Nutrition policy can give you indigestion, World Food Prize laureates say

From left: Catherine Bertini, 2003 World Food Prize laureate, United Nations undersecretary-general for management and chair of the U.N. System Standing Committee on Nutrition; Cutberto Garza, leading professor and director, Cornell Division of Nutritional Sciences; and Malden Nesheim, provost emeritus and founding director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences, listen to a lecture given by Cornell Professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen at the Biotechnology Building on Sept. 23 as part of the World Food Prize Seminar Series. The lectures and panel discussion for this first seminar in the series concerned the topic "Accomplishments and Aspirations: Linking Agriculture, Nutrition and Health." Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography
	Per Pinstrup-Andersen, 2001 World Food Prize laureate and the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Poicy in Cornell's Division of Nutritional Sciences, speaks Sept. 23 as part of the World Food Prize Seminar Series. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Roger Segelken

Eating food is easy -- sometimes too easy. Even growing quantities of food is easier these days, thanks to agricultural advances from the Green Revolution and the genetic-modification movement.

But getting truly nutritious food to the people who need it most? That's the challenge for the next century, agreed three winners of the World Food Prize in a Sept. 23 seminar that was part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) centennial celebration.

A standing-room-only audience of students and faculty members in the Biotechnology Building's G10 conference room heard Nevin S. Scrimshaw, president of the International Nutrition Foundation and 1991 World Food Prize laureate; Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Cornell's H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy and the 2001 laureate; and Catherine Bertini, an undersecretary-general at the United Nations, where she is chair of the System Standing Committee on Nutrition, and 2003 prize laureate.

Speaking on "Agriculture to meet human biological needs," Scrimshaw said the human genome has not had time to adapt to the modern foods we try to feed ourselves. He cited one "Paleolithic remnant," the African Kalahari bushmen, as a people whose diet is better attuned to their genome, and listed the huge variety of unprocessed animal food sources that sustain them.

Scrimshaw pointed to one example of policy-makers' attempt to provide more food -- the farmed fish that are replacing the dwindling wild fish supplies worldwide. But farmed fish are less advantageous to human nutritional needs because they have lower levels of omega 3 fatty acids, compared to native fish, Scrimshaw noted, adding: "We have to optimize quality to bring food closer to the needs of our genome."

Reminding his listeners that he is an economist and that policy-makers look to economists for guidance, Pinstrup-Andersen cited one policy gaffe in his native Denmark. The Danish government subsidizes whole milk -- because producers have trouble selling dairy products with high butterfat content -- and as a result, whole milk is much cheaper for school children in Denmark. It is also less healthful than low-fat milk, setting up the children for a lifetime of obesity and subsequent disease that will cost the government far more for health-care costs than the dairy subsidies it paid.

Sometimes subsidies have multiple effects, Pinstrup-Andersen observed. He said European Union sugar subsidies boost the price of that fattening commodity to EU residents -- a good consequence -- but have bad economic consequences for sugar growers in developing countries who can't penetrate subsidized markets. The Green Revolution saved millions in Asia from dying of starvation, the Cornell food economist continued. But because of its focus on rice and wheat and not the pulses (leguminous crops like beans, peas and lentils that are richer in iron), he said, iron-deficiency anemia is on the rise in Asia.

When Pinstrup-Andersen said that food aid does not always reach the neediest -- and cited Indonesia, where 20 percent of households have an obese parent as well as malnourished children -- Bertini had to agree. Without speculating whether the obese parents were men or women, she said policy-makers should listen to the real decision-makers in hungry families before deciding key questions, such as whether to send cash with which to buy food or to send actual food.

The U.N. food official said she hears the same plea wherever she travels and speaks with mothers: "'Please keep sending food. When cash comes in, my husband controls it. When food comes into my household, I control it." Bertini said she made sure the World Food Program in Afghanistan was staffed by women; when the Taliban men "complained to Washington that 'it might as well be called the Women's Food Program,' I took that as a high honor."

Bertini even had a school lunch story to top Pinstrup-Andersen's: She said when she asked the operators of Saudi Arabia's massive dairy herds (with as many as 25,000 cows per farm) why they were complaining about milk surpluses and why they didn't send excess milk to the schools, they answered: "Not possible. Schoolchildren must drink Pepsi."

Continuing the World Food Prize series, which is sponsored by the Division of Nutritional Sciences and by International Programs at the agriculture college, the executive secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, Monty Jones, will speak Oct. 20 on "From Asia to Africa: New Rice for Africa -- Fighting Africa's War Against Poverty and Hunger." On Nov. 11 the director of tropical agriculture at Columbia University's Earth Institute, Pedro Sanchez, will speak on "Recommendations of the U.N. Millennium Project Hunger Task Force." All seminars are scheduled from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. in G10 Biotechnology Building and are open to the public.