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Band Aids and the Copenhagen Consensus

Posted by kevindick in Interventions, Poverty, Socio-technical systems on June 9th, 2008 | View Comments

I recently alerted Rafe to the latest Copenhagen Consensus, which aims to set priorities for the most cost effective interventions to improve global welfare. Items (1) and (3) were micronutrient supplementation and fortification. Rafe expressed concern that these were a "band aid approach". After pondering this characterization for a bit, I have some thoughts on when to apply a "band aid approach" and the conditions we should attach to such approaches. The most common objection I hear when discussing this topic is usually given in the form of a quote: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." My stock retort is: "A starving man makes a poor student." Obviously, if someone is hemorrhaging to death, you've got to stop the bleeding before doing anything else. But in terms of interventions, this analogy applies mostly to the case of responding to disasters. Lack of micronutrients is a chronic, rather than an acute, condition. However, there's the more subtle issue of trying to help people break out of a bad equilibrium. Malnourished populations are caught in a vicious circle where they don't have the biological resources to improve their human capital enough to accumulate the wealth (using wealth in the general sense that includes things like adequate shelter, water, capital, economic opportunities, educational opportunities, etc.) necessary to improve their level of nourishment. So I think band-aid approaches for chronic conditions are good when they are part of a larger plan to break the target population out of a bad equilibrium. In this case, you would give them supplements today and help them ensure access to more nourishing food supplies over a longer term. To this end, #5 on the Copenhagen Consensus list is biofortification. If anybody out there has researched which biofortification outfit could make the best use of donations, let us know.

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taoist

Actually I'm a big fan of the Copenhagen Consensus, and I bought "How to spend $50 Billion to make the world a better place" when it came out after the first Copenhagen Consensus. I think the Copenhagen Consensus isn't a band-aid approach, precisely because of how it is evaluated. The approach that the economists take when prioritizing where to spend the money is to evaluate how quickly that money will return to the global market. Thus, the priorities set by the first Copenhagen Consensus were to fight malaria, and for clean water. Both effects are areas where you can just throw money at the problem and expect to see your investment pay off, as spending directly reduces the occurrence of illness in the poorest regions of the world, which directly increases the amount of productive time that they can spend to improve their own solution. I believe the number the Copenhagen Consensus settled on for those two areas was that every dollar spent in those areas would return $7 to the global economy within 50 years on average. Global Warming, by comparison, breaks even as an investment in 200 years.
taoist

My stock response is "Build a man a fire, and you warm him for a night. Light a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life."
Bonnie McClafferty

Regarding the last request. Check out HarvestPlus. www.harvestplus.org.
Yassir Islam

Lack of micronutrients can be devastating--hundred of thousands of children go blind, permanently, from lack of vitamin A. Millions of other children are mentally and physically impaired from lack of iron, and will never fully 'catch up,' once the damage is done. This is the tragedy of 'hidden hunger.'

Until the poor have access to healthier, more diverse diets, fortification and other interventions are critical. However, biofortification does offer a novel approach--to actually improve the nutritional content of staple food crops grown and eaten by the poor, day in and day out.

HarvestPlus, which coined the term biofortification, is a non-profit global alliance working to reduce micronutrient deficiencies by biofortifying staple food crops like corn, rice, wheat, beans, and sweetpotato that the poor in developing countries rely upon. Please visit our website to learn more, or to support us.