SpecialfocuslReports

It would not be appropriate to debate here the general merits of multilateral versus bilateral food aid. In the case of Peru, bilateral food aid donors -- particularly the voluntary agencies - had the incidental advantage over multi- lateral aid of also providing non-food resources, thus obviating a limiting factor of the multilateral projects. This is not necessarily an inherent difference between the two forms of aid.

In conclusion, it must be stated that it is not easy to quantify, in relation to costs, the be&its of food aid and

particularly of project aid where so many factors are involved. Some of the benefits are humanitarian, some de~e~oprnent~l and there are many imponderables. However, while a neat and accurate balance sheet is not possible it does appear that food aid has alleviated much real distress, has contributed to increased production and developlnent and has helped the economy of one sorely tried Latin

American country. With the implementation of the kind of improvements suggested it is believed

that food aid in general can be made appreciably more effective.

Pbifip Griffin*

Dublin, Ireland

’ The author is attached to the Ministry of Agriculture in Dublin, Ireland. and is First Vice Chairman of the governing committee of the World Food Programme (Committee on Food Aid Policies and Programmes). ‘The Peruvian counterpart of the Seventh Day Adventist Service. 3The proportion of women workers to men is about 1 to 6.

Reports

Tracing feeding ~rogramm~ drop-outs

Supplementary feeding programmes have been used as one outlet for the food

aid which is sent to developing nations. In the November 1978 issue of Food

Policy, Simon MaxweN analyzed the costs and benefits of supplementary

feeding projects, in terms of both nutritionat and non-~utritjona~ results.’ In

considering the importance of such results, she rate and health status of

programme drop-outs can significantly affect conclusions. An exercise

demonstrating the differences in results, depending on assumptions about drop-

outs, is presented here for a World Food Programme (WFP) feeding project in

The importance of tracing drop-outs from supplementary feeding programmes is illustrated with data from a WFP project in Mexico.z The project envisaged the feeding of 150 000 pre-school children and 75 000 expectant and nursing mothers in rural areas with a ration consisting of milk, fish and edible oil, every day of the year for a period of five years beginning at the end of 1971. For the children the ration was to be 350 calories, 20 g of protein and 16 g of fats, and by 1974 a review mission, assessing the results of the project, was able to conclude that ‘the programme is making a significant contribution to improvement of the nutritional status of the beneficiaries’. The data on which this conclusion was based sre reproduced in Table 1. The classification of malnutrition is based on the Gomez classification which allocates children to categories according to the relation their weight for

age bears to the Harvard standard of weight for age generally used by nutritionists. ‘Normal’ is 90-100% of the Harvard standard, 1st degree malnutrition is 7.5-90% of standard, 2nd degree is &O-75%, and 3rd degree is below 60%

The sample is of course a very small one, less than .50/o of all participants in the project, but the table does seem at

first sight to show a significant improve- ment: after two years of supplementary feeding no child is suffering from third degree malnutrition and the numbers suffering from first and second degree malnutrition have each been cut by nearly half.

There are, however, two problems with the data. The first is a difficulty with many such studies, namely that it is a longitudinal study of one particular group of children: it does not relate changes in their nutritional status to those of similar children not receiving supplementary feeding. Over one third of the children participating in the programme were normally nourished to start with. The justification for including them could only be to ‘immunize’ them against malnutrition, but if the nutritional status of the community

Table 1. Classification by nutritional status of pm-school children in the states of Jalisco and Guanajuato (Mexico), 1971 and 1973.

Normal Malnourished

1 st degree 2nd degree 3rd degree

Total

1971 1973 No % 36 228 38.2 2Nfo5 63.2

303 50.8 198 38.9 63 10.5 36 7.9

3 0.5 597 100.0 50:

0 100.0

Source: WFP, Interim Evaluation Report CProiect Mexico 3071, WFPJIGC 26/l 1 Add A.3, Rome, 2974, p 14.

52 FOOD POLICY February 1979

were generally good and rising this might not be necessary. In any case it is necessary to include data on a control group.

