and (iv) long-term investments in HFS and nutrition analysis, and in planning capacity. Food security and nutrition strategies and programmes should be increasingly developed in close consultation and dialogue with the various private and public actors, ranging from the food-insecure households themselves to communities, civil-society organizations, local and national governments, international finance institutions and bilateral donors.

In short, a stronger focus on HFS and nutrition as an important outcome of IFAD’s investment projects should ultimately lead to a new generation of projects that would address the central conditions for bringing about improved HFS and nutritional well-being in a holistic and integrated manner, based on: (i) a more gender sensitive participatory analysis and evaluation of project interventions from an HFS and nutrition perspective, and more women-targeted interventions; (ii) the integration of health and sanitation activities and analyses through inter-agency collaboration; and (iii) a supportive, enabling socio-economic, institutional and policy environment.

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1/ IFAD is about to embark on a three-year applied research programme with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to develop, test and disseminate more cost effective operational tools for identifying the relative vulnerability of regions and specific population groups to food insecurity, determine the appropriate set of location-specific interventions and evaluate project impact in terms of HFS and nutrition goals.