Evolution and Impact of EU Aid for Food and Nutrition Security: A Review

Lara Cockx and Nathalie Francken

LICOS Discussion Papers from LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven

Abstract: In the aftermath of the world food price crisis, the issue of food and nutrition security has received a high level of political attention and the international donor community has repeatedly underlined its commitment to combat hunger in the world. In order to enhance the effectiveness of the international community’s efforts in addressing the widespread problem of malnutrition, we need to improve our knowledge on what activities donors are currently engaging in and which interventions have been shown to be successful. This paper offers both an overview of the aid for food and nutrition security landscape and how it has changed and an extensive review of the available evidence on the impact of a wide array of interventions aimed at addressing all four dimensions of food and nutrition security; availability, access, utilization and stability. We find that despite the renewed interest and elevated levels of funding for food and nutrition security assistance in developing countries, the empirical evidence base for the effectiveness of these interventions in improving beneficiaries’ food and nutrition security – although in several cases promising – is weak. In particular, the question whether different interventions improve the quality of food consumption and consequently nutrient intake and status, remains largely unanswered. Moreover, few studies assess longer-term effects and there exists relatively little rigorous evidence that compares different interventions. It is therefore strongly recommended to undertake additional research to improve the evidence base as this would allow researchers and policy makers to establish the type of approaches that improve food and nutrition security in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Finally, in order to facilitate this process, there is a need for a clear and uniform definition of food and nutrition security assistance on the one hand as well as agreed upon, comprehensive indicators on the other hand.

JEL-codes: F35 F53 I38 O12 O13 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://feb.kuleuven.be/drc/licos/publications/dp/DP%20377%20compl.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Working Paper: Evolution and impact of EU aid for food and nutrition security: a review (2016)
Working Paper: Evolution and impact of EU aid for food and nutrition security: a review (2016)
Working Paper: Evolution and impact of EU aid for food and nutrition security: a review (2016)
Working Paper: Evolution and Impact of EU Aid for Food and Nutrition Security: A Review (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lic:licosd:37716

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LICOS Discussion Papers from LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().