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A New View of Nutrition .

With an expanded focus on nutrition, FEWS NET provides food security analysis that is valuable for short-term relief and long-term development solutions.

In July 2012, some 60,000 Sudanese refugees, fleeing conflict in their home country, crowded the Yida camp across the border in South Sudan. Hundreds more arrived each day, exhausted and weak. Each day a handful of refugees died, and the daily death toll was increasing.

As the rainy season began, threatening to worsen sanitation, hygiene, and disease, a study found that about 22 percent of the refugee children under the age of 5 were acutely malnourished. Although USAID, U.N. agencies, and NGOs already were providing emergency assistance, the study — supported by USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) project implemented by Chemonics — offered clear evidence of the need to ramp up support.

Nutrition studies such as this have traditionally been used in emergency situations to catalyze humanitarian action, target nutritional and medical interventions, and contribute to ongoing monitoring. Increasingly, however, FEWS NET is using nutritional analysis to explain the broader context of food security, particularly the underlying causes of and relationships between acute and chronic food insecurity. A more detailed understanding of these causes and relationships could inform longer-term development solutions to food security.

In an expansion of its scope, the project is building its knowledge base on nutrition and increasing the use of nutrition data in its monthly analysis of 36 of the world’s most food-insecure countries. Alongside its long-standing integration of agroclimatology, markets and trade, and livelihoods information, nutrition analysis will add a new stream of critical information on one of the key drivers of food insecurity.

“By looking at the causes and teasing out specific information on food insecurity, as well as behavior, caring practices, disease, and poverty, we hope to find a new level of detail that will be valuable both to humanitarian responders planning for emergencies as well as development agencies focused on longer-term solutions.”

Christine McDonald, FEWS NET Nutrition Advisor

Historically, malnutrition was considered a lagging indicator and therefore not an essential element of food security analysis. The thinking was that under-nutrition becomes evident after an extended period of low- or poor-quality caloric intake, once people are already food-insecure. In other words, when it is too late to be useful in understanding the underlying causes of food insecurity.

But this is a narrow view, said FEWS NET’s U.S.-based nutrition advisor, Christine McDonald, who recently joined a Chemonics team that includes nutrition experts Joel Munywoki in Nairobi, Kenya, and Moussa Moctar in Niamey, Niger.

“To make progress, it’s important to understand nutrition in a comprehensive way, to see what we can learn, for example, about seasonal patterns and trends and who within a given population is particularly vulnerable to malnutrition,” said McDonald, a registered dietitian with a doctorate from Harvard University, who recently studied dietary interventions in Malian and Tanzanian children.

“By looking at the causes and teasing out specific information on food insecurity, as well as behavior, caring practices, disease, and poverty, we hope to find a new level of detail that will be valuable both to humanitarian responders planning for emergencies as well as development agencies focused on longer-term solutions,” she said.

The bridge between humanitarian and development programming comes at an opportune time, when global leaders are promoting new approaches to improved nutrition and food security. These include the Scaling Up Nutrition movement, the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, the 1,000 Days campaign, and A Promise Renewed initiative, which advocates evidenced-based decision-making to improve maternal and child health.

20

fields offices with FEWS NET food security analysts

36

countries in which monthly analysis of food security takes place

FEWS NET will undertake this expanded effort in collaboration with partners, including national governments, international agencies, and NGOs. For example, Action Against Hunger, a global humanitarian organization with expertise on nutrition, conducted field research in the Yida camp.

Following devastating famines in East and West Africa in the mid-1980s, USAID created FEWS NET to help governments and relief agencies plan for and respond to humanitarian crises. Today, analysts in 20 field offices and a home office in Washington, D.C., provide objective early-warning and food security analysis on 36 countries. In partnership with U.S. government agencies, national government ministries, U.N. agencies, and NGOs, they collect and analyze data on such factors as weather, climate, agriculture production, prices, trade, conflict, and livelihoods. Alerts, monthly reports, and other products are made available via subscriber lists and on FacebookTwitter, and the FEWS NET website.