Policy conflicts in global food assistance strategies: balancing local procurement and harmonization

Coordinated efforts through multilevel governance are important to addressing global food insecurity by mitigating policy conflicts and working towards meeting collective objectives as effectively and efficiently as possible. While multi-stakeholder efforts to provide nutrition-sensitive food assistance have been met with some degree of success, this paper demonstrates that policy change in one area of food security governance has the potential to have unintended consequences on other components within the governance framework. This paper examines the interactive dynamic of three core components of multilevel governance frameworks for international food assistance, specifically Ready-To-Use Foods (RUF) to treat malnutrition, local-regional procurement (LRP) strategies of raw materials for RUFs and international standards for food safety and quality applicable to finished RUFs. It shows how proposed changes in international standards for RUF food safety and quality may have the potential to complicate existing and future efforts to incorporate locally sourced raw materials like pulses into RUF formulations and may also have unanticipated impacts on long-term food security goals pursued at other levels of decision-making.