Milk-and-Dairy-Products-in-Human-Nutrition-FAO

Chapter 9 – Human nutrition and dairy development: Trends and issues 371
in large programmes like that of India and the East Africa Dairy Development
project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (Chapter 8) provides an
opportunity to include well-designed evaluation on the scale necessary to measure
consumption impacts. Chapter 7 describes a few examples on which to build, such
as the study by Alderman (1987) in India and that by Ayalew, Gebriel and Kassa
(1999) in Ethiopia.
The following points also need to be taken into consideration:
• Dairy programmes that aim to improve nutrition should include evaluation of
nutritional impact from the start and have it built into their design. Whether
the programme is a private or a public investment, measuring impact requires
a baseline.
• Programmes that aim to increase supplies to urban populations will have
a more difficult measurement task since many consumers will be distant
from producers and hard to locate. Much has been written about the
nutritional value of livestock ownership (e.g. Randolph et al., 2007), but
far less has been written that directly links changes in production patterns
with urban consumption.
9.3.2 Design of dairy programmes for nutritional outcomes
This section focuses on programmes and projects that are funded with the specific
aim of improving nutritional impact. This means that it is likely to be applicable to
publicly funded development efforts or those funded by the private sector that have
a social as well as profit objective.
The first step in designing a programme is to determine its objectives and a
dairy programme that aims to improve nutritional outcomes may have more than
one objective. It may be aiming to boost the milk supply, support producers in a
particular area and/or increase consumption of safe and nutritious food among the
poor. These objectives can be harmonious but they can also conflict, making project
design somewhat challenging. For example, a programme that increases milk supply
and improves quality by investing in large-scale production and processing may
unintentionally displace small-scale producers.
As discussed in Section 9.2.4, it is generally accepted that it is easier to provide an
abundant, cheap and safe milk supply from fewer, larger farms than from numerous
small farms, but this may not benefit large numbers of small-scale rural producerconsumers.
Setting price ceilings that ensure cheap milk to cities discourages
producers and encourages the development of parallel markets. Keeping food prices
low through subsidies affects all consumers, not only a limited target group, and for
that reason it can be an expensive way to promote consumption by poor consumers
as well as encouraging overconsumption by others.
The difficulty of pursuing multiple objectives may explain why dairy-industry
development programmes have not been strongly focussed on nutrition and why
dairy-industry development and nutrition have tended to follow different paths
in public investment. To bring them together is likely to require a comprehensive
programme that contains elements of conventional dairy-industry development
programmes and conventional nutrition programmes.
Any programme in the dairy sector is likely to work better in targeting nutrition
if it is part of the wider nutrition strategy for the country; there may already be