In 1989, the ACC/SCN Secretariat organized a workshop "Managing Successful Nutrition Programmes" at the 14th IUNS Congress in Seoul, August 1989, in which case studies of 17 selected nutrition programmes in 12 countries were presented. At the 16th Session of the ACC/SCN in February 1990 the SCN decided, following a proposal by UNICEF, that the scope should be broadened and a series of case studies be undertaken on country-wide actions aimed at improving nutrition. These would be presented at the 15th IUNS Congress in 1993. UNICEF agreed to provide financial support for this exercise.
The project commenced in November 1990, when a proposal was written that described the structure and content of the reviews. This was later considered by the 18th session of the ACC/SCN in New York. Following this, a trawl of relevant information sources was undertaken and relevant national institutions approached. Consultations on the outlines of country-specific reports (based on the general proposal) were subsequently initiated, country review authors identified and contracts passed to support the work. Preparation of the first drafts of the reviews took approximately 6 months, and were carried out in each case by 1-3 co-authors selected by the collaborating institution.
Three documents that guided the country reviews through providing a basic format and general ideas on setting scope and content, were the UNICEF Nutrition Strategy document (1991) and the two ACC/SCN Nutrition Policy Discussion Papers Nos. 8 and 10, namely "Nutrition-Relevant Actions: Some Experiences from the Eighties and Lessons from the Nineties" and "Managing Successful Nutrition Programmes".
The Brazilian review was prepared by Dr. Roberto F. Iunes, an economist and Dr. Carlos A. Monteiro, an epidemiologist with the School of Public Health and Center for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition of the University of Sao Paulo. We are also very grateful to Dr. Philip Musgrove (World Bank) and Dr. Dutra de Oliveira (IUNS) for their constructive comments on earlier drafts.
The authors would like to thank the following people for their help in the elaboration of this work: Prof. Dr. Maria Helena D'Aquino Benício, and the research assistant Nelson da Cruz Gouveia (Child Health and Nutritional Status); Luiz Patrício Ortiz and Ana Lúcia de Siqueira Brito (Demography); Adriana Schor for research assistance in the area of Economics; and Stuart Gillespie for his comments and discussion. Remaining shortcomings of the paper are the responsibility of the authors.
