Alan Berg (nutritionist)

In a 1997 survey of the international nutrition community, Berg was the one most often cited as a role model for young persons entering the field. In 2008, the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition honored Berg as one of the first recipients of the United Nations Achievement Award for Lifelong Service to Nutrition, citing him at the presentation as "a global giant in nutrition history.

Following Berg's retirement from the World Bank in 1995, he has served as an adviser or consultant to a number of international nongovernmental organizations, as well as the World Bank through 2014. He also, through 2010, returned to the Brookings Institution as a Guest Scholar. Berg continues to serve as a board member of the public health organization Calcutta Kids, providing health and nutrition services to mothers and young children in Indian slums. He maintains active involvement in the development of Double-Fortified Salt.

Berg's work has helped to transform the way development agencies and national governments think about the problem of malnutrition as a fundamental component of economic growth. His planning techniques and multisectoral operational work, particularly during his long tenure as the senior nutrition officer at the World Bank (1972–95), have modeled a number of practices that other donor institutions and countries now often incorporate into their own projects. Furthermore, Berg's efforts to transform development assistance for nutrition have prompted a number of academic training programs for nutritionists to expand their curriculum to include coursework in nutrition policy, planning, and implementation, creating a new career path for graduates.

Berg also served as Visiting Professor of Nutrition Policy and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1976, where he organized and led a conference that drew government ministers and international development authorities. He then served as lead author of the MIT Press book, Nutrition, National Development, and Planning. During these years, Berg also chaired the Nutrition Panel of the National Academy of Sciences' World Food and Nutrition Study (1975). His work captured the attention of policymakers and is widely credited with establishing nutrition as an essential dimension of international development strategies and designing planning techniques to address them in a multisectoral way.

In 1972 World Bank President Robert McNamara recruited Berg to be Deputy Director of the new Population and Nutrition Projects Department at the Bank. During the 23 years of Berg's tenure, the size of nutrition operations generated by the Bank (free-standing nutrition projects and nutrition components of health, education, agriculture, rural development, and social protection projects), earlier negligible, totaled $2.1 billion, significantly more than the spending of all other donors combined.

Berg was then recruited by Ambassador Chester Bowles to come to India to work with the Indian government as head of the U.S. government's first national-scale, nutrition project. In India, Berg found an opportunity to test the recommendations he had developed with the White House Task Force on Nutrition. His work in India included direction of the extensive food aid program, creation of that country's food and pharmaceutical industry association to address malnutrition, introduction of social marketing techniques designed to change consumer behavior in nutritionally beneficial ways, and a number of new efforts to fortify food staples there with vitamins and minerals. Berg also initiated in 1969 the concept of Double Fortified Salt, adding iron as well as iodine to common salt, with the aim of reducing iron deficiency anemia without requiring changes in dietary practices.

When famine struck India in 1966-67, he coordinated a massive food aid distribution effort that is recognized as having saved millions of lives. The intervention earned Berg the U.S. government's annual award as the Outstanding Young Civil Servant in 1968. Lester Brown, often a critic of U.S. policies, later praised that relief effort: "For the United States, this was one of our finest moments."

Alan D. Berg (born February 18, 1932) is an American international development authority, most notable for his advocacy and large-scale implementation of strategies to address malnutrition, especially among children and pregnant women. Berg's professional focus on nutrition spans more than half a century and has earned him wide recognition for stimulating a new policy approach to international nutrition assistance.