Fighting Malnutrition: An Evaluation of Brazilian Food and Nutrition Programs

摘要

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the World Bank undertook to support substantial projects designed to reduce or prevent malnutrition in four countries to which it was providing major financial and technical assistance. Brazil was one of these countries; Colombia, India and Indonesia were the other three. The Brazil Nutrition Research and Development Project, begun in 1977, included a large number of components directed to one or another of the presumed sources of malnutrition in the country. The principal effort went into an experimental scheme to subsidize basic foodstuffs in poor neighborhoods, while other components addressed food supplementation, nutrition education, linking nutrition programs to health services, improved food marketing, and assistance to peasant producers. Both before and after the Bank Project, which ended in 1980, the Brazilian government introduced a series of food and nutrition programs. Thus, the study of all the large programs directed primarily at consumers, undertaken by the Pan American Health Organization in 1983-1988, unifies these efforts and complements the Bank's attempts to derive lessons from the Brazilian project.