Scaling Up International Food Aid: Food Delivery Alone Cannot Solve the Malnutrition crisis
A recent two-day international meeting in New York City on preventing and treating childhood malnutrition was organized by Columbia University’s Institute of Human Nutrition and the humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières (MSF)
The meeting focused on food insecurity particularly in crisis regions where many humanitarian agencies work and several speakers at the meeting argued that the world’s poor lack access to food and that improving health services or educating mothers alone will not be enough to address the malnutrition crisis.
Food aid alone however, cannot be sufficient for combating the multi-faceted nature of the current [malnutrition] emergency in the long-term.
Addressing the role of food aid in long-term efforts will require answering some difficult questions, including which basic determinants of malnutrition should be the major focus and who should coordinate the global response to the malnutrition crisis. The dialogue must therefore extend beyond the immediate context of food delivery to the broader sociopolitical sphere, including the role of humanitarian agencies and nongovernmental organizations themselves. These concerns will be explored in an upcoming commissioned series in PLoS Medicine.
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