Introduction

In the shifting context of global policy-making, International Organizations (IOs) have become powerful sources of expert authority and central sites for the exercise of power in global governance. While we have a clear understanding of how IOs deploy expertise, there has been relatively little effort among legal scholarship and International Relations (IR) to critically examine the processes by which such institutions produce and validate knowledge claims about governance objects and, in doing so, authorize certain solutions as the only ones “viable.” This chapter examines the way in which the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) acted as central vehicles in defining the contours of “hidden hunger” as a “matter of fact” – or as a medicalized and economized object of governance. It shows how this problematization largely authorized the prioritization of short-term responses and easily measurable programs such as food fortificationFootnote ¹ and vitamin supplementation in Global South countries. Rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic determinants of the problem, such responses acted as political analgesics providing temporarily relief. In highlighting how IOs’ “ways of seeing” are connected to the practice of governing, the chapter sheds light on the everyday politics of rule-making.

This chapter examines how IO’s knowledge practices stabilize certain “ways of seeing” and acting upon global governance objects. Looking at how IOs delineate the contours of objects allows us to move beyond “problem-solving” perspectives, according to which institutions’ main role is to enable global cooperation and find solutions to global challenges.Footnote ² The work of IOs is profoundly political. They make certain issues knowable and governable and, in doing so, define the world in such a way as to confer authority on some categories, actions, and actors rather than others.Footnote ³ This is especially patent at a time when, in order to make claims valid across jurisdictions, IOs rely on the acquisition and deployment of certain forms of expertise.

International legal scholarship has largely focused on analyzing the formalistic and institutional dimensions of objects of governance, be they climate change, pollution, or health.Footnote ⁴ From such perspectives, objects of governance are exogenous entities to be addressed and regulated through laws, conventions, and standards. However, adhering strictly to a formalistic and legal account of objects fails to capture how given visions and ways of acting upon gain traction at the expense of others. For that, we need a more textured examination of the socio-political processes that shape such objects. I propose to do so by analyzing how IOs define objects as “matters of fact,” to draw on Latour’s term, and how, in turn, this problematization narrows down the possible range of policy solutions.Footnote ⁵ In contrast to “matters of concern,” which are marked by dispute and situatedness, matters of fact appear as ahistorical realities. Nonetheless, matters of fact are just as political as matters of concern; the distinction lies in how institutions approach them and how they are publicly perceived.

Empirically, I focus on the field of global food governance, more particularly on the case of “hidden” hunger, which has been defined and addressed by the international community as a form of undernutrition primarily stemming from vitamin and mineral deficiency. Such forms of hunger are qualified as “hidden” because there are no visible warning signs, so that individuals who suffer from it are not often aware of it. I explore how hidden hunger was problematized as a medicalized problem stemming from “a deficit” of nutrient consumption in Global South countries. Despite being a complex socio-economic and political issue directly linked to factors such as access to food, inequalities, and dominant agroindustrial models, efforts to address hidden hunger have predominantly relied on what I refer to as “political palliatives,” such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation.Footnote ⁶ The chapter mainly focuses on the work of three particular agencies, also known as the bureaucratic machineryFootnote ⁷ of food and agriculture: the FAO, WHO, and UNICEF.Footnote ⁸ While the activities of these agencies were certainly key in mobilizing resources and bringing public attention, this chapter wants to highlight the politics inherent in their knowledge-making practices and highlight that ways of seeing problems always come at the expense of marginalizing others.

The remainder of the chapter proceeds as follows: The first section of the chapter discusses different perspectives that have scrutinized the work of IOs as machineries of social and political ordering. The second section of the chapter introduces the analytical framework of the paper, namely how IOs’ problematization of objects of governance as “maters of fact” restricts the range of possible solutions and political interventions. Sections three to five delve into the empirics by unpacking how WHO, UNICEF, and the FAO delineated the contours of hidden hunger in highly exclusionary ways. On the one hand, they show how, through quantification techniques, laboratory exercises, and statistical instruments, IOs assembled a body of knowledge that defined hidden hunger in medicalized and economized terms, portraying it as an indisputable matter of fact. On the other hand, the empirical sections explore how this problematization marginalized some knowledge forms while simultaneously enabling short-term forms of political action, mainly targeting individuals in the Global South.

