Journal Article

76

Equate and Conflate: Political Commitment to Hunger and Undernutrition Reduction in Five High-Burden Countries

Published on 13 July 2015

As political commitment is an essential ingredient for elevating food and nutrition security onto policy agendas, commitment metrics have proliferated. Many conflate government commitment to fight hunger with combating undernutrition.

We test the hypothesis that commitment to hunger reduction is empirically different from commitment to reducing undernutrition through expert surveys in five high-burden countries: Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania, and Zambia. Our findings confirm the hypothesis.

We conclude that sensitive commitment metrics are needed to guide government and donor policies and programmatic action. Without, historically inadequate prioritization of non-food aspects of malnutrition may persist to imperil achieving global nutrition targets.

Authors

Dolf J.H. te Lintelo

Research Fellow and Cities Cluster Leader

Rajith Lakshman

Research Fellow

Publication details

published by
Elsevier
authors
te Lintelo, D. and Lakshman, R.
journal
World Development, volume 76

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