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Tag: school meals

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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.

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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.

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One of the strategies used to inject nutrition into school meals is to incorporate local food into the menus. Local food has a different definition depending on the application - for some, 'local' meas that it comes from within the country, others withing the region, others within a specific range (for example, I worked for a store where 'local' meant a radius of 30 miles).

Local buying enables producers to secure a predictable demand for their products and can, in some cases, allow farmers to diversify what they grow: if schools demand an array of fruits and vegetables and buy that produce locally, this can change how agriculture is conducted in the area.

Valencia et al. (2019) drew a flow chart to describe how local buying can impact markets, households, agriculture, and resilience to climate change:

There are a great many ways to put a concept like this into effect; not only does the definition of 'local' need to be clearly defined, but the roles of different actors should also be clearly defined. What, for example, is the role of the central government? What social groups (women's groups, agricultural cooperatives) should bear some of the responsibility? Do farmers have direct contact with the schools?

Local buying for school meals is therefore a plastic model that can be shaped to fit the unique circumstances of each country or region in which it is implemented. Bundy et al (2012) illustrates this:

This diagram shows only three out of scores of examples - and is distilled down to the most fundamental elements - but it does show the heterogeneity and flexibility in these programs.

These initiatives are challenging to implement because there are high levels of uncertainty - whether farmers can supply the demand, whether the food will be safe, et cetera - on the other hand, highly centralized programs in which food is bought from non-local sources can be brittle but have assurances as to the amount provided and the overall safety of the products.

In some cases, centralized programs work better - in places where, for example, the agriculture of the zone can only support household use - and in others, decentralized programs with local buying are better. It seems to me that most of the time, a mixture of the two works best: local buying for a portion of the food and deliveries 'from away' for the rest. As with anything, the answer isn't simple.

P.S. Lest you think that local procurement is only a feature in low-income countries, here is an example from my home state of Maine.

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Peru has several food procurement programs that are meant to keep the baseline of poverty at an acceptable minimum; the one in charge of school meals is called Qali Warma (which translates to 'strong child' from the Quechua language). Qali Warma provides meals to schoolchildren in kindergartens and primary schools throughout Peru, and in the Amazon, all children in public schools receive meals.

This program is based around predetermined menus, which have been formulated by nutritionists; everyone on a national level prepares more or less the same meals. These meals often revolve around a milky drink with cereals in it (such as oatmeal, maca, or quinoa), bread, and crackers/cookies. There aren't many vegetables or fruits incorporated into the program, and much of the food has a very long shelf life; additionally, in some places, the milk is powdered or canned milk, which some students do not enjoy - and you can't blame them, as anyone who has had powdered milk will attest.

Common supplies for the preparation of school breakfasts.

I can find flaws in Qali Warma - but I remind myself that the presence of the program is something that can be built upon, and that not having Qali Warma could have truly negative repercussions. However, the government strives to improve its program as well as it can, by working to ensure that the food arrives at the schools safely (without spoiling), and by doing what it can to promote healthy food. For example, there was a directive in 2015 to drastically increase the amount of quinoa in the program, by 85 percent.

For more information on this program, there is a reader-friendly summary of the program and a case study in this report by Health Poverty Action.