More than 1,200 economists descended on Milan this past August
for their triennial gathering under the auspices of the International
Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE). Among the bewildering
array of topics covered, nutrition was very much on the agenda reflecting the
development zeitgeist of our time. Indeed, a full plenary session was devoted to it. Also on the agenda was
a symposium on whether consumers will accept foods that have been biofortified with vitamins
and minerals.
In tandem with these developments, I set up shop hosting a
HarvestPlus booth at ICAE for the first time. I was in good company, sandwiched
between one of our parent institutes, the International Food Policy Research
Institute, and the United States Department of Agriculture's Economic
Research Service.
As a communicator, this grunt work of sitting behind a booth and
trying to engage passersbys can be both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating
because there is a pecking order at these conferences and being at a booth usually
places you at the lower end; rewarding because of the rich opportunities for conversations
that you just don't get by sitting at your desk, sometimes even with luminaries
of the development world.
After a week in the trenches, I made some surprising
discoveries. Many delegates, regardless of whether they were from richer
or poorer countries, were hazy on hidden hunger. They had heard about it, but struggled
to hone in on what it was exactly. Similarly, when I began asking those curious
enough to stop by the booth if they had heard of the first thousand days, I was
surprised by the number of blank stares I received in return. This, despite
then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being the face that launched the thousand days challenge five years ago,
and despite more than 100 governments signing up to the global Scaling Up Nutrition
movement which had embraced the thousand days challenge.
The intention here is not to chastise agricultural economists, or to generalize. (I will admit to having an M.Sc. in
agricultural economics myself.) I
certainly could not have talked to everyone, and so perhaps my sample size was
drawn from those who knew least about our work and were curious enough to find out.
The lesson here is for those of us concerned that nutrition is invisible. Guess
what? It still is. We are still not getting through, even to the broader
development community, to the extent we think we are.
One reason might be the complicated lexicon around nutrition.
I've been to events, for example, where nutritionists have argued about whether
to use the term malnutrition or undernutrition and failed to agree. Today the
nutrition community may have moved beyond these debates; but if we are still
not getting through to people with a brilliant encapsulation of what matters
most—the first thousand days of life, a concept that lends itself to powerful
storytelling—then we have a problem.
A second reason is that we simply don't tell enough stories.
Human beings are wired for storytelling; statistics and graphs are simply not
sticky enough, unless you are preaching to the choir, and even now and then a
choir needs its spirits lifted.
Third, as Lawrence Haddad and others have pointed out, there are
still no “Departments of Nutrition,” and so nutrition tends to fall through the
cracks. As for hidden hunger, while insidious and far-reaching in its effects, it
does its damage from within—there are no images of famine-scarred children to
share through social media with audiences that are increasingly inured to the quieter
suffering in the world.
Here’s how I finally got through to my audience: I made nutrition more relevant to the work and
interests of each member. One delegate said he worked on improving economic
productivity in his country. How, I asked, will you do that when 20 percent of
your work force will grow up to be compromised because of hidden hunger in
childhood? Another was concerned about
the impacts of climate change on agricultural yield. What about the nutritional
quality of food? I asked. There is some evidence that nutritional quality will
decline for some staples along with yields. How will you nourish your citizens
with a smaller and less nutritious harvest at the end of the day? Asking these
questions led to some “aha” moments, and as a communicator, nothing is more
satisfying than that.
But we need to continue to hammer away at this, and find ways to communicate why nutrition still needs to move up the agenda of researchers, policymakers, and donors. We still talk—too much I would argue--—within our silos.
Reductionist disciplinary investigations may give us greater
insights into the world's problems, but holistic inter-disciplinary
conversations is what it will take to solve them.
Yassir Islam is Head of Communications at HarvestPlus,
a global program that improve nutrition and
public health by developing and promoting biofortfied food crops that are rich
in vitamins and minerals. HarvestPlus is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). CGIAR is a global agriculture research partnership for a food secure
future. The HarvestPlus program is coordinated by two of these centers, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
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