Food for All Talk “The Nutritious Supply Chain: Optimizing Humanitarian Food Aid”

On March 19, another Food for All Talk (#FFATalks) under the WBG-Netherlands Partnership took place, entitled “The Nutritious Supply Chain: Optimizing Humanitarian Food Aid”. Prof. Hein Fleuren of the Zero Hunger Lab and the Tilburg School of Economics & Management presented how they developed a model that simultaneously optimizes the food basket to be delivered, the sourcing plan, the routing plan, and the transfer modality.

Food supply chains in fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) contexts (and beyond) can be optimized for nutritious outcomes and local sourcing, while saving millions of dollars or reach far more vulnerable people with the same amount of money.

Chaired by Martien van Nieuwkoop, director Agriculture Global Practice at the World Bank, Prof. Hein Fleuren of the Zero Hunger Lab at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, gave a Food for All Talk in which he demonstrated how this has been done in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP) for their emergency relieve operations. Big data, business analytics and modelling result in 15-20% savings in real case applications. Optimizing flexible food baskets for nutrition outcomes and local availability and including cash and voucher systems are all part of the deal. WFP is now rolling this out for all its country-based operations.

The discussion focused on how the World Bank can use these analytics at the emerging crisis phase (World Bank’s Agricultural Intelligence Observatory (Ag Observatory) and Famine Action Mechanism (FAM)) when local coping mechanisms, including those of the market and the private sector, can still be triggered, before emergency, when everything shuts down. It is also highly relevant for example for public (food) distribution systems related to social safety nets or for national grain storage planning to buffer against crisis.

Please download the presentation of Prof. Hein Fleuren here.

Please watch the recording of this Food for All Talk as presented by Prof. Hein Fleuren. (Please note that unfortunately, due to a technical issue, for the first 17.5 minutes the slides are missing; thereafter the PowerPoint slides appear.)