The article relies on an in-depth case study. Through immersion in details of the case, I explore the ways in which IOs produced and validated knowledge claims about hidden hunger as an object worthy of global collective attention with consequences for legal outcomes. This was done through an extensive textual analysis of policy documents, reports, and websites from these IOs, as well as of academic publications in nutrition and health journals. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with policy makers and statisticians from the WHO, FAO, and UNICEF, as well as from civil society organizations.

IOs as Machines for Social and Political Ordering

The discipline of IR and some strands of legal scholarship have treated international institutions as “solvers” of different problems, such as international cooperation and information asymmetries, among others.Footnote ⁹ In an attempt to reintroduce the “social” into the analysis, sociological-oriented scholarship has questioned some of these premises by exploring the ways in which IOs do politics.Footnote ¹⁰ These accounts are highly attentive to the role of IOs in shaping intersubjective understandings. Barnett and Finnemore, for example, highlight that IOs are autonomous actors that “both regulate and constitute the world.”Footnote ¹¹ Other accounts have highlighted the different ways in which IOs, as purposeful actors, assemble or mobilize knowledge to achieve certain goals such as expanding their mandate into new areas,Footnote ¹² enacting depoliticization,Footnote ¹³ or becoming policy relevant actors in a given field.Footnote ¹⁴ Approaching IOs as real fields of ethnographic inquiry, scholars have conceptualized them as circuits of power “where normative frameworks are produced and globally diffused, resources are distributed and knowledge circulated through transnational expert networks.”Footnote ¹⁵ Similar claims have been made by international legal scholars, who have examined IOs’ activities and workings in their contingent and historically situated dynamics.Footnote ¹⁶

Following this research tradition, this chapter explores a concrete aspect of the politics of IOs object-making: the knowledge-making practices that they set up in order to problematize objects of governance, and thus govern them. Following Foucauldian-inspired scholarship in international law and IR, I seek to understand how certain practices and modes of treatment are attributed to problems.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, rather than focusing on how certain issues enter the domain of “thought,” I am interested in exploring how, more concretely, IOs actively participate in exclusionary processes of social and political ordering in the field of global food policy.Footnote ¹⁸

Studying how IOs participate in object-making in the domain of global food governance is of relevance to international law scholarship in two main ways. On the one hand, food governance is an area that is treated as an appendix of trade regimes and where there is a high deference to expert knowledge. Analysis of “technical standards” and trade negotiations tends to overshadow the politics of norm-making.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, international legal scholarship has often taken food governance standards at face value, ignoring the knowledge that underpins them.Footnote ²⁰ On the other hand, thinking about object-making and its links to knowledge also makes it possible to understand that that “universal” definitions of dietary standards or notions such as hunger often rest in uncertain and elusive grounds, thus indicating that expertise is a space of instability and constant challenge.

IOs’ Power: Knowing and Acting upon Objects of Governance

In global governance, where there is an absence of democratic forms of legitimation, the recourse to knowledge constitutes one of the most advanced sources of authority.Footnote ²¹ Governing, indeed, increasingly takes place “outside the arena of legislative deliberation and democratic decision making”Footnote ²² and relies on claims to expertise rather than those of collective identity value and interest.Footnote ²³ The consolidation of evidence-based modes of decision-making, for example, attests to the fact that governing increasingly rests on claims of efficiency and instrumental rationality rather than those of collective identity value and interest.Footnote ²⁴ This broader turn towards rationalized forms of governance and, more broadly, the scientization of politics is particularly pronounced in policy-making transcending nation states.

In this context, IOs solidify their authority by depicting objects of governance as exogenous entities that are knowable and actionable.Footnote ²⁵ Through the production of global indicators, metrics, rankings, and datasets, or by hiring bodies of experts, IOs strive to insulate themselves from partisan squabbles and processes of political contestation.Footnote ²⁶ This often leads some IOs to simplify complex social activities into simple “scores,” economized “facts,” or ratings.Footnote ²⁷ This process resonates with what Latour has termed “matters of fact,” which are entities that are presented as uncontestable truths, fostering a perception of naturalness and inevitability.Footnote ²⁸ Problematizing issues such as pollution, crime, or migration as matters of “fact,” detached from their socio-economic and political determinants, indeed allows IOs to act as powerful global governors.Footnote ²⁹

Representing social problems as matters of fact requires significant effort. It is indeed intrinsically related to the availability of technologies, infrastructures, and different instruments, which translate the complexities of economic, social, and political contexts into a stabilized reality capable of orienting action. However, despite their aura of universality, “matters of fact” are just one exclusionary particular way of defining and thinking about global objects. Attempts to scientize often result in the exclusion and erasure of subjects and of those voices that do not conform to logics of instrumental rationality.

