Planet friendly home-grown school feeding: What does it mean?
School meals present a unique opportunity to tackle the various food system challenges, including the depletion and pollution of natural resources, habitat and biodiversity loss, deforestation, ocean acidification, and climate change, while delivering multiple social and economic benefits towards sustainable food systems for healthy diets (WHO 2022; Pastorino et al. 2023).
Through evaluation of the current school meal supply chain in Sub-Saharan Africa, this study identifies practices in food production, transport, processing, and storage which may influence the impact of school feeding programs on planetary health. The study initially focuses on three main products supplied to schools by the World Food Program (WFP) – maize, beans and dark green leafy vegetables – and proposes to focus on general agronomic, food processing and handling practices. This is a consequence of the lack of crop-specific information on greenhouse gas emissions for the Sub-Saharan region but is based on several individual studies that can be generalized to provide qualitative information on which practices are more planet hostile and which are planet friendly. The results of this study may be interesting for school feeding programs in general, but especially for home-grown school feeding programs (HGSF), which promote shorter, sustainable value chains and a fairer economy for smallholder farmers, fisher folk and disadvantaged groups, particularly women and youth. Despite these advantages, the approach is challenged by the lack of evaluation tools and metrics that can be used to quantify the level of “planet friendliness” in the different regions HGSF is applied.
The assessment undertaken has resulted in an evaluation tool for all of WFP’s farmer-directed procurement processes linked to school feeding. The tool, currently in draft form and yet to be tested, provides information about indicators to be included in food procurement policies and processes for the provision of greener school meals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The tool is intended to simplify the evaluation of current procurement processes and guide future decision making around school procurement to ensure planetary health considerations are widely adopted to bolster systemic resilience.
Furthermore, the study identifies HGSF as a potential method to enhance local sourcing from smallholder farmers, bolstering sustainable local agriculture and strengthening local food systems (Pastorino et al. 2023). However, to support agricultural transformation towards environmentally friendly practices and food handling, it is crucial to have in place effective multi-level communication systems and supportive procurement policies. Some case studies high-light the economic benefits that HGSF can bring to local communities, but they also point out challenges in obtaining reliable information on actual food production processes, as sourcing and procurement often occurs at a range of nodes of the supply chain and not directly from farms.
The proposed tool, originating from the analysis of key informant interviews and a literature review, outlines 21 indicators along with potential measures and practices that are categorized as planet hostile, moderately planet friendly, and planet friendly. This tool can serve multiple purposes: as a checklist, a scoring template for refining tenders, a monitoring and evaluation tool, or a foundation for co-creating policies for any school feeding program at the school, local, or national level. It represents a first step towards the development of a tool that can analyse the entire school meal value chain and use sustainability ratings to identify areas for improvement. The tool requires testing and further refinement through an iterative, participatory process to identify context-specific opportunities for ensuring school feeding programs become more “planet friendly”.
The work presented here include the key findings. Detailed background information and additional literature references are available in a separate document, the Annex. Additional evaluation criteria, qualitative indicators and a tracking progress checklist are presented in Annex 1; Annex 2 presents scientific background information for the proposed rating of the different practices; Annex 3 provides the literature references for the section on agricultural practices presented in the evaluation tool; Annex 4 presents background information on aspects relating to environmental impact along the value chain and Annex 5 on environ-mental impact of storage systems. Key findings of the KII are summarized in Annex 6.
Borelli, T.; Nekesa, T.; Mbelenga, E.; Jumbale, M.; Morimoto, Y.; Bellanca, R.; Jordan, I.