Abstract
Impact of national food fortification programs is contingent on the extent to which there is compliance with national standards. However, this compliance is often sub-optimal and is not consistently measured. One of the challenges to more regular measurement is an over-reliance on quantitative assessments of micronutrient levels for compliance, which are costly. In resource constrained environments, this contributes to weaknesses in regulatory monitoring. We offer an alternative, systems-based approach to determine compliance, presenting a unique score that can capture firms’ compliance behaviour, based on whether and how firms actually carry out stages of the fortification process. The key utility of such a measure being its use to monitor fortification propensity and assess changes in response to interventions. Further, we present an empirical application of this measure, providing novel evidence on firms’ compliance towards food fortification regulations in Bangladesh, investigating the institutional and firm-level factors that correlate with compliance behaviour towards food fortification regulations among edible oil and salt producers.
Highlights
Large-scale fortification of staple foods and condiments is a costeffective, scalable and evidence-based strategy to help meet human re quirements for essential nutrients and address micronutrient de ficiencies, when delivered as intended (Horton, 2006; Keats et al, 2019)
In order to overcome this hurdle, we present a unique ‘Compliance Behaviour Score’ (CBS) that measures whether and how firms carry out stages of the forti fication process in accordance with the framework outlined by Henson and Heasman (1998)
We interviewed a total of 10 edible oil firms, 6 wholesalers, 8 retailers, one representative from the packers’ associa tion, one premix supplier
Summary
An important factor determining the impact of national food fortification programs is the extent to which there is compliance with national standards. This compliance is often sub-optimal, limiting potential for impact; and is often not consistently measured, limiting the ability of program managers to implement course corrective actions. One reason for this is an over-reliance on quantitative tests of nutrients as the definitive indicator of compliance because they offer numerical results that can be compared (directly or indirectly) with the micronutrient specifications. Over-reliance on such an approach is prohibitive in terms of costs and availability of resources, with resulting weaknesses in regulatory and performance
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