Similarly, presenting objects as matters of fact is not devoid of political implications. In the following section, I show how such a problematization narrows down the scope of possible solutions, limiting them to approaches that align with standardizable rationales and quantifiable results. Responses to matters of facts often come in the form of technical fixes that are perceived as straightforward and easily implementable. Such responses become favored due to their perceived feasibility and their capacity to demonstrate measurable impact and “results.” These responses, however, act as what I refer to as powerful “political palliatives,” which provide surface-level and temporary relief, while overlooking responses that address the social, political, and economic root causes of problems.

Problematizing Hidden Hunger as a Matter of Fact: Science and Economics

I focus on the case of hidden hunger to show how different UN agencies characterized hidden hunger as a “matter of fact,” portraying it as a medicalized problem of nutrient deficiencies mainly in the Global South, to be solved through programs such as adding nutrients to food or delivering vitamin capsules. In a first step, I examine how IOs produced a “cartography of nutritional deficiencies,”Footnote ³⁰ by amassing a body of biochemical and statistical knowledge produced through quantification processes. In doing so, IOs perpetuated Global-North–Global-South asymmetries, wherein countries in Africa, South America, and Asia are characterized by their “deficiencies” and framed as in need of “correction” and assistance.Footnote ³¹ In a second step, I show how such problematization of hidden hunger subtly authorized technical responses and short-term forms of political action that largely neglected the root causes of the problem.

Until the 1980s, hidden hunger did not garner significant global attention. The focus of global discourse in the field was primarily on what was termed the “protein era,” characterized by a widespread belief that a “protein gap” was the primary cause of malnutrition and hunger worldwide. However, by the 1970s, it became evident that the deficiency in protein was not the predominant nutritional issue globally.Footnote ³² Consequently, there was a shift in focus towards the role of “micronutrients,” or tiny substances and particles such as vitamins and minerals, which started receiving increasing attention from the international community.Footnote ³³

In fact, at the time, the connection between these tiny nutrients and health was primarily the subject of scientific and academic inquiry. During this era, studies conducted on a national scale began to unveil the extent of “hidden hunger,” its clinical manifestations and its ramifications for health.Footnote ³⁴ However, in 1986, a publication by Alfred Sommer of an article on Vitamin A in the Lancet played a pivotal role in elevating what was considered solely a “health” issue into a matter of greater social and political significance. Sommer’s study not only confirmed Vitamin A’s role in severe clinical conditions, as previously documented, but also highlighted its correlation with elevated childhood mortality rates.Footnote ³⁵

Given the relevant and potential social implications of the topic, various UN agencies convened major international conferences to advance the understanding of the impacts of nutritional deficiencies and elevate political conversations. As early as in 1974, Sommer was invited to a WHO-sponsored meeting in Indonesia to discuss his work on Vitamin A. He was also in charge of writing the 1995 WHO report on Vitamin A deficiency and its consequences, and of chairing different scientific advisory committees at the WHO and UNICEF.Footnote ³⁶

The 1990 Summit of Children took the issue very seriously and promised the virtual elimination of Vitamin A deficiency by the year 2000.Footnote ³⁷ After the summit, several conferences and summits were held. One significant event was the Conference on Ending Hidden Hunger in 1991, held in Montreal. The primary objective of this conference was to garner “political support at the highest level for ending hidden hunger.”Footnote ³⁸ A similar acknowledgment took place one year later, in 1992, at the first FAO/WHO International Conference on Nutrition in Rome, where it was recognized that hidden hunger was a “matter of major public health concern.”Footnote ³⁹

However, much more than a shift in discourse, the construction of hidden hunger as an object of governance entailed the deployment of tools, instruments, and technologies to make it actionable. In the context of increasing awareness and interest, IOs started to produce and assemble a significant body of knowledge that served to delineate the object as an incontrovertible scientific fact. “Accurate” knowledge of the vitamin content of foods, food consumption at the household level, and anthropometric indicators of nutritional deficiencies were fundamental in that regard.Footnote ⁴⁰

At the time, the WHO expressed concerns about the incommensurability of hidden hunger. The UN agency pointed to a “lack of consistency” of existing nutrition standards, in particular due to a lack of homogenization of “methods of analysis and presentation of survey results.”Footnote ⁴¹ Up until that point, nutrition surveys often employed diverse methods, reporting systems, and reference values.Footnote ⁴² A similar issue of incommensurability existed regarding food consumption data, which is also crucial for making the object of hidden hunger actionable. As pointed out in a WHO Bulletin: “data on global patterns of dietary habits, as well as differences by population characteristics are not well established.”Footnote ⁴³ Such discrepancies and lack of homogeneity in measures and methods was largely seen by IOs as an obstacle to validating knowledge about hidden hunger across jurisdictions.

