United Nations System
Standing Committee on Nutrition

Working Group on Household Food Security

held during the SCN's 34th Session, Wednesday 28th February 2007, 10.30 – 11.30, Rome.

Chair: Florence Egal (FAO)
Co-chair: Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted (for DANIDA)

Agenda

• Bridging food security and nutrition: indicators for measuring households’ access to food and dietary diversity
  Marie-Claude Dop, Terri Ballard, Amélie Solal-Céligny & Gina Kennedy (FAO)
• Indigenous Peoples and Food Diversity –Linking Culture, Nature and Health
  Harriet Kuhnlein, Centre for Indigenous People’s Nutrition and Environment (CINE)
• Documenting local action for food security, nutrition and livelihoods: a proposal for an online initiative
  Florence Egal and Luca Servo (FAO)
• ECHUI: Reviewing the global framework and plan of action with a household food security lens
  Introduction and debate

Presentations are attached to the meeting agenda.

Summary of the Meeting
All Working Groups had been asked to discuss the draft ECHUI framework and plan of action with a view to elicit feedback. It was therefore decided that the meeting be divided into two parts: the first part would allow participants to exchange information on recent developments related to nutrition and household food security (see presentations attached) and the second part would be dedicated to discussing ECHUI Framework.

Part 1:

Marie-Claude Dop presented the tools being developed for measuring households’ access to food and dietary diversity, emphasized the importance of standardisation, and presented the strengths and limitations of these tools. She encouraged the incorporation of these tools in surveys and programmes on nutrition and mortality.

Harriet Kuhnlein based her presentation on 12 case studies and indigenous peoples’ right to food. The presentation included the importance of academic and community partnerships in developing the research for benefit of Indigenous Peoples, the large variety of foods used in rural areas, and common environmental concerns – reduced habitat, contaminants, encroachment and piracy. The points raised in the discussion were on the importance of intellectual property rights and trade, food diversity in complementary foods and prevention of obesity in “nutrition transition”, the need for scientific evidence to determine the importance of changing patterns of food diversity for nutritional status and prevention of disease, and the differences in diet diversity among women, men and children.. A video on the Maasai was shown after the working group session.

Florence Egal and Luca Servo presented the draft FSNL (Food Security, Nutrition and Livelihoods) Online Network and the role it can play in sharing knowledge among people involved in Household Food Security and Nutrition, documenting successful case studies as well as function as an online platform, especially for local practitioners. The presentation and ensuing discussion emphasized the need for a strategic and effective facilitation of the network (a part time manager should be considered) which has obvious funding implications. The simplicity of the tool - the Dgroups platform was specifically planned for countries with connectivity problems - is essential to its performance, given the problems relating to use and slowness of the internet at the field level.

Part 2:

The second part of the meeting focussed on the ECHUI (The Ending Child Hunger and Undernutrition Initiative). Sarah Laughton, ECHUI/WFP, joined the chair and co-chair and was given the opportunity to participate actively in the discussions. In general, concern was raised about too little focus on Household Food Security in the ECHUI Framework in relation to the focus on supplementary feeding, cash transfers and social safety nets. Participants emphasized the importance of country-level analysis in determining which interventions ECHUI should focus on in a given context. The importance of contextualizing ECHUI in terms of the realization of human rights, and particularly the right to food, was raised. It was felt that the Initiative must consider and include tools to identify local problems and local solutions as well as partnerships at the country level, interventions than can give immediate impact on children and women, poverty and other causes of household food insecurity, focus on marginalised and vulnerable households, interventions that can be driven to scale, how different interventions can complement each other. It was noted that in fact, many of these priorities are currently reflected in the Global Framework for Action for ECHUI. It was stressed that ECHUI should ensure very close partnerships with other initiatives such as the International and National Alliances Against Hunger and Malnutrition and strong linkages to policies and strategies from other agencies such as DFID, The World Bank and UNICEF as well as to the MDGS and the World Food Summit: Five Years Later. It was felt that the roles of the SCN, the bilateral agencies, civil and private sectors should be specified. Also, it was felt that a new name and the abbreviation (ECHUI) should be chosen to better reflect the scope of the area.