Basic needs, planning and policies
Schwefel, D.
Intereconomics 14(3): 132-138
1979
ISSN/ISBN: 0020-5346 DOI: 10.1007/bf02924554Document Number: 406779
The recommendations of international organizations such as the World Bank, ILO, OECD and FAO, and comparable demands by critical social scientists evince a growing awareness that basic human needs should be made the point of departure and orientation for analyses, planning and evaluation. With poverty identified as being at the root of the crucial nutritional problem, the solution should be sought in increased incomes for the under-nourished target groups. "Nutritional programmes" in this sense now include: general price subsidies for specific foods, use of food additives, distribution of food stamps and income transfers. All projects, programmes and policies, no matter by what department initiated, should be re-examined as to their effect on the abatement of poverty and nutritional deficiencies. The agricultural and nutritional policies, at least should be aligned. There is a need to devise an integrated policy which is not targeted on output figures and how to raise them but focuses on the quality of the goods and services for the basic needs of the masses of the population. Such a policy would relate to utility values, not to exchange values. In the draft programmes for national food and nutrition policies which have been prepared in the seventies, in Latin America in particular, an attempt has indeed been made to focus policies and plans on basic human needs. They centre on a basket of goods and services which conforms to basic dietetic recommendations and can be produced most economically. The prime object is thus to fix material production targets, indicative of needs though not necessarily of demand, in the light of a rational food budget as opposed to the traditional practice of setting monetary and arbitrary-statistical output targets in the name of an x% growth of production. In contrast with the traditional production planning this is a consumption planning which is concerned with the question who consumes the goods produced. In this sense national food and nutrition policies are to be regarded as counter-models to the usual economic plans and policies, as models for a "reduction of deprivations", and not a bare increase of the gross national product, as the objective of development planning.
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