Donors should begin considering buying nutrition-rich food aid items from producers in aid-recipient countries in order to boost local manufacturing capacity as well as to save money, a nutrition expert said at a recent conference on humanitarian studies.
Several developing countries are now manufacturing their own ready-to-use therapeutic foods, or RUTF, but donors, including the United Nations still prefer to buy RUTF manufactured overseas, Steve Collins said at the World Conference on Humanitarian Studies held last week in the United States, IRIN reports.
Some manufacturers of RUTF in the United States, however, noted that manufacturers in developing countries still lack the capacity to manage distribution networks needed to scale up their operations.
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