Skip to content

Category: Procurement Programs

Published on

Last Friday, I was able to meet with the Chief of Performance of Qali Warma; this was my first opportunity to speak to someone in the program. Our conversation covered a lot of ground and helped me to feel out the position of Qali Warma. When I asked about the possibilities of including more diversity in the menus, I was told that Qali Warma has a couple of initiatives to include traditional potato varieties in Junin and tarwi in Ancash. This was news to me, so after a Google search I was able to discover the scale of the programs.

Foto: Tarwi en floración, Comunidad de Camicachi, Ilave/A. Canahua
Field of Tarwi.

Tarwi is a traditional Andean food most commonly found in Peru and Bolivia; those familiar with flowers will recognize that tarwi is part of the lupine family. Here, the beans are eaten as an accompaniment to a meal, in ceviche (marinated in lemon juice and hot pepper), or served in a dish such as tarwi with potatoes and rice.

Qali Warma is bringing tarwi in the form of bread to six provinces of the department of Ancash, reaching 76,500 students. The tarwi is ground into flour or boiled and mashed before getting mixed into the dough.

Tarwi flowers, tarwi beans, a dish of tarwi with potato and rice, and tarwi ceviche.
papas-andinas
An array of different types of traditional potato varieties.

The second initiative is taking place in department of Junin; SENASA (the Peruvian agency that monitors agriculture and provides technical support) and the regional agriculture board of Ica have provided trainings and technical support to farmers. Farmers have formed cooperatives so that they can produce potatoes not just of sufficient quality but also sufficient quantity for the demand.

This collaboration and hard work has resulted in 336 schools in four provinces with a total of 17,352 students receiving traditional varieties of potatoes in their school meals. The estimated amount bought for 2019 is 31 tons.

CIP
Many potato varieties have marbling of color in their flesh.

Qali Warma faces a number of troubling challenges, and as with any large bureaucracy, moves slowly. However, these initiatives and their pilot programs show that there are some in the institution who wish to make positive changes; the success of these initiatives can be scaled out to more regions in Peru. While neither of these initiatives will completely change how Qali Warma functions, they do show how the model can be flexible enough to include some kinds of non-perishable foods without endangering food safety, or bogging down the administration to a prohibitive degree.

Published on

Bettering school nutrition has obvious benefits that no one can deny; however, if someone were to play devil's advocate, they might just ask whether diversifying the food and local sourcing for school meals really does that much good.

Image result for devil's advocate
xkcd, "The Sake of Argument"

I can answer that in a couple of ways: one, feeding children a diverse diet teaches them in a way that whiteboards and lectures never could, and two, that enhancing local markets does a better job of improving dietary diversity than having a lot of species grown on any one farm.

Shibhatu & Qaim (2018) and Jones (2017) both came to similar conclusions. Jones conducted a review of 21 studies and found that in 19 of them there was only a slight positive association between on-farm diversity and dietary diversity. Shibhatu & Qaim examined dietary diversity and on-farm species diversity of 1,482 households in Indonesia, Kenya, and Uganda and found that market access was a better determinant of dietary diversity than diversity on the farm.

This is because what is grown on the farm isn't necessarily what is eaten, which makes sense, even though it's not the first conclusion we might jump to. But when you think about it, you can think up any number of plausible scenarios where this happens: think of cocoa farmers in west Africa who have never had chocolate. They grow chocolate not for their own consumption but to make money for their families, and the amount of money they make depends on their access to markets.

The challenge for agrobiodiverse ecosystems is that having an incredibly diverse farm can be economically disadvantageous, as it can foster subsistence livelihoods, lower income, and lower diet quality, running against one of the main goals of agrobiodiversity: food security (Shibhatu & Qaim 2018). The key, then, is to support diverse farms by giving them a market for their production that enables them to buy food that helps them eat well.

