Mukunda Kattel

The Global Hunger Index (2020) – released in Lalitpur early this month – ranks Nepal 73rd among 107 countries with sufficient data to calculate the Global Hunger Index (GHI). Nepal’s hunger level is ‘moderate,’ the second best on the GHI Severity Scale, which is a five-category scale of 100 points where 0 means no prevalence of hunger and 100 indicates the extremely alarming state of hunger. With the score of 19.5, Nepal is on the same scale as Sri Lanka in South Asia. All the rest countries in the region are in the third – ‘serious’ – category in which Nepal was in 2012. This is both welcome and impressive progress.
Nepal has fared well in all the four indicators that combine to form the GHI: the percentage of the people deprived of sufficient calories of food; the under-five mortality rate; child wasting (under-five children with symptoms of acute undernutrition); and, child stunning (under-five children suffering from chronic undernutrition). Among the factors contributing to the reduction in hunger are improved food security, and the resultant decrease in undernourishment, decline in population growth and increasing government spending in agriculture, child and maternal nutrition and child-health focused interventions. Political stability and the active participation of civil society in campaigns against hunger are implied to be the subsidiary factors behind the progress.

Shortage of nutritious food
However, the report warns, there is no room for complacency. Access to food is uneven in the mountains. In other areas, where access may not be an issue, the food available is deficient in terms of dietary diversity and micronutrients. The persistence of gender inequality leaves women, including pregnant women, at a disadvantage in terms of the consumption of nutrient-rich diet, which has a direct bearing on maternal health and neonatal mortality. Poor sanitation and hygiene in the Terai, especially in Province 2, continue to cause child stunting and wasting. This indicates the chronic shortage of nutritious food in the area, which is otherwise known as the country’s food basket.
To sustain the gains made so far and move from the current ‘moderate’ down to ‘low’ level of hunger, the report has made a couple of policy recommendations. Crucial among them are: to build synergy among sectors and institutions that work on nutrition-sensitive priorities, such as agriculture, health and women’s empowerment; to increase farmers’ access to technologies, extension services, inputs, credit and markets to ensure inclusive agricultural value chain; to implement education programmes on feeding practices targeting young mothers and certain demographic regions, such as Terai; to strengthen and improve access to health care aimed at treating and preventing malnutrition; and to create an enabling environment for civil society organisations to work as a voice for the poor and marginalised vis-à-vis gender equality, food security, access to nutritious food and democratic decision-making.
The recommendations have a two-fold message. The first suggests that the cause of hunger is not just the unavailability of food. It is the combination of policy frameworks, culture of policy implementation, capacity of those who matter, including land workers, feeding practices and, most importantly, access to food and health care. The second is the call for a new approach to the entire food ecosystem, one in which all these constituting factors are dealt with as part of a coherent whole.
Nepal requires adopting the ‘rights-based’ approach to the food system to graduate to the ‘low’ level of hunger. The approach builds on the ‘entitlements approach’ – also known as political economy approach – pioneered by Amartya Sen in the 1980s. Central to it is the emphasis that hunger and malnutrition do not have a technical quick-fix. As such, a mere growth of agricultural productivity and the increased quantity of food – the technical aspect of a food system – cannot address the problem of hunger. Based on historical evidences of growth failing to make a dent in hunger and poverty, this reasoning of Sen calls for the analysis – and fixing – of unequal power relationships that underlie the food chains at different levels – from the local (such as a rural municipality) to the international (such as the World Trade Organisation) – through governance reform.
In the 1990s, drawing largely on the academic contribution by scholars like Sen, human rights-based approach to food was developed aimed at creating a level playing field for the people at large to participate in decision-making about the food ecosystem. Put simply, the rights-based approach creates obligations on both national governments and the international community – known as ‘duty bearers’ in human rights jargon – to empower the ‘rights holders’ to participate in decisions about production and distribution of food, and hold the defaulters to account when a default is detected. To represent the interest of the voice-deprived, particularly those on the margin of socio-political life, the human rights system creates space for civil society organisations (CSOs) to serve as a voice for them.
The rights-based approach thus creates a triangular interaction among the three actors of the human rights system – the duty bearers, the rights holders and the accountability promoting agents (CSOs) – to ensure that every rights holder has access to food of minimum dietary energy requirements. This is what the Constitution of Nepal, 2015 has envisioned (in Article 36) and the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty Act, 2018 to realise the constitutional protection of the right to food.

Rights-based approach
What we need to do now is to walk the talk as a matter of urgency. At the very least, we should constitute the mechanisms – the food councils at national and provincial levels and coordination committees at the local level – to protect, promote and fulfill the rights enshrined in the above-cited Act in a manner envisaged by the rights-based approach. The delay in constituting the mechanisms not only makes the Act indolent but also risks losing the achievements made over the years.
Let us all join together to celebrate the progress and keep the three actors of the human rights system in a constant interaction to see through the pending task. In a decade from now, we should be a hunger-free nation.

(A PhD on human rights and peace, Kattel is a senior research fellow at Policy Research Institute. kattelmr@gmail.com.)