SCN News No 36 - UNSCN

78
PUBLICATIONS
www.unsystem.org/scn
Global obligations for the right to food
Kent G (ed.)
The purpose of this book is to clarify
and strengthen the obligations of the
global community in relation to the
human right to adequate food. It explores
the various actions that should
be taken by governments, nongovernmental
organizations, and
individuals to ensure that all people
of the world have access to adequate
food, and assesses the nature
and depth of the global responsibility
to ensure adequate food for the
world's population. This book was prepared by a Task Force of
the Working Group on Nutrition, Ethics, and Human Rights of the
SCN. Its eight chapters authored by Kent G, Künnemann R and
Ratjen S, Donati F and Vidar M, Brady M, Gupta A, Latham M,
Cohen M and Ramanna A, and Vivek S, are followed by reflections
by the editor and a total of 43 specific recommendations
formulated by the group of individual authors and addressed to
the global community and a broad range of actors, including UN
agencies, governments and civil society actors. The recommendations
are grouped into seven broad areas of global-level state
obligations, intergovernmental organizations, nonstate transnational
actors, humanitarian assistance, nutrition of mothers, infants
and pre-school children, nutrition of school-age children,
access to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, and
food sovereignty. The recommendations concern the role that
the global community should play in implementing rights-based
plans to eradicate hunger and malnutrition, and could serve as
building blocks for such a global plan.
www.rowmanlittlefield.com
The book is based in part on an earlier book by George Kent,
Freeedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food (online)
World Development Report 2008:
Agriculture for Development
The World Bank
(online, E/F/S/P/A/R/C)
This report provides guidance to
governments and the international
community on designing and implementing
agriculture-for-development
agendas that can make a difference
in the lives of hundreds of millions of
rural poor. The Report highlights two
major regional challenges. In much
of Sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture is a strong option for spurring
growth, overcoming poverty, and enhancing food security. Agricultural
productivity growth is vital for stimulating growth in other
parts of the economy. But accelerated growth requires a sharp
productivity increase in smallholder farming combined with more
effective support to the millions coping as subsistence farmers,
many of them in remote areas. Recent improved performance
holds promise, and this report identifies many emerging successes
that can be scaled up. This Report addresses three main
questions: What can agriculture do for development? What are
effective instruments in using agriculture for development? How
can agriculture-for-development agendas best be implemented?
www.worldbank.org
SCN NEWS # 36 back to contents
Towards food sovereignty: reclaiming autonomous
food systems
Pimbert M (online)
Towards Food Sovereignty is an
online book with linked video and audio
files. The first three chapters,
available here, begin to describe the
ecological basis of food and agriculture,
the social and environmental
costs of modern food systems, and
the policy reversals needed to democratize
food systems. The video and audio clips show farmers,
indigenous peoples and consumers all working to promote food
sovereignty, it highlights the importance of locally controlled food
systems to sustain both people and nature.
www.iied.org
Nutrition Beyond the Health Sector: A Profile of
World Bank Lending in Nutrition from 2000 to 2006
Garrett J and El Hag El-Tahir S
(online)
The World Bank report Repositioning
Nutrition as Central to Development
explicitly recommended improving nutrition
by not only working through the
health sector, but also in non-health
sectors such as agriculture and education.
This report provides descriptive
and financial profiles of the Bank's recent
portfolio in nutrition (from FY2000 to late FY2006) to note the
extent to which the Bank has actually gone outside the health sector
to work on nutrition. In this period, 41 projects were assigned a
theme of "food and nutrition security." Just over half of them (22
out of 41) had nutrition-related components or activities. Of these
22 projects, half fell within the health sector, and half fell outside.
www.worldbank.org
Dietary Diversity as a Measure of
Women’s Diet Quality in Resource-Poor Areas:
Results from Rural Bangladesh Site
FANTA/USAID/IFPRI (online)
Results from Rural Bangladesh Site
Simple population-level indicators are
needed to assess the quality of
women’s diets and to monitor progress
in improving diets. FANTA is
working with a number of researchers
on a Women’s Dietary Diversity Project
(WDDP), whose broad objective
is to use existing data sets with dietary
intake data from 24-hour recall to analyze the relationship
between simple indicators of diet diversity–such as those that
could be derived from the new Demographic and Health Surveys
(DHS)–and dietary quality for women. With funding from
USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, the WDDP is analyzing data
sets from five countries: Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique
and the Philippines. The final report for Bangladesh
indicates that food group diversity indicators may be a simple
and valid option for population-level assessment and for monitoring
progress toward improved micronutrient intakes among
women of reproductive age.
www.fantproject.org www.usaid.gov www.ifpri.org