The second problem concerns drop- outs. In the Mexico study 88 children or 15% of those originally examined had ‘disappeared’ by the time of the evaluation. It makes a crucial difference to the value of the intervention whether the ‘drop-outs’ were normal or malnourished, as can be seen by presenting the Mexico data in matrix form and making alternative assumptions about the distribution of drop-outs.” In Table 2 the most optimistic assumption is made, that all the children who dropped out were normally nourished children who no longer needed or wanted supplementary feeding. By tracing movements between cells it can be seen that with this assumption 168 children, or 46% of those originally malnourished, showed some nutritional improvement in the sense of moving to a higher nutritional classification. However, 33 children or 52% of those who began with second degree malnutrition showed no improvement, nor did 168 of the children who began with first degree malnutrition.

In Table 3 a different assumption is made, that drop-outs are in proportion to the distribution of children at the beginning of the programme. For example, there were 228 normal children (representing 38% of the total), so that 34 drop-outs (or 38% of 88) came from the category of children normally nourished at the beginning of the programme. This assumption would hold if, for example, all drop-outs were out-migrants from the project area and if out-migration were independent of nutritional status. It can be seen from Table 3 that the more restrictive assumption leads to a fall in the number of ‘improvers’ from I68 children to 105 or only 28% of those originally malnourished.

Even this is unrealistic because it ignores the possibility of infant and child mortality being related to the degree of malnutrition. As a final illustration, a third assumption is made which incorporates infant and child mortality at a hypothetical (and very low) rate of 25 per 1000 per year, giving 60 deaths in the sample during the

Reports

Table 2. Matrix presentation of Mexico data. Assumption: all ‘drop-outs’

normally nourished.a

Before Normal 1 ST0 2nd* 3rd’

Total

After- After- Normal 1 St0

140 - 135 168 _ 30 _ -

275 198

After- 2nd0

- -

33 3

36

After- After- After-

3rd0 drop-outs Total

- 88 228 _ _ 303 - - 63 _ 3

0 88 597

altalm = ‘Improvers’. Source: Same as Table 1.

Table 3. Matrix presentation of Mexico data. Assumption: drop-outs proportional to initial participatioma

After- After- After- After- After- After-

Normal l& 2nd0 3rd0 drop-outs Total Before:

Normal 194 _ - _ 34 228

1 :t” 81 177 - _ 45 303

2nd’ _ 21 33 _ 9 63 3rd” _ _ 3 _ 0 3

Total 275 198 36 0 88 597

altal~cs = ‘improvers’. Source: Same as Table 1.

Table 4. Matrix presentation of Mexico data. Assumptions: (a) infant mortality at 25/l OOO/yr related to degree of malnutrition; (b) remaining drop-outs distributed proportionately to initial participation.

Before: Normal 1 St0 2nd0 3rd’ Total

After- After- After- After- After- After- After-

Normat 1 St0 2nd’ 3rd’ drop-outs died total

202 _ - _ 11 15 228 73 181 - _ 14 35 303

_ 17 36 - 3 7 63 _ _ - - 0 3 3

275 198 36 0 28 60 597

altalics = ‘improvers’. Source: Same as Table 1.

project period. The death rates used are related to the degree of malnutrition, classifying first and second degree malnutrition together as ‘mild’ and then using ratios derived from Sommer’s and Loewenstein’s figures.“ The remaining drop-outs are distributed proportionately as before and the picture which emerges is the one shown in Table 4. It can be seen that the number of improvers has fallen again, to 90 children, or 24% of those malnourished at the beginning of the programme. All the children suffering from third degree malnutrition have died, and of the 63 initially suffering from second degree malnutrition only 17 have shown sufficient improvement to bring them to a higher nutritional category.

It is possible that these figures understate the value of the programme;

it is possible that in the absence of the programme the average nutritional status of the sample would have deteriorated. It is also possible that some children improved, though not by enough to take them to a higher category, and that the feeding programme prevented deaths from nutrition related causes. Nevertheless, it does seem to follow that it is very dangerous to read into evaluation data any conclusion about the impact of supplementary feeding unless meticulous care has been taken to trace drop-outs.

