C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest

Community Nutrition: Long-Term Solutions,
Stability and Sustainability

By Elizabeth Miller (Sr., Goshen, Ind.)
Winner of the 2004-2005 C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest

 I met Alice while I was working in Kenya last summer. She spoke no English and I spoke very little Swahili, but through a mutual friend, I learned her story. Alice was a twenty-year-old widow with two children. Her husband had died of AIDS, leaving her and her children infected with the virus. In addition, her best friend had also recently died, leaving Alice with her friend’s two children, as well. Alice had no financial support and due to the effects of the HIV was also struggling with tuberculosis. Her children were hungry and Alice’s weight was far below a healthy level. Any food she received, she gave to the children, further deteriorating her own health.

Alice’s situation and the resulting malnutrition she experiences is not uncommon. Since 1950, 450 million people have died from malnutrition and related causes. While malnutrition is a recognized problem, it has often been approached too simplistically in countries with high levels of poverty and food insecurity. One solution has been to use technologically advanced crop varieties and agricultural methods to increase food yields. Another approach has been to provide nutrient dense food supplies to areas with high levels of malnutrition.

While these responses are important, they do not provide long-term solutions that will affect the root causes of malnutrition. When the food aid is gone and farmers can no longer afford high-technology crops and irrigation methods, malnutrition will return.

A successful fight against global and local hunger must involve a community-centered approach to malnutrition. Community nutrition is necessary because it provides long-term solutions, promotes stability and supplies communities with sustainable methods to reduce malnutrition.

Emergency aid is important because it meets nutrition needs for the short-term, but it does not affect long-term changes. To develop long-term changes, the individual causes of malnutrition within the community must be recognized and removed. It is important to identify chronic and seasonal food shortages, diet diversity and inadequate feeding practices that exist. A community approach to nutrition demands that the community answer these questions, with the help of trained individuals, and develop long-term solutions to their malnutrition problems.

According to the Agricultural Nutrition Advancement Project, at the most basic level, communities should find new way to preserve, process, distribute and market food. Within the agricultural sector, production can be diversified to include foods containing micronutrients that may be missing from foods commonly eaten in the community. Nutrition education can also encourage vendors to process and sell their food in more nutritious and innovative ways. These approaches will result in structural change that reorients the relationship of the community to food and nutrition.

Community nutrition also increases stability, because it demands that various sectors, including agriculture, health and education, work together to improve the nutritional status of the community. Improved stability in one area often precipitates increased stability elsewhere.

George McGovern, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies on Food and Agriculture (FAO), sees school lunch programs as one of the major steps in the fight against malnutrition. He discovered that wherever school lunch programs were offered, in developing countries, school attendance doubled within a few years. Children receiving the lunches had more energy to focus on their education, which has long-term benefits for the community. It also involved the agricultural sector, when local farmers were able to sell their produce to the schools as part of the lunch program.

Another community program connecting nutrition to the schools was started in Panama and described in The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003, published by the FAO. Thirteen Panamanian communities were involved in the project that focused on improving the food security of children and teaching them how to grow and eat nutritious foods.

The students studied nutrition education, food processing, and forestry and worked on maintaining school gardens. Eventually the project spread into the wider community, involving teachers, farmers and parents. Households voluntarily joined together and formed associations to grow nutritious crops and share information.

This program shows how various community sectors worked together and accomplished significant changes. Underweight children dropped from 19.9% to 10.6 %, almost a 50% decrease. In addition, malnutrition in participating communities dropped by as much as 85% in some cases.

This approach to nutrition is exciting, because the stability spreads outwards from the original project. Improved nutritional status in the educational system promotes gender equality by reducing the disproportionately large number of women and girls who suffer from malnutrition. Also, using innovative agriculture techniques can result in an improved local economy.

Finally, community nutrition is necessary is because it supports sustainability. The American Dietetics Association defines “sustainability” as “society’s ability to shape its economic and social systems so as to maintain both natural resources and human life.” This definition implies that a successful response to malnutrition involves methods that a community could begin and maintain, while protecting its resources.

In fact, community approaches to nutrition are more likely to succeed. In 1993, the FAO published “Guidelines for Participatory Nutrition Projects” in which they wrote, “When a community is fully involved in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of nutrition and other development projects, these are likely to be more effective and sustainable.”

Sustainable nutrition programs must meet the real needs of the community, be relatively low-cost, protect the community’s resources and function with minimal external input. This approach provides a greater ability to adjust to unexpected changes, because the programs are rooted in the knowledge of the community.

This past summer I worked in Mosoriot, Kenya with a program that seeks a sustainable, community-centered solution to the malnutrition within their community. The farm I was at, one of three HAART and Harvest Initiative farms in Kenya, seeks to provide nutritional support for HIV/AIDS patients, but the program is also affecting changes within the rest of the community. Patients with HIV/AIDS are referred to the farm for nutritional support by a local clinic. Here they can receive foodstuffs and attend nutrition and agricultural classes. In addition, local community members are employed by the farm and taught sustainable and more productive agriculture techniques.

The pictures on the screen show some of the farm’s strategies. Chicken’s diets are supplemented with vegetables grown on the farm, which makes their eggs more rich with beta-carotene, providing better nutrition for clients who receive the eggs. A legume called sesbania is grown on parts of the farm to increase nitrogen levels in the soil. The protein-rich leaves are then picked and fed to the dairy cows to increase their milk production. The farm has two wells, dug with everyday tools, that work on a pulley system to provide people with safer water. These are sustainable approaches using common resources, available to most community members.

Every other week patients meet at the farm to attend nutrition and agriculture classes, to learn methods for improving their nutritional status.

Workers on the farm usually stay for a few months before leaving to begin agriculture projects of their own. While on they farm, they are provided with a healthy diet, taught new agriculture techniques and are encouraged to attend weekly agriculture classes. When I left two of the workers were planning to start their own cooperative in another community. In this way, the knowledge about better nutrition is spreading. In addition, a local school also uses the farm’s facilities to teach elementary school children about agriculture and nutrition.
These solutions are not cheap or easy, however. While they will hopefully be more low-cost for the communities, these approaches definitely require investment from both international and domestic organizations in capital, human resources and food stuffs. Community nutrition is a way of addressing malnutrition that will last beyond the stay of aid-workers, the initiatives of one charismatic individual or the efforts of one organization.

Anthony, the director of HHI Farm, once told me that, “There is no pride if your neighbor is starving.” He often tells the farm workers this to encourage them to share their knowledge and help their community, emphasizing that group security guarantees individual security, not the other way around. But this wisdom applies to us as well. There also is no pride for us if our neighbor here or across the world is suffering from malnutrition. While the problem may seem far removed from our lives, there are steps we can take to help our neighbors.

I would encourage you to volunteer in government and non-governmental organizations that approach malnutrition from the perspective of local communities. It is also important to pay attention to hunger-related legislation and act as an advocate for legislation that offers the most sustainable solutions for communities. This is also an area where the church, as it cares for both the bodies and spirits of people, can play an important role by supporting international and domestic efforts.

I would like to return to Alice’s story now. She became involved with the HHI program and began receiving food from the farm. But because of the community-centeredness of the program, she is doing more than just receiving aid. When able, she attends the nutrition classes and every day she picks up fresh milk that the workers in the dairy save just for her. Usually, they only give out fermented milk, but her baby’s stomach can’t handle it, so they have tailored the program to meet her needs. In addition, she is connected to other families facing the same struggles she is and is able to maintain close contact with the clinic. While this program does not fix all of Alice’s problems or cure her HIV, this example of sustainable community nutrition has provided her and her family with the possibility for long-term changes, increased stability and better health.