My interests include food systems, support for culinary enjoyment rather than turning meals into formulae, global health enhancement, policy and strategy and everyone who deprecates reductive, reactive actions.
Posted on 18/02/2025
Greetings!
First of all, we would like to make this contribution understandable to everybody whether it is an evaluation professional or an actual food producer or an ordinary consumer of food. Otherwise, it would run the risk of being an academic post inaccessible to people who are really concerned
with policies and regulations affecting food systems.
It is easy and simple to outline what such policies and regulations ought to enable food systems to achieve, but unfortunately, theorists often forget what the end-users of food systems wish and require from the one they use vary widely. Their wishes and requirements are for the most part, governed by their food culture, which has both a physiological and an environmental relevance that should not be overlooked.
Briefly then, successful policies and regulations concerned here should guide food systems adequately to meet the following objectives:
- Their operation is progressively environmentally sustainable; most of the current ones are not, hence the need for their gradual progress towards their future sustainability.
- Their output is guided by the norms of the local food culture to the greatest possible degree.
- Their output should be adequate for their end-users to procure a wholesome, varied and a balanced diet.
- Their output should be physically accessible and affordable to the end-users.
- Minimise food losses as much as possible; neither policy nor regulations offer a feasible means of reducing domestic food losses.
However, they are useful in reducing them from the trade, storage and transport sub-systems in food systems.
We need not emphasise that unless the above criteria are met, no technical improvement of food systems or how they are financed would enable one to deal with the problems of hunger, malnutrition and inappropriate nutrition rampant in the world today. Whether a given food system meets those criteria would have to be ascertained by local inspection, and then one would be able
to formulate relevant generic regulations.
But let it be remembered that the value of such formulations will be nugatory, unless a mechanism exists to enforce them with sufficient vigour.
It is often tempting to direct both policies and regulations to the exclusive benefit of a particular group of foodf producers, harvesters (eg. fishermen) or the end-users. However, a careful look at any food system would show that farmer poverty as well as malnutrition and inappropriate
nutrition often stem from inequities in the trade sub-system of a fiven food system.
All things being equal, inadequacies in other sub-systems in a food system would have the same effect owing either to inadequate food production of the yielder sub-system or its wastage in transport and storage sub-systems.
The goal of a food and agriculture policy is to enable the people of a country to procure on a regular basis what they require to obtain a wholesome, varied and balanced diet at an affordable cost.
Achievement of this goal requires a number of strategies whose specific nature depends on a
country's current food culture.
Success of this policy depends on meeting two critical requirements. First,the strategies it employs should be in accord, i. e., intra-policy harmony.
For instance, in a country where adequate nutrition for the majority does not obtain, a food and agriculture policy that embodies the strategy of investing in cash crops is not in harmony with its goal as described above. Sometimes, international organisations are guilty of this harmful activity
as illustrated by World Bank compelling certain West African regimes to export their peanut crop resulting in protein malnutrition among children.
Secondly, as a food system consists of several sub-systems that come under the jurisdiction of different ministries, their policies may conflict with the main objective of a country's food and agriculture policy. This inter-policy disharmony with respect to latter's goal could have very
undesirable consequences for the people concerned.
Consider now, the trade policy of a country that allows import of new food stuffs, establishment of
large foreign monoculture factory farms etc., which would have disastrous consequences for small holders, independent retailers and the general state of nutrition in the land involved.
Achievement of the requisite inter-policy harmony is difficult for three reasons.
- First, vested interests that plague every government
- Secondly, bureaucratic norm of shielding oneself behind 'institutional autonomy' in
order to preserve status quo - Finally, lack of intellectual breadth and
competence to apprehend it necessity in every field should the authorities
deliver what they so glibly promise.
The perceptive reader would have noticed that while the regulations needed call for on-the-spot investigation, ascertaining whether an acceptable degree of intra-policy and inter-policy harmony obtains would have to be undertaken before the strategies they employ are implemented. This may run into a wide variety of difficulties, but unless it is done, at least a partial failure of a given food and agriculture policy is inevitable. Inertiaof the bureaucratic tradition and infatuation with the peculiar terminology of tradesmen seem to be the greatest obstacles to progress in this field.