If someone's still playing devil's advocate they could say - the point of school meals is to feed children nutritious meals, not to save whole communities of vulnerable farmers, so why not just fortify food?

Devil's advocate
Andrew Grossman.

I'll return to my first point. If you feed children fortified foods (like the biscuits that are given to Afghan children), you're not teaching them what they will need to know later in life when they no longer are participating in a school meal program. If you show a child that the school approves white rice, cookies, and sugary drinks, they aren't learning habits that will benefit them for their rest of their lives, and you can't guarantee that they will buy fortified foods in the future. (For that matter, one of the things I learned when I was in Capilla was that the children don't like the texture of fortified rice.)

On top of this, if you buy local food for school meals - if it has the full and proud support of the school and the planners of the program - you are also sending a powerful message to the children that the food produced by the community has real value, and that there could be possibilities for them if they stay in that community.

Published on

After reading a landslide of formal documents of Qali Warma, I'm able to accurately summarize how the program works:

(Own elaboration.)

All of the big decisions are made at the national level; the Buying Committees (CCs) buy from a list of approved foods; those providers who are given contracts are in charge of delivering food to schools, where there are committees (CAE) who are in charge of receiving, preparing, and giving the food to the children. Qali Warma supervises the process, penalizes providers who do not conform to their standards, and works with agencies such as SENASA, who monitor the quality of foods and the functioning of the value chain.

All the food provided by Qali Warma is shelf-stable (with the exception of bread and eggs). Approved foods include rice, noodles, crackers, different kinds of flour and flaked grains, milk, dried beans and lentils, cheese, olives, and canned 'products of animal origin.' This last category is a collection of strange food items (even to Peruvians - I checked with my office mates), and includes not just canned fish but also canned: chicken, beef tripe, and fish-balls in sauce. Another food in this category sounds horrible to me but is a common food here: sangrecita, chicken blood. I'm told that when it's cooked well, it tastes pretty great.

Sangrecita is the dark mass; the stuff on the side is yuca.

Still, I'd say sangrecita day is a good one to be a vegetarian.

There are set menus that schools follow which have restrictions on the categories of food that can be used each day; they usually have a milk drink with different grains in it or perhaps fruit juice, along with bread, rice, or noodles and a product of animal origin or legumes. Sometimes it's a drink and a cracker or a slice of cake with Andean grains in it.

Most schools follow this scheme, but there are some pilot programs that have changed how Qali Warma works, in order to add fresh produce into the school meals.

One completed and self-perpetuating pilot has taken place in Junin, a department to the east of the department of Lima. There, the FAO and the Junin Qali Warma authorities helped schools begin school gardens, enhanced the capabilities of local farmers, built a processing plant for produce, and helped organize CAEs in participating schools. This was undertaken with a broad base of support from a number of different institutions, and is still in operation after the FAO stepped back.

Farmers working on a model farm near Jauja, Junin. (Note that they're using oxen here, probably because the tractor is busy.) (Own picture)

Here's how it works: each month, the CAEs receive money from each parent for each kid they have in school. This is somewhere around 4-5 soles per child per month, between one and two USD. They use this money to buy fresh foods to complement what they are getting from Qali Warma, and can buy from the regular local market or from the agroecological market that the FAO helped to found through farmer trainings and the processing plant. In many cases, the choice of the CAE is between buying a lot of food of uncertain safety in the normal market or buying less food of better safety in the agroecological market. After trainings, most CAEs prefer buying in the safer markets.

This pilot has produced some great effects, particularly in the level of satisfaction in the service. It does have some flaws, though, as concerns the traceability of foods: if a child gets sick as a result of the school meal, it's crucial to know where that food came from. In addition, the money for the fresh food comes from parents (and in some cases, the municipalities): Qali Warma's funding isn't contributing to this at all. Add onto that that this wouldn't work in every part of Peru, and this pilot remains the sort of thing that provides highly valuable experiences, but something that would have to be tinkered with and changed before its rollout on a national level.

