The National Crusade Against Hunger, the main public policy strategy to eliminate hunger in Mexico, has failed since its creation. Due to an absence of a methodology to identify those who live in extreme poverty and suffer from undernourishment, which by federal mandate the strategy should benefit, in the states that concentrate such population the coverage with social programs is less than 40%, while in states with far fewer people suffering from those conditions the coverage is higher than 250%.
In a country where over 7 million people spend their days without anything to eat and have no means to escape their ordeal, the largest strategy to combat hunger that has ever been registered in Mexico has distributed its resources by guesswork, without first detecting the conditions of those who it is supposed to benefit.
The absence of a methodology has also allowed for the dissemination of inaccurate results in public speeches and other official channels of communication such as the website of the Crusade. For instance, the website claims that one of the main programs used to reduce hunger, the Food Support Program (PAL), currently benefits 4.17 million people; however, according to official records of the Crusade the program currently benefits only 1.15 million people. This means the government report 3.6 times more beneficiaries than those in the official databases of the program. More details ahead.
The current investigation was conducted by obtaining and processing over 300,000 publicly available official databases of beneficiaries of the National Crusade Against Hunger which were separated at the community level. The data was systematized and aggregated into a single database in order to understand what happens at the center of this public policy strategy.
And what happens is not small: the coverage is unequal in the different states of the country and the priority was not given to those most vulnerable. On one hand, where extreme poverty and hunger is extensive and systemic, coverage falls below 40% like in the state of Oaxaca where only 38.9% of that vulnerable population is benefited with social programs.
On the other hand, in eleven states more people were benefited with the strategy than CONEVAL, the organism in charge of measuring poverty in Mexico, identifies should receive the social programs. For instance, in the state of Aguascalientes the excess in coverage reaches 268%, even though only 1.5% of the population of the state lives in extreme poverty and is malnourished. The Crusade is obliged under its mandate to utilize the estimates provided by CONEVAL to identify the population it should serve.
The disparity is larger at the municipal level. In the 150 poorest municipalities in the country, where more than 32% of the population lives in extreme poverty and is malnourished, the average coverage is 41%. For example, in eight municipalities in Oaxaca none of the population receives a social program even though over a fifth of its population would qualify to be a beneficiary of the Crusade.
In contrast, in the 150 municipalities that have the lowest level of extreme poverty, the average coverage is 137%; by this standard, more people are being benefited than CONEVAL estimates should qualify to be part of the strategy. In Juchipila in the state of Zacatecas, for instance, the coverage is 1500% higher than it should.
Falsifying Beneficiaries
In an interview with Omar Garfias, Technical Secretary of the Inter-secretarial Commission of the National Crusade Against Hunger, he mentioned that the initial design of the strategy, due to the characteristics of the programs that it is comprised of, did not take into consideration the identification of people whose characteristics would qualify them to participate in the Crusade and instead conducted a territorial policy where resources were assigned on a regional basis. In each region, local coordinators selected who would benefit from the policy.
“When we entered (into the Crusade) that was one of the great insufficiencies of the social policy. You say, there are very important sums of money destined to social policy but -who is receiving it?- There wasn't a scheme to characterize the beneficiaries so there was a lot of resources assigned on guesswork. You say, he looks ruined, he is a poor farmer, so you give (the programs) to him...when we started there were no databases of beneficiaries, there were only unconnected lists of people who were receiving the programs but there wasn't a unique (methodology) to characterize (the beneficiaries)”
And so the Crusade began, without the basic instrumentation that a program designed to eradicate hunger is supposed to have, and without knowing first who is actually suffering from malnourishment. This lack of methodology to identify the vulnerable population gave way to inflated results in the official discourse of the organism in charge of coordinating the Crusade, SEDESOL.
According to Garfias: “Yes, it was a problem because it permitted the assignment of beneficiaries at will… by this I mean it allowed for falsification ( of beneficiaries), so you can say -these people are poor- and who should you give (the programs) to? How can you tell they are poor? We don't know their characteristics, so when someone comes and says “I gave (the programs) to my friend” how can you tell him yes or no? The ideal is to have (an instrument to identify the characteristics of people) and that is what we are striving to achieve”.
The ideal path before starting a public policy would be to know beforehand the target population. However, for Garfias that would have incurred in a political cost:
“If we didn't start the Crusade we had two problems: first we would lose two and a half years of work, and it wouldn't have acquired the centrality of a priority strategy for the President. Priority strategies are announced on the first day. We decided: lets begin the Crusade but lets also modify the institutional tools that are insufficient”.
In a context where almost 3 million people who live in extreme poverty and are malnourished currently don't receive any social programs, the cost of the insufficient tools to characterize beneficiaries has led to a situation where in 11 states at least 279,000 people are currently receiving programs who shouldn't according to the operational rules of the Crusade and that at the moment, there are no tools to even verify if they are poor or not.
