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

Abstract

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. The authors test the hypothesis that commitment to hunger reduction is empirically different from commitment to reducing undernutrition through expert surveys in 5 high-burden countries: Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania, and Zambia. Their findings confirm the hypothesis. They conclude that sensitive commitment metrics are needed to guide government and donor policies and programmatic action. Without this, historically inadequate prioritization of non-food aspects of malnutrition may persist to imperil achieving global nutrition targets. This research is supported by the Department for International Development’s Transform Nutrition Programme which is led by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)