In response to the perceived lack of uniformization, IOs undertook different activities to universalize standards on diets and food intake. In 1949, the FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Nutrition was established to set references for nutritional politics and health standards.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although the committee was set up to provide technical advice to FAO/WHO secretariat, it also played a key role in insulating these two UN agencies from the politics of their member countries. From the very beginning the Joint Expert Committee expressed its wish to introduce an international codex of analytical methods that would assist scientists to ensure the generation of “uniform and comparable” data regarding the vitamin content of foods and diets.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nowadays, the overarching framework governing FAO/WHO stipulates that all experts chosen must demonstrate impartiality and objectivity in their assessment.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, a core tenet guiding joint WHO/FAO expert committees on nutrition is the principle of “neutrality,” with their guidance mandated to be grounded solely in scientific evidence.Footnote ⁴⁷

During the same period, the WHO launched efforts to assemble a Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition with the aim of collecting, standardizing, and sharing child anthropometric data (indicators typically pertain to individuals’ height and weight). The FAO also launched its Global Database on Food Consumption to standardize the number and proportion of people in each country who consume “insufficient” dietary energy.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although FAO had been publishing “World Food Surveys” and “Food Balance Sheets,” there was a need to further “strengthen micronutrient surveillance capabilities and activities by devising indicators to monitor strategies for achieving national goals related to coverage, compliance and effectiveness in targeted populations.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Among the efforts to quantify food consumption and nutrient intake was UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), a set of surveys that provided “internationally comparable and statistical data” compiled in more than 200 indicators on children and women.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to UNICEF, MICS has become the “largest source of statistically sound and international comparable data on children and women worldwide.”Footnote ⁵¹ By standardizing data collection, providing internationally comparable statistics, and strengthening surveillance capabilities to monitor strategies aimed at addressing malnutrition and dietary deficiencies globally, these initiatives were crucial in problematizing hidden hunger as something detached from specific social contexts.

Efforts to delineate hidden hunger as a matter of fact also involved the deployment of a wide array of technologies as well as the provision of training assistance, particularly in laboratory capacity to measure the recommended indicators.Footnote ⁵² In order to collect biochemical data on nutritional deficiencies, infrastructures such as laboratories that allow for the storage of specimens were essential. Similarly, the availability of instruments such as rapid test kits, used during face-to-face interviews in different household surveys, were key for “testing” the bioavailability and food composition.Footnote ⁵³ Additionally, analyzing vitamins in bodily fluids was another assessment method, which employed a spectrum of physical, chemical, and biological testing techniques to evaluate foodstuffs and ascertain their physiological effects and nutritional value of foods as sources of vitamins for human consumption.Footnote ⁵⁴

A final aspect that contributed to consolidating hidden hunger as a matter of fact involved its redefinition as a measurable economic concern. The link between economic competitiveness and hidden hunger was operated through the publication of studies that highlighted the impacts of hidden hunger on cognitive functioning, work capacity, and productivity, largely echoing dominant assumptions about development at the time.Footnote ⁵⁵ For micronutrient malnutrition to be quantified in economic terms, it needed to be turned into indicators that could be specified numerically. The most tangible exemplification of this “economized” definition of hidden hunger is known as the WHO disability-adjusted life year (DALY).Footnote ⁵⁶ DALY is a time-based statistical measure that combines years of life lost due to premature mortality and years of life lost due to time lived in states of less than full health, or years of healthy life lost due to disability.Footnote ⁵⁷ The study identified malnutrition as “the risk factor responsible for the greatest loss of DALYs.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Through the use of datasets, surveys, and numerical tools, IOs problematized hidden hunger in scientized and economized terms, or as an indisputable “matter of fact,” that could be known through objective and universally applicable markers that could travel beyond nation states. Backed by estimates of validity and reliability, hidden hunger appeared thus as an objective reality.Footnote ⁵⁹

