Mexico Poverty: Functioning of Crusade Against Hunger Depends on Good Will of Governors

Animal Politico: Tania L. Montalvo
Translated by Monserrat Rivera-Chao

The results of the National Crusade Against Hunger depend on the good will and the interests of each state government. The form in which the strategy operates varies from state to state, since

“the governors do not have big incentives to give priority to the activities of the Crusade, so that their collaboration is a function of temporary personal and political factors.” 

So concludes the National Council for Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval), the organization that evaluates the country's social policy, in its Assessment of the National Crusade Against Hunger in 2013-2016 that it published this past Friday.

The consequence is that the Crusade has results that are unequal between states where it is able to accomplish coordinating the efforts of social policy and others where the reduction of diet deficiencies or other deficiencies does not advance. This is due to the decisions of the local governments whether or not to share information, collaborate operationally and coordinate with the programs of the federal government tied to the strategy.

MV Note: The Mexican government defines poverty “multidimensionally”: food or diet poverty is defined by a family’s lack of means to grow sufficient food or sufficient income to purchase the “basic food basket”. Other dimensions are income, housing, access to clean water and sewage disposal, and access to education, health care and pension. A family is “moderately poor” if it lacks access to one of these. It is “extremely poor if its income is below the “line of wellbeing” and it has deficiencies in two of the “social” dimensions. The Crusade Against Hunger only addresses "food poverty" of the extremely poor.

Since there are cases where there is no willingness of state governments to cooperate,

“ the effectiveness of the strategy can be a function of actors and decisions unrelated to the mechanisms of the Crusade.”  

As a consequence,

“the state government competes with the Crusade; it creates parallel structures, similar programs and competes for beneficiaries,” Coneval reported.

It warned that when willingness on the part of local authorities does not exist,

"the strategy of the federal government is insufficient to compensate for the disinterest or overcome the resistance of a state government.” 

It mentions, without giving more details, that some of the states that compete with the Crusade for beneficiaries are Sonora and the State of Mexico.

The lack of coordination is also between state secretariats [departments], with municipal authorities or even between secretariats at a federal level, indicates the report of Evaluation of the Interinstitutional Coordination of the National Crusade Against Hunger, that is part of the reports taken into account by the Coneval to create the 2013-2016 Assessment of the strategy.

“The capacity of the state level agents of Sedesol to be able to coordinate with their peers in other agencies (and the willingness of these to link themselves to one another and cooperate) it is not necessarily uniform; neither is the capacity of municipal governments to collaborate in substantive form with the Crusade. And the same occurs in the federal agencies: there are programs more open to coordination based on the logic of deficiencies and others that, due to their design, make it operationally complex to coordinate.”

Coneval found that at a municipal level evidence of good coordination with the National Crusade Against Hunger does not exist; while between state secretariats:

“information is shared about the beneficiaries only as an exception and the same thing occurs with the exchange of information between state and federal government agencies.”

In its Assessment about the results of the strategy, Coneval indicated that coordination is one of the central challenges of the National Crusade Against Hunger, and if it succeeds, “ it will result in integrated attention in communities and stop suffering from social deficiencies.”

Coneval acknowledged that the strategy “has achieved that attention to deficiencies occurs in a more integrated manner” but insists that, until now, the implementation has been unequal due to the failures in coordination between the actors involved. Spanish original