Also near Jauja in Junin, one of Junin's famous lakes. (Own picture.)

Published on

In the readings I have sifted through and in the conversations I have had, corruption is nearly always mentioned as a key problem in Peruvian government. I'm told it's hard to get things done because the money that is allotted for various uses gets siphoned, sometimes every time it changes hands. (I have no hard proof for this, but it shows at the very least how little faith there is in the government.)

Changing Qali Warma would necessitate changing who has responsibility for the program's money, which poses problems. How do you vet people at different levels of government or in the public? Having a strong accounting system with a high level of transparency is both difficult to achieve and highly necessary.

Corruption also damages confianza (trust, fraternity); in an environment where corruption is always expected, people who show passion for a particular project are looked at askance. What is their interest in the project? Do they have the power to mishandle or appropriate money? People with genuine intentions have been minimized in their places of work because of this fear.

Confianza is a very important word in Peru: if there is no confianza, there will be few advances, as each player will constantly be looking over his/her shoulder. Communities receiving the benefits of new or changed programs need confianza in the government or organization affecting the changes, need to know that intentions are pure.

Qali Warma is in a unique position to change how people feel about the government as a whole: if Qali Warma can provide a stellar, safe service, it would be a potent message to the public: there are good people in government who care about you and your children.

For information about solutions to corruption in public procurement, read Transparency International's Manual:

Found at:
https://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/publication/curbing_corruption_in_public_procurement_a_practical_guide

Published on

The history behind locally sourced school meal programs began in earnest in 2009 when Brazil launched its Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE).

Generally speaking, when we think of Brazil we think about Carnival or impressive amounts of corruption (think Odebrecht); we might even worry about the nationalistic turn the country has taken. But Brazil has - somewhat quietly - sounded out a resounding victory against hunger, enacting coordinated policies designed to feed Brazilians under the umbrella of Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), an intersectorial push that removed Brazil from the World Food Program's Hunger Map in 2014.

WFP Hunger Map 2018, https://www1.wfp.org/publications/2018-hunger-map

One of their first programs began in 2003, the Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos (PAA), which buys food for public institutions; family farmers and agroecologial practices are encouraged, with the end of strengthening the Brazilian economy and providing food autonomy.

PNAE began a few years later; municipalities establish relationships with farmers and other suppliers and buy food for their schools. (This is a drastically different system to Peru, where menus are decided on a national level and purchases are made according to a strict list of allowed products on a regional level.) Brazilian municipalities are aided by nutritionists to ensure that the meals provided are nutritionally adequate; deliveries are made at the schools, where the people in charge of receiving food check for quality and quantity requirements.

There is a minimum of thirty percent of the food purchases to be made locally, which some of the municipalities are exceeding. PNAE is often sourced from framers with smaller plots of land that produce for local markets (rather than export markets for crops such as corn and soy).

Valencia et al (2019) shows the dynamics between farmers who supply PNAE and those who do not:

Valencia et al 2019.

However, this is not an accurate picture of the entire country; these results are from the state of Santa Catalina, which has a highly developed and diverse agricultural mosaic. Other states have not had the same success, and there are reports of municipalities buying no local food in their PNAE programs - in 2014, 3345 of the 5534 municipalities (60 percent) did not reach the 30 percent minimum of local products; 23 percent did not buy locally at all (Hunter et al 2016). This may be because there is a lack of political will or because the agricultural system in the area is not able to provide both for the usual needs of the community and the needs of PNAE, making external sourcing necessary.

The wide-scale support of the program across sectors has garnered international attention and has been responsible for the inspiration behind the school meal programs in dozens of countries in Africa and the Americas, including but definitely not limited to: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Mali.

Groundbreaking public acquisition programs may not be what Brazil is known for on the street, but it is worthy of attention as a model of what is possible, a model that can be changed to fit the conditions of highly varied countries the world over.