Omissions and Erasures

Problematizing hidden hunger as an exogenous object to be measured and apprehended through quantification is far from being a neutral exercise. As any “universalizing” attempt, it comes with its own erasures. A statistician working for UNICEF highlighted the significant challenges associated with collecting data on hidden hunger, especially in countries located in Africa, Asia, and certain parts of Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁰ Due to the lack of available national surveys in these regions, statisticians tasked with modeling the data make inferences about these regions based on data from neighboring countries where such information is accessible. This is necessary to generate “reliable global estimates” that transcend national borders, despite the fact that data from Global South regions is excluded. On some other occasions, the problem does not come from the lack of data but from what IO staff refer to as “bad quality data” that countries, mainly from the Global South, provide to the IOs’ secretariats.Footnote ⁶¹ As the UNICEF statistician added, in such scenarios, this data cannot be included in the statistical models as it does not fit the criteria for quality.Footnote ⁶² This statement shows that the numbers and data aggregated, mainly from the Global North, thus become the authoritative account of “the food problem” and of what the Global South “lacks.” A peasant from a grassroots organization in Mexico also pointed out:

Additionally, defining hidden hunger as a matter of fact always entails drawing a sharp boundary between those with the capacity to diagnose, evaluate, and solve deficiencies and those who are the target of interventions. This echoes what Grotluschen and Buddeberg call “southering” – which means defining Global South countries in terms of what they lack while exposing them to a pronounced deficit perspective.Footnote ⁶⁴ Within the dominant approach to hidden hunger people credentialed as experts such as IO staff and statisticians – and not the women who are responsible for feeding families or those who suffer from hunger – are the ones who “know” the problem and hence can prescribe solutions for the malnourished.Footnote ⁶⁵ This narrow conception also evades a social view of hunger and malnutrition that would include macroeconomic and political issues of poverty, inequality, and marginality. For decades, agroecology movements, peasants, and grassroots organizations have emphasized the connections between industrial food production methods and the increasing levels of hunger worldwide.Footnote ⁶⁶ While some of the most prominent multilateral institutions at the global level recognize the importance of such perspectives, they have largely remained at the margins.Footnote ⁶⁷

Therefore, addressing hidden hunger through a scientific account of “missing” nutrients evades a social view.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hidden hunger, understood a matter of fact, de-roots food not only from its cultural richness and its sensual and practical dimensions but also from the broader contexts in which it is produced.Footnote ⁶⁹

Acting upon Hidden Hunger: Political Palliatives?

Nowadays hunger (including hidden hunger) is treated as a scientific matter, mainly concerned with diet quality and objectively measurable nutrient/caloric intake, a paradigm that historians have also referred to as “nutritionism”.Footnote ⁷⁰ When hunger is predominantly addressed by focusing on the nutrient content of food, only certain “magic bullet” solutions become viable.Footnote ⁷¹ Although there is a widespread consensus that acknowledges that interventions focusing on “food systems” could be long-term solutions to hidden hunger, those seems to have received the least attention in the past decades.Footnote ⁷² The rationale behind these asymmetries often stems from an argument about knowledge, attributing the marginalization of socio-economic interventions to the purported “lack” of data or evidence.Footnote ⁷³

Currently, food fortification or vitamin supplementation are the most celebrated way of addressing hidden hunger, despite the fact that many other longer-term strategies are also available.Footnote ⁷⁴ For example, the World Bank has, in many iterations, emphasized the potential of food fortification, stating that “no other technology offers as large an opportunity to improve lives at such low cost and in such a short time.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Other influential actors of the global food and nutrition community, such as the Consultative Group for Agricultural Research and its “Micronutrients Project,” have echoed the sentiment that such interventions are efficient as they have the advantage of treating “the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of micronutrient deficiencies.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Biofortification as a solution to the problem of hidden hunger, therefore, allows the international community to address malnutrition without having to completely rethink the real roots causes of hunger.

Over the past decades, IOs have undertaken numerous projects based on fortifying food with isolated nutrients. Under the “Brighter Futures” initiative, a program funded by the Gates Foundation, UNICEF has conducted large-scale fortification projects in several countries.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, the WHO has also provided extensive guidance to countries on the use of micronutrient powders, which are single‐dose packets containing multiple vitamins and minerals that can be sprinkled onto semi‐solid food. Such powders have been promoted as a “proven” strategy to combat this form of undernutrition.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other organizations working in close partnerships with IOs have also been established to conduct large-scale fortification programs in several countries. One of such initiative is the Micronutrient Initiative (later renamed Nutrition International), which since its inception in the 1992 Montreal Hidden Hunger summit has emphasized the provision of market-based interventions through the delivery of isolated nutrients such as vitamins and minerals.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to its website, the organization works to “deliver the greatest nutrition impact at the lowest cost.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In 2008, Nutrition International supported the WHO Department of Nutrition for Health and Development in enhancing its capacity to provide “evidence-based” nutrition interventions.Footnote ⁸¹ For that purpose, Nutrition International facilitated the meetings of the WHO’s Nutrition Guidance Expert Advisory Group and its activities related to fortification.Footnote ⁸² Similarly, Nutrition International was part of the “core group” that significantly influenced the policy-making process that resulted in the publication of one of the most important WHO/FAO fortification guidelines.Footnote ⁸³