Programs that do not Fight Hunger
Another problem is that under the current structure, hundreds of thousands of people are being counted as beneficiaries of the National Crusade Against Hunger even though they are not receiving any program that substantially helps them to fight malnourishment.
The Crusade as a strategy is comprised of 61 programs of which, according to the Federal Audit Office, only 9 of them directly combat hunger and the rest relate to other endeavors such as health, agriculture or entrepreneurship.
If a person receives at least one of the sixty one programs, they are counted as beneficiaries of the Crusade, and as such “one less Mexican is suffering from hunger”, even though he might have received an agricultural subsidy that does little to combat the main issue they face: malnourishment.
However, according to the Strategic Plan of the Crusade, defined in the Logical Frame Matrix of the strategy, for a family to overcome extreme poverty and malnourishment it has to improve seven components: to increase their income above the Minimum Welfare Line, a benchmark defined by CONEVAL; access to an adequate nutrition, access to health services, access to social security, basic services such as water and electricity in their home, adequate living space, and access to education. Dozens of the programs included in the Crusade do little or nothing to abate any of these deficiencies.
Approximately 22% of the beneficiaries, over 877000 people, counted in the official databases of the Crusade do not receive any of the programs that directly combat hunger, the primary objective of the strategy. Among those programs that they don't receive are Prospera, Food Support Program (PAL), Pensions for Older Adults, or Community Kitchens Program.
The majority of them receive other programs, predominantly Popular Insurance, a public health insurance, which might help improve their health and reduce medical expenses, but does little to fight malnourishment.
Even in the municipalities that have coverage of over a 100%, the beneficiaries of the Crusade might not receive any program that combats hunger. For example, in the municipality of Cosio in the state of Aguascalientes, which has an excess coverage of 364%, the majority of beneficiaries only receive Popular Insurance.
Unfulfilled Goals
A report by the Federal Audit Office indicates that the Crusade has been insufficient in combating hunger and its reach has been smaller than estimated in its initial goals.
In the design of the strategy, as mentioned in the “Fifth Axis: Innovation and Coverage Strategy”, by 2014 the Crusade was supposed to reach 5.3 million people and by 2015 7.1 million people. In 2015 they only reached 4.5 million people. This implies that by 2016, in Mexico there should no longer exist people who live in extreme poverty and are hungry who don't receive any social programs. This goal is far from achieved.
Additionally, the Federal Audit Office exposed weakness in the programs that comprise the Crusade since they haven't accredited a methodology to select beneficiaries, they do not have mechanisms for the evaluation of their impact in reducing extreme poverty or malnourishment, and their budget design lacks tools to analyze their financial management.
One of the recommendations by the Federal Audit Office to increase the coverage of the programs designed to eradicate hunger is to investigate and implement actions to improve coordination of their main programs.
Programs that Combat Hunger
The budget of the main program to combat poverty in Mexico, Prospera, and its complementary program for areas without access to health and education services, Food Support Program (PAL), are large enough to cover all the target population of the National Crusade Against Hunger. With its current budget, Prospera benefits 23 million people, more than 3 times the number of people currently living in extreme poverty and are malnourished.
The National Development Plan 2013-2018, which establishes all social development goals for the current government, indicates that it is a national priority to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. However, even though the current operating budget of its main program is more than enough to achieve such a goal, less than 50% of the target population of the Crusade currently receives either Prospera or the Food Support Program.
When the Technical Secretary Omar Garfias was asked about this predicament, he commented: “Many of the main poverty program that combat hunger followed indicators different to alimentary goals. Now we are striving to correct that. What challenges do we face? That all those programs have beneficiaries, so we have to tell some people, hey you weren't supposed to get that program...”
Its All About Marketing
Currently, the only data that can be used to analyze the programs of the Crusade is the one that is shared in their official website and communiques.
However, that data can be misleading. In the case of the Community Kitchen Program, the beneficiary database indicates that 36,000 people of the Crusade receive the program. In contrast the Crusade website claims to benefit over 1 million people, more than 28 times the number of people that officially receive it. In the case of other programs like Liconsa, a milk distribution program, the reported number beneficiaries is 4.8 times larger than the official records and in the case of Pensions for Older Adults 11.3 times larger.
When Omar Garfias was asked about this situation, he mentioned that the information in the website is correct but it includes beneficiaries that received the programs prior to the inception of the Crusade that may not live in extreme poverty or suffer from malnourishment. That situation dramatically impacts the reported numbers.
As he puts it: “Yes, (the data) should have asterisks. What we don't have today is the data with which we have to substitute it as it should be, the again its a marketing exercise...”
The Technical Secretary assured us that social policies are made that way: “the tire is fixed at the same time one goes on its way”, but that is not a norm. In 2007, Cambodia implemented “IDPoor”, a program designed to identify the most vulnerable populations so that they could be the priority of their social programs. It was designed in collaboration with the German Development Corporation (GIZ) and has been a case study in poverty alleviation by the World Bank. And not as a Marketing exercise.
