USAID Expedites Emergency Food Aid

I just wanted to drop a quick update about USAID’s efforts to provide immediate relief to the ongoing food crisis in Ethiopia. As you may know, Ethiopia and other countries in the Horn of Africa have been hit especially hard by the rise in food and fuel prices and drought. In July, the UN warned that more than 14 million people in the region are in need of emergency food aid, with 10.3 million in Ethiopia alone. This new U.S. shipment is an important step in meeting Ethiopia’s urgent food needs and should be accompanied by new investments in agricultural productivity to target long-term food security and help Ethiopia become self-sufficient.

Excerpt below, full piece here.

The shipment includes 9,390 MT of split yellow peas, 6,150 MT of vegetable oil, 6,320 MT of corn soy blend, and 1,400 MT of wheat flour, the agency said in a statement.

“This is only one of multiple strategies USAID is implementing to alleviate impacts of the world food crisis in that region and elsewhere around the world”, it said.

Accordingly, USAID’s Office of Food for Peace plans to provide over 1 million MT of food, valued at more than $857 million, to Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti in fiscal year 2008 in response to the drought emergency affecting the Horn of Africa.

-Chris Scott

US provides Ethiopia with $112 million in Emergency Funds

The United States has recently given $91 million in emergency food funds and $21 million in humanitarian aid to Ethiopia, one of the countries hardest hit by the food crisis.

From AllAfrica.com:

According to press statement from the US embassy in Addis Ababa , the donation was in response to Ethiopian government’s revised June 2008 Humanitarian Requirement Report.

This new donation coupled with last month’s announcement of $80 million in emergency assistance brings the total US assistance in response to the drought to [nearly] $200.

“The donations have come in response to continuing humanitarian needs in Ethiopia, where poor end erratic rainfall distribution, high food prices, ongoing conflict, arid limited humanitarian access have negatively impacted food, water, and pasture availability, resulting in increased malnutrition rates, food and water shortage, and heavy loss of livestock,” the statement said.

A majority of the funds will be divided between non-governmental organizations already performing on-the-ground relief work, such as UNICEF and the International Rescue Committee. Through their work, the funds are expected to help over 1 million people, including over 50,000 malnourished children.

-Betsy Avila

Frist Africa Trip - Day 2

Sen. Bill Frist, MD, is traveling through Mozambique and Rwanda on a 10-day trip to visit and observe the great work of U.S. led initiatives. Throughout the trip he’s blogging on the Healing Hands blog and here on the ONE Blog.

In Maputo, Mozambique, today, I met with senior officials to discuss the progress of the Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact (MCC) that Mozambique signed with the United States last summer.

This five-year, $507 million agreement focuses on the neglected northern part of the country where I will visit later this week. The Compact will bring clean water to tens of thousands of people for the first time—making them less vulnerable to disease and more economically productive. MCC’s grant will also allow Mozambique to build new roads that link poor communities with markets. A land tenure component will help ensure that property rights are respected. Finally, the Compact seeks to eradicate a coconut disease that threatens one of northern Mozambique’s most valuable crops.

Last year, President Bush appointed me to the Board of Directors of the MCC, which was created by Congress in 2003 when I was Majority Leader of the United States Senate to reduce global poverty through economic growth. The MCC represents a fundamentally different way of giving American development aid to the world’s most deserving nations.

In the past, most of our aid money was, frankly, wasted. That’s because we didn’t pay attention to the quality of the government or how well it treated its people. That caused many Americans to grow skeptical about foreign aid. The late Senator Jesse Helms used to refer to foreign aid as a “rat-hole” because of all the waste and corruption!

We learned something from those failures. MCC only awards aid to countries that are accountable, both to their own people, and to the American taxpayers who ultimately provide the grants. There is no point at all in wasting your taxpayer dollars in countries with bad governments. But in well-governed countries, American generosity can produce transformational change in the daily lives of poor people. (more…)

Fighting Cuts to the MCC

At the end of May the Senate passed a bill to provide emergency aid for
Jordan, Burma, and food security - urgent humanitarian needs that our
government needs to address.

