Det kunne være det kalorie-badende junk-food Amerika, men det er Nigeria, hvor konsekvenserne er til at tage og føle på: 1/4 af alle småbørn er undervægtige og 40 procent hæmmet i væksten – den store udfordring er at få ernæringsrigtig kost ind i salgskæden i den private sektor.
LONDON, 18 April 2014 (IRIN): With a certain amount of fanfare, Nigeria has just officially become a middle income country. It is not the sort of country associated with widespread hunger, or a country where people normally get, or expect to get, food aid.
And yet around a quarter of small children in Nigeria are underweight, and around 40 percent are stunted (hæmmet i væksten); they do not get enough nutritious (ernæringsrig) food to reach their full physical and mental potential.
In a nation of 170 million people that is a huge number of children, far too many to be reached by any feeding scheme.
You do not have to be an ideological cheerleader for the power of free markets to believe the best way to reach these children – in Nigeria and elsewhere – would be by getting more nutritious fortified (beriget) food into the normal, private sector distribution chain and into the small shops and local markets which serve the poor.
“Even people living in rural areas and working on farms rely on markets to purchase food for some or all of the year,” says John Humphrey at the UK Institute of Development Studies (IDS), noting:
“And when we talk about market provision we are in effect talking about the private sector. We are not just talking about Nestlé and Unilever and the big multinationals; we are talking about a broad range of private sector operators.”
Humphrey and his Overseas Development Colleagues colleagues are among a growing number of nutritionists and academics who have been worrying away at the problem of how best to harness the power of the private sector to deliver not just enough calories, but the vitamins, minerals and micronutrients that children need.
Working with the market
There are precedents (fortilfælde) for successfully delivering micronutrients through commercially available foodstuffs.
The widespread addition of iodine (jod) to salt has almost eliminated goitre (struma – se http://www.netdoktor.dk/ordbog/struma.htm) and other iodine deficiency (jodmangel) symptoms in many countries. But the difficulties faced by Ethiopia in trying to enforce the iodization of salt show some of the problems of this approach.
Poor people buy their salt in small quantities from the market, and most of it comes from artisanal (små) producers. Adding iodine at small scale is more difficult and more expensive, yet the resulting salt looks the same and tastes the same as untreated salt which can be sold at a lower price.
In Ethiopia’s arid Afar region rock salt producers lobbied hard against compulsory legislation. But the government persisted.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other organizations helped introduce easier methods for small producers to treat their salt, and the country’s network of village health workers now has the job of testing the salt on sale in their areas. Even so, universal coverage has still not been reached.
The problem, says Humphrey, is that the value of fortified foodstuffs is what is known as a “credence” (troværdigheds) good:
“If you say to somebody, ‘this product is rich in vitamins,’ you can eat as much as you like but you are still not going to know if it really is rich in vitamins; you are simply going to have to believe it. So this is a massive problem, especially for the case of nutrient-rich food.”
The classic ways of establishing belief, through brand promotion, packaging and advertising, raise the price.
In fact a higher price can in itself help persuade customers that it must be good. It is – in the words of a well-known beer advertisement – “reassuringly expensive”.
A study of weaning (fravænnende) foods in Mali found that the imported baby food Cerelac outsold similar local products, even though it was three times more expensive, and many mothers could not afford to buy enough of it to derive much benefit.
Challenge of regulation
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http://www.irinnews.org/report/99960/fortified-food-persuading-the-private-sector-to-do-good