While some of these programs have been key to addressing hunger and malnutrition, scholars argue that “top-down nutrient-specific” interventions alone do not “solve” the problem of hidden hunger, as they claim.Footnote ⁸⁴ Some researchers have found that food fortification programs often tend to overestimate the magnitude of the problem in Global South countries. When such programs are implemented by IOs on a large scale, they also tend to ignore the eco-social specificities of countries as well as the socio-economic determinants of hunger and malnutrition.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Colombia, for example, micronutrient powder supplementation was not the most adequate way of tackling hidden hunger.Footnote ⁸⁶ Another challenge is that, because fortified foods are more costly, they may be beyond the reach of people who are at the greatest risk of deficiencies and, instead, tend to most benefit the people who need them least.Footnote ⁸⁷

Despite the acknowledgment in recent years that food fortification and supplementation fail to address the root causes of hunger, the international community continues to portray them as some of the only “evidence-based” solutions. This was the case during the 2021 United Nations Foods Systems Summit, where “scaling up” biofortified crops was heralded as a “game-changing solution.” The summit emphasized that, in order to deploy large-scale fortification programs, “market forces will be harnessed and leveraged” to ensure the success of this “cost-effective” intervention mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The tendency to understand nutrition as a medical problem mainly stemming from a lack of nutrients consumption has several implications. On the one hand, when food is mainly seen as a chemical compound, it can easily be treated as a commodity that is sold and consumed, a frame that has largely served the commercial interests of industries based in Global North countries, which market food as a commodity delivering health promises.Footnote ⁸⁸ At the global level, the agroindustrial and pharmaceutical complex have indeed largely benefited from this narrow meaning attributed to hunger and have used nutritional “deficits” as a goldmine offering ample market opportunities.Footnote ⁸⁹

More generally, such a reductive problematization of hidden hunger, and food in general, puts increasing pressure on individuals to take charge of their health.Footnote ⁹⁰ Several programs are now being conducted in countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, or Bangladesh to address hidden hunger and malnutrition in children through the selling of “Sprinkles,” a manufactured package of micronutrients delivered through markets.Footnote ⁹¹ When hunger is construed as an individual concern, with all attention directed towards the consumer phase of the issue, the responsibility for “solving” it falls upon individuals. Through the purchase of nutrient-enriched food, or vitamins, individuals are tasked with bearing the responsibility of addressing unprecedented levels of global hunger.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I explored the ways in which different UN agencies, the WHO, the FAO, and UNICEF have problematized hidden hunger as an indisputable “matter of fact.” By assembling a significant body of biochemical knowledge about malnutrition these institutions gave the object an aura of naturalness and objectivity. On the one hand, through data aggregation, surveys, and technologies, hidden hunger was defined as a problem stemming from a “deficit” in nutrient consumption in Global South countries. On the other hand, hidden hunger was defined by UN agencies in a highly economized way, placing emphasis on its measurable impact on economic competitiveness and the productivity of nations.

However, akin to any universalizing endeavor, this way of approaching hunger was not only exclusionary but also restricted the spectrum of possible responses and policy options. The chapter elucidated how the dominant problematization of hidden hunger as a problem of missing nutrients has largely authorized and validated short-term political actions, such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation. These responses functioned more as political palliatives than as transformative solutions addressing the root causes of hunger such as inequality, trade regimes, lack of access, environmental degradation, and industrial agriculture.

This chapter has highlighted that the ways in which IOs know and address problems is therefore never functional. Producing knowledge about a given issue and stressing how to “best” approach it is always an exclusionary practice that prioritizes certain voices at the expense of others. This brings a subtle but profound change in the ways in which we think about IOs’ daily work and their power to shape governance practices. As this chapter has emphasized, it is by studying knowledge-making processes behind global problems that one can better understand who has authority to govern and why, and how boundaries and hierarchies are established, maintained, and potentially transformed.