Best wishes!
Lal Manavado.
Norway
Lal - Manavado
Consultant
Independent analyst/synthesist
Posted on 08/09/2025
How to Ensure the Use of Evaluation Results in Decision Making
A historical retrospect of the evolution of policies would convince one of their fragmented and less than coherent emergence. A concerted attempt to ascertain their public utility by evaluation is fairly new. Thus, decision-making seems to have had a logical priority over evaluation.
Before one proceeds, it is important to distinguish between decision-making and implementation. Owing to its general character and political considerations, the former is all too often guided by expediency or an obvious public need. This may be far from being ideal, but one would have to take political reality into consideration were one to make a worthwhile contribution to public well-being.
This obvious distinction between decision-making and implementation introduces a temporal component to what kind of evaluation would be of significant utility to decision makers. This may be called pre- and post decision making evaluation feed-back respectively. When a decision is to be made, pre-decision evaluation feed-back could provide some useful guidance as to its appropriateness with reference to the following criteria:
• Competence of decision makers and decision implementers; this ranges from the national and regional to the local field levels.
• Cost of procurement, operation, and maintenance of the tools and other materials required for implementing a decision.
• Its effects on the environment, national employment figures and the equitability of its results.
• Its implications on local culture, public health etc.
The perceptive reader would have noticed at once that the evaluation of those four criteria could only be undertaken with reference to a specific decision, hence, its logical priority over evaluation.
Here, evaluation faces two major challenges:
• Degree of political devolution in a country; for instance, in Canada, the provinces have a great deal of political autonomy, thus the regional policies ought to be dovetailed into their national counterparts. In Scandinavia, local authorities have a great deal of autonomy, hence, in those countries, decision design applicable to the area is carried out locally. In such cases, decision evaluation has to be very flexible because what food each area may successfullyproduce can vary significantly.
• Differences in the type of data on which an evaluation could justifiably be based vary
considerably. While policies and their implementation strategies are concerned with overall national benefit, that at the local or field level one has to pay attention to what contribution a plan/project may make first to the well-being of an area and then to the country as a whole.
When a previous decision to achieve comparable objectives has been implemented, the actual public utility of its results would provide the evaluator some very useful guidelines on what recommendations would be most useful to the designers and implementers of the next decision on the same subject. The utility of such recommendations depends on the willingness and ability of the political leaders and their decision makers to learn better ways of doing things.
Next, one encounters the problem of identifying the data on which an adequate evaluation may be based. Obviously, what ought to be monitored depends on the level at which an evaluation is carried out. For instance, an evaluation of a decision and its implementation strategy will require the pertinent information relative to the four criteria described earlier. It will be noted that at regional and local levels, the relevant data will also vary according to the political powers vested in them.
Finally at the plan/project level one needs clearly to distinguish between monitoring the ‘objective facts that may indicate its successful completion, and the actual benefits it offers the target group. A multi-million Dollar motor way hardly used by vehicular traffic had been quoted in this forum as an example of the former.
This sketch of multi-layered evaluation required at national, regional and local levels
provides one a glimpse of the way forward. It has two dimensions:
• National decision-makers have neither the time or the inclination to peruse evaluations of plans/projects; what they need to know are the achievable goals of national importance, like a way to enhance food production. The decision and implementation strategies needed here are general in character. One might say that those provide a framework aimed at a general goal, while successful plans/projects can be seen as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and if the general goal is attained, then those pieces would fit snugly into the picture of success.
• The four criteria discussed earlier will guide those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle as to their place in the whole, their suitability with reference to a national goal. Therefore, the challenge one faces in incorporating evaluation as an adjunct to national planning is how to make the decision-makers understand its usefulness and persuade them to use it appropriately. Unfortunately, their unwillingness or inability to apprehend the necessity of completeness of the means of implementation in use, failure to grasp the need for inter- and inter decision harmony make the present task rather difficult.
Lal Manavado.