The problem:

The Senate funded the assistance by proposing to cut the budget of the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which invests in long-term poverty reduction, by 1/3. The U.S. has already promised MCC funding to several very poor countries, including the African nation of Burkina Faso, scheduled to sign a compact with the MCC in July.  Since the news, the NGO community has been advocating hard against the proposed cuts.

The result:

Last week the proposed cuts were reduced from $525 million to $58 million by a conference of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate approved the bill last night and it is now up to the President to approve.

This month, I had the privilege of traveling to Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world. 80% of the population is rural, subsistence farmers. The women I met in Burkina Faso rely on small vegetable plots to feed their families and send their children to school. The MCC’s programs would help women have access to land, help girls go to school, and improve rural roads - key strategies for reducing poverty and increasing food security. I also met with (more…)

GAO Report Critiques Insufficient Food Aid

The U.S. Government Accountability Office will release a report today saying that the United States’ and multilateral agencies efforts to reduce hunger in sub-Saharan Africa have been “insufficient.” The report comes one week before a special United Nation’s summit in Rome on the global food crisis.

From today’s Washington Post:

“To see that chronic hunger in Africa is getting worse despite our actions shows that the international community must retool its strategy to combat it,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), chairman of the subcommittee on African affairs, who led the request for the report. “Rather than simply sending more food aid to Africa, the U.S. and the international community need to address the factors that contribute to food insecurity.”

A spokeswoman for USAID said the agency was aware of the report but said it would decline comment until its official release this morning. The report comes on the heels of another released by the GAO last year sharply criticizing U.S. food aid programs. That report called them “inherently inefficient” because they rely on the sale of American-grown food that is costly to transport overseas, as opposed to food purchased closer to the troubled regions themselves.

-Virginia Simmons

Burma Flooded, Aid Stalled

NASA has posted these shots of the Burma/Myanmar coast before and after Monday’s cyclone.

From NASA:

“The entire coastal plain is flooded in the May 5 image. The fallow agricultural areas appear to have been especially hard hit. For example, Yangôn (population over 4 million) is almost completely surrounded by floods. Several large cities (population 100,000–500,000) are in the affected area. Muddy runoff colors the Gulf of Martaban turquoise.”

From the AFP:

Around 5,000 square kilometres (1,930 square miles) remain underwater, and more than a million homeless need emergency relief, a UN spokesman said.

“The bottle-neck (in aid) is getting it out in the delta. That needs boats, helicopters, trucks,” said Richard Horsey, a Bangkok-based spokesman with the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs…

Food prices in Myanmar, already one of the most impoverished nations in the world, have soared. A bag of rice now costs 40,000 kyats (35 dollars) in the commercial hub Yangon, up from 25,000 last week.

Frustrated aid agencies said they are still being denied permission to enter Myanmar and use their experience and expertise to ensure the right aid gets to the neediest places as soon as possible.”

-Virginia Simmons

More Food Aid Rations

Last week the World Food Program held talks to discuss how to ration critical international food aid, this week, the USAID is doing the same.

The soaring price of basic foods - like wheat, corn, rice and other cereals - over the past half year is creating a funding deficit likely to reach $200 million by the end of 2009. USAID currently provides food to almost 40 countries and areas - including Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Honduras and Sudan’s Darfur region. Now the agency must decide how and where to scale back.

From this weekend’s Washington Post:

“USAID officials said the administration, facing a tight budget year, was not planning to request funds to cover the projected $200 million shortfall from the price increases. USAID purchases grains in the same domestic commodities market as the U.S. companies that serve up Wonder bread or Big Macs, meaning they pay the same high market rates. As a result, officials said, the program cuts are necessary. “At this point, this is the administration’s request,” Borns said yesterday…

Frank Orzechowski, an adviser for Catholic Relief Services, said his organization has calculated that U.S. food aid would drop from 2.6 million tons last year to about 2.2 million this year. “That is going to be a pretty big hit for the people who can afford it the least,” he said.

