Nutrition and national development planning.

We have argued that development strategies aimed at the reduction of all forms of deprivation, according to an explict statement of values and priorities, are necessary for the integration of nutrition planning into overall national development planning. We do not regard this as likely to lead to the neglect of the key issues of investment and production. Instead, we argue that consideration of investment and production strategies should be explicitly directed to their purpose, the reduction of deprivation, rather than, as in the past, treated as the necessary means to that purpose. Thus investment and production strategies would be aimed directly at relieving deprivation including, especially, nutritional deprivation, and their impact in this respect will need to be explicitly predicted and evaluated. We have argued that problems and potentials differ greatly at the area level and that planning must be an iterative process in which national and area-level strategies and programmes are brought to consistency through successive cycles of adjustment and reappraisal. A major role in planning, especially in detailed design and implementation, is assigned to area level. Planning must proceed from an identification of the deprivations under attack to the identification of intervention measures. Elsewhere we have argued the case for the 'functional classification" of malnutrition and the use of "typical profiles" in the understanding of "the ecology and etiology of malnutition". Where planning accepts the need for an integrated approach to the attack on all forms of deprivation, these analyses of nutritional deprivation would from part of a more comprehensive analysis of general deprivation. The existence of "functional classification" and "typical profiles" analysis with respect to malnutrition would provide an excellent base from which a more comprehensive view might be developed. The factors affecting the evolution of nutritional - and other - deprivation problems need to be understood in order that we can identify points in the system where intervention may control theri emergence. In any situation there will be alternative intervention points bearing either directly on the alleviation of symptoms (malnutrition) or, more or less indirectly, on the control of its causes. In general, mixed strategies will be called for. At this stage in our understanding no generalizations are possible about the nature of strategy choices. Our choice of intervention measures must be based upon an understanding of the overall system as it generates malnutrition, and of which forces exert the most powerful effects. One important element of this analysis will be an understanding of the behaviour of the malnourished. However, conventional planning approaches, in which ministries and departments concern themselves only with problems and measures which conform to the definition of their own spheres of responsibility, have failed to define these choices effectively...