The individual and institutional capacities required for the prevention and reduction of nutritional insecurity and hunger in lesser-developed countries as the twenty-first century approaches are identified in this book. Household nutritional "security" can be defined as the successful
The essays in this book champion the idea of increasing, or scaling up, grass roots operations to provide nutritional security, while scaling down the efforts of national and international institutions. Scaling up involves strengthening local capacities to improve and expand upon current successful programs by building upon existing local culture and organizations. This, in turn, enables the programs to strengthen relationships with national governments, international bilateral/multilateral donors, as well as non-governmental organizations. Scaling down concerns the ways and means by which these various organizations encourage and complement the local development. Therefore, as local capacities are scaled up, the national/international control over decisions and functions is, ideally, scaled down. The volume also directly addresses the resultant complication: how to create programs that are both culturally specific and that will flourish well into the future.