Skip to main content

Home Grown and Healthy Food


By Supriya Kumar
According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), around 70 million school-age children live and attend school in hunger-stricken areas in sub-Saharan Africa. Working in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the WFP is hoping to address this problem using home grown school feeding(HGSF) programs.
HGSF is a school feeding program that provides locally produced food to schools in countries, including Brazil, Chile, India and Thailand. Like other school feeding programs, the focus is on alleviating hunger, while supporting education, nutrition and community development. The goal is to ensure a continuous supply of good quality and highly nutritious food that satisfy local preferences while protecting crop diversity. Unlike other school feeding programs, HGSF follows core principles that not only improve children’s food nutrition, but also increase the incomes of small scale farmers by creating an ongoing – and stable – market for their crops.
One important part of HGSF programs is that they are built on existing plans, not designed from scratch. Typically, a school feeding plan is developed by a country with the support of partners, such as WFP, and it may or may not utilize food that is locally produced. HGSF then develops the program by linking it with local agricultural production. In Kenya, for example, HGSF has helped develop links between existing programs and the government. HGSF provides grants and training to community-driven food security projects while the government provides grants to schools that can then purchase food produced by small-scale farmers participating in the community-driven food security projects.
By developing existing food programs, WFP ensures that programs are country-specific and are catered to the country’s needs. Although the underlying goal of the project is the same, local food preferences and the local agricultural situation are factors that might differ from region to region. For example, even though WFP prefers direct links between the small-scale farmers and the schools, to avoid expensive middlemen, exceptions were made in India’s “Midday Meals” (MDM) scheme. It was found that purchasing rice directly from farmers was not feasible because food for MDM had to be channeled through the public distribution system. WFP acknowledges that there is no single design that can fit all countries and adaptations are necessary for HGSF programs to be successful.
HGSF also helps increase farmers’ incomes by improving their access to the school feeding market and protecting them from rises in food prices. WFP, with partner organizations, help improve farmers’ access to inputs by providing information, training and support to small-scale farmers. In Malawi, the Rockefeller Foundation and the CNFA/Rural Market Development Trust (RUMARK) are supporting projects to improve the supply of agricultural inputs. By training and certifying over 300 agro-dealers across the country, farmers now can travel less to buy inputs from these agro-dealers, who are typically closer than the government owned Agricultural Development and Marketing Agency (ADMARK) or commercial companies.
Through these home-grown school feeding programs, WFP is helping to provide children with healthy and nutritious food while also creating long-lasting income opportunities for small-scale farmers in an effort to eradicate global hunger and poverty.
What do you think? What are some ways that we can provide children with nutritious food, while helping small-scale farmers? Let us know in the comments section!
Supriya Kumar is a research fellow for the Nourishing the Planet project.
To purchase your own copy of State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, please click HERE. And to watch the one minute book trailer, click HERE.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great News with Unilever!

Unilever commits to 75% sustainable packaging Unilever made a well-timed move to commit to sustainable sourcing of packaging in July with research studies showing consumers will change purchasing decisions to support this type of ethical commitment. Unilever published its sustainable paper and board packaging sourcing policy as part of its commitment to double the size of the business while reducing its environmental impact. The policy outlines the Unilever’s ambitious goal to work with its suppliers to source 75 per cent of its paper and board packaging from sustainably managed forests or from recycled material by 2015, rising to 100 per cent by 2020. The commitment makes Unilever the first global FMCG company to commit to sourcing all of its paper and board packaging from sustainably managed forests or recycled material within a clearly defined timeframe. For the company’s requirements for paper from virgin sources, preference will be given to supplies delivered through the Forest ...
Post a Comment
Read more
Back from Europe... life there is sweet and happy! The boys and I spent 3 months in France in Brittany, in the middle of the countryside. It's green, humid and it rains so much that our eyes couldn't get tired from watching the grass, the trees, all the the different cultures in the vast fields. What is most pleasant is the way people care about Earth. They know how to recycle, how to reduce energy consumption, etc... They are so conscious about ecology that we have to learn from them. Well, not that they know more than Native people all over the world, but at least, they are closer than people from the US. Of course, there are many exceptions here too and we have to promote and talk about it as much as we can. For example, this product (link below) has been introduced in the US from Japan, 5 years before it was in Europe. It promotes health on many different levels ;  humans, animals and of course plants.... Check it out. http://hdeuxflo.yourbodyiswater.info Thanks and h...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nano-particules.... not as safe as they predicted!

Hey Guys, I found this great article about nano-particules and wanted to share... @h.deux.flo Nanotechnology was supposed to revolutionize the world, making us healthier and producing cleaner energy. But it’s starting to look more like a nightmare. Nanomaterials—tiny particles as little as 1/100,000 the width of a human hair—have quietly been used since the 1990s in hundreds of everyday products, everything from food to baby bottles, pills, beer cans, computer keyboards, skin creams, shampoo, and clothes. But after years of virtually unregulated use, scientists are now starting to say the most commonly used nanoproducts could be harming our health and the environment. One of the most widespread nanoproducts is titanium dioxide. More than 5,000 tonnes of it are produced worldwide each year for use in food, toothpaste, cosmetics, paint, and paper (as a colouring agent), in medication and vitamin capsules (as a nonmedicinal filler), and in most sunscreens (for its anti-UV...
Post a Comment
Read more