“The biggest concern is that there are going to be more people being pushed into food insecurity in poor countries because they don’t have the purchasing power to cover higher costs, and we will be less rather than more prepared to cope with that. Higher commodity prices is not a situation that the U.S. is to blame for, but we are going to need to see it step up now and decide to make a greater contribution anyway.”

The full article here.

-Virginia Simmons

Show Me Some Leg(islative Updates)

Just a heads up that tomorrow the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations will be analyzing President Bush’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget request and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

Check back to our Feb 4 post for intel on president’s 2009 budget request.

And see Michael Gerson’s Feb 18 post here on the ONE Blog for more on the MCC.

-Virginia Simmons

Taylor Reports In

(Taylor works on the ONE Communications team and is currently traveling with President Bush, First Lady Laura Bush and Live Aid and Live 8 organizer Bob Geldof. Read all her posts so far from the trip here.)

A lot happened in Accra, Ghana today. First, President Bush met with President Kufuor of Ghana and they held a joint press conference. They about talked about, among other things, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Ghana has received a compact from MCA to build roads and improve infrastructure. MCA compacts go to well-governed countries, countries who fight corruption and invest in health and education for their citizens.

Then it was on to a lunch with Peace Corps workers in Ghana. Ghana was the first country in the world to welcome the Peace Corps. The first 52 Peace Corps workers arrived here on August 30, 1961. Since that time, more than 3,700 volunteers have served in this country (including two of my good friends Monica and Alex Smith - who met when they both served as Peace Corps workers in Ghana and the Cote d’Ivoire and later married. Monica was a water and sanitation specialist and Alex educated people about HIV/AIDS).

The Ghanians have a special bond with Americans who serve in the Peace Corps and gave them a big welcome at lunch. The lunch guests, including President Bush and Bob Geldof, heard harrowing tales of Peace Corps life in rural Africa, including one woman who was bitten by a cobra and then discovered that the local clinics had run out of both poison anecdote and pain medication! (Don’t worry - she survived and told her tale to the President in person today.)

After lunch was my personal favorite part of the day: a tee ball game! We watched some Ghanian youngsters play ball - the Little Dragons vs. the Little Saints. I;m not sure my travelling companion, Sir Bob Geldof, understood the intracacies of the game, having grown up in Ireland, deprived of the World Series…but we all enjoyed it, nonetheless.

We also (more…)

Michael Gerson on the MCA

As President Bush visits Africa this week, much attention will focus on the fight against HIV/AIDS, and rightly so. More than 1.4 million men, women and children now receive anti-retroviral drugs because of the generosity of the American people. The President’s AIDS initiative has been a soaring success - a case study in the power of American compassion to save lives.  
 
But while the fight against HIV/AIDS deserves this attention, there is other good news on the African continent that goes beyond the progress made against this terrible epidemic.
 
On his visit to Tanzania, President Bush signed the largest agreement ever - $700 million - as part of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Like the President’s AIDS initiative, the MCA is a bold, innovative venture of American leadership.
 
The MCA has fundamentally changed the way the United States delivers financial support. The account gives African leaders and governments incentives and practical help to fight corruption, free their economies from repressive and unfair policies and increase investment in education and health. Countries that take these courageous steps are awarded a MCA compact. To date, more than two-thirds of the MCA’s $5.5 billion is being invested in African countries that are enacting broad-based, fundamental reforms. Other African nations, which naturally want their own financial support, are getting the message and starting down the difficult but crucial road toward government transparency and accountability.
 
More than simply sending dollars, the MCA lays the groundwork for sustainable growth in Africa - the type of growth that can raise millions above extreme poverty. Economic development, in the long run, results from trade and foreign investment. The most effective kind of aid helps build the infrastructure, human capital and legal structures that encourage trade and invite investment – roads, health care, education and strengthening the rule of law.
 
Today, the MCA has been such a success in Africa that there are many more countries competing for its funds than there are funds available. Congress should fully fund this vital program. And I hope ONE Members, and all voters who care about seeing the African people succeed, will push their leaders to invest in the promise of the African people by investing in the MCA.
 
-Michael Gerson

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2/19/08 UPDATE: This was cross posted onto Townhall today.