Simon Maxwell,

Santa Cruz,

B Olivia

FOOD POLICY February 1979 53

Reports

’ Simon Maxwell, ‘Food aid for that no child moves up by more than one of children suffering from severe, mild and supplementary feeding programmes - an category and that no child moves down a no malnutrition to be in the ratios analysis’, Food Policy. Vol 3. No 4, 1978. category. Relaxing these assumptions 13.4/l .7/l. See A. Sommer and M.S. 2 WFP, Interim Evaluation Report (Project would reduce correspondingly the number Loewenstein. ‘Nutritional status and Mexico 3071, WFP/IGC 26/l 1 Add A3. of ‘improvers’. mortality: a prospective validation of the Rome, 1974. 4 In Bangladesh, Sommer and QUAC stick’, in American Journal of 3 In the matrix presentation it is assumed Loewenstein have shown mortality rates ClinicalNutrition. No 28, March 1975.

Upland rice: an underdeveloped crop of Latin America

Rice is a staple of the Latin American diet and one of the most widely

cultivated crops in the region. Although mention of rice calls to mind carefully

tended plots of irrigated land, that is not the typical method of cultivation in

Latin America. Over 70% of the rice grown is of the upland type, providing

more than 50% of total aroduction.

In recent years world attention has been drawn to the development of new, high- yielding varieties of irrigated rice. These have made significant contributions to increased productivity in Asia. Latin America, especially Colombia, has also benefitted from these new varieties. However, since upland rice is the dominant type cultivated in Latin America, the achievements have had limited impact on a majority of the rice cultivation of the region. That fact takes on added significance when one considers that much of the upland cultivation involves small or subsistence farmers. No one would deny the overall benefits to the general population in countries such as Colombia where increased rice production has improved the nutritional picture, but that is a situation involving only the cash economy and not the subsistence levels of living still common in the countryside.

The definition of upland rice used by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is ‘rice grown on both flat and sloping fields that are not bunded, that were prepared and seeded under dry conditions, and that depend on rainfall for moisture’.’ A similar definition is found in a general study which classifies tropical farming systems.* This definition is useful because it clearly excludes rice which is grown with any source of

supplementary moisture. However, the equivalent terms arroz de secano in Spanish and arroz de sequeiro in Portuguese are not used in such a restrictive sense in Latin America. Therefore the dichotomous classification of production systems, into upland and irrigated, in Latin America typically places within the former category some areas of cultivation (especially on floodplains) where the crop enjoys additional moisture derived from the soil and where it is not dependent exclusively on rainfall. No estimates exist as to the extent to which such areas are represented under the upland category. Therefore in this article upland rice is used to designate the crop according to the Latin American connotation.

Geographic distribution

Brazil is pre-eminent in overall rice production and ranks as the leading non-Asian producer and sixth largest in the world. Upland rice represents 86% of the total area under rice cultivation in the country (Table I), and is concentrated in the south-central portion of the Brazilian Plateau. The six Central American countries together account for the second largest area of upland rice, representing 93% of all rice they cultivate. The crop is most important in Panama and Costa Rica,

in the highlands and western coasts. Mexico ranks as the third most important upland rice grower, with 65% of the crop under upland conditions. Cultivation is concentrated in the southern and southeastern states of Mexico.

Colombia continues to derive one quarter of its rice from upland cultivation. As recently as 1966, Colombian rice production in terms of area was equally divided between irrigated and upland; however, introductions and local development of new high-yielding varieties of irrigated rice have brought about a major shift from upland to irrigated rice growing. Current upland rice cultivation is mainly found in the coastal lowlands. In neighbouring Ecuador, where three quarters of the rice is of the upland type, the coastal lowlands also represent the major area. Bolivia’s rice production is totally of the upland type, coming from the eastern lowlands of the country. Venezuela, despite recent expansion of irrigated cultivation, still obtains 40% of its rice from upland cultivation, chiefly in the Orinoco Lowland. Peru currently derives one fifth of its national rice production from upland cultivation in the eastern lowlands.

A small amount of upland rice is grown in the Caribbean, in Haiti, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, but it is of minor importance. Paraguay has a modest amount of rice production, with 42% derived from upland cultivation, all coming from the northeastern portion of the country adjacent to Brazil.

From the above discussion it is clear that upland rice growing in Latin

54 FOOD POLICY February 1979