Worthington Weighs in on Rome Summit

InterAction President and CEO Sam Worthington wrote this post from the first day of the FAO emergency summit in Rome on the food crisis.

The concern is the current global food crisis, affecting millions of people in both developed and developing countries all over the world. The scene is the FAO Food Security Summit in Rome.

After more than fifteen speeches on the food crisis by various heads of state, the themes begin to blur. Some talk about the need for a new North-South partnership based on solidarity between the world’s rich and poor. The idea that poor African countries, rich in water and arable land, would unite with rich dry countries in a partnership to address this food price crisis is interesting. If it had been proposed by a Gulf state, rather than the President of Benin, maybe it would become something more than another paper speech sitting outside the plenary room.

Some speeches were sadly very disconnected from reality. To hear President Mugabe talk about how his policies have contributed to food security reflected a significant cognitive disconnect. Western NGOs, he said, are causing all the political discontent in Zimbabwe.

Overall the speeches were quite good and reflected the world’s widespread recognition of the urgency of the food crisis and the timeliness of the high-level conference. They acknowledged that limited progress has been made since the 1996 World Food Summit, and that the world can’t continue business as usual. There is widespread recognition that issues with food distribution, price, access, and production could slow or even reverse our progress towards achieving the first Millennium Development Goal.

Behind all the words, there is a sense of overall commitment to address this crisis and to doing it in a way that is sustainable. Unfortunately, such a solution still eludes us. The fall of the government in Haiti, caused by food riots, left a void that concerns many conference attendees.

-Sam Worthington

Sam Worthington is the President and CEO of InterAction, the largest coalition of U.S.-based international NGOs focused on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. More information about InterAction’’s response to the food crisis is available at: http://interaction.org/foodcrisis

Jubilee USA Launches Petition for Haiti

The global food crisis has Haiti in its grip.

The lack of affordable food has caused riots and political turmoil. While some Haitians are reportedly eating dirt to quell their hunger, their government is forced to pay almost $1 million each week in debt service to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, both wealthy banks that were supposedly established to fight poverty.

The finance ministers of the G8 countries — the world’s richest nations — meet on June 13 and 14 in Japan to discuss the food crisis. By cancelling debts they could help alleviate the suffering of Haiti and other affected countries.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. will be attending the G8 meeting. Please sign Jubilee USA’s petition to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. to urge him to support accelerated debt cancellation for Haiti and in the meantime an immediate moratorium on the country’s debt service payments at this meeting. Jubilee USA will deliver this petition before he leaves on Wednesday, June 11.

-Monet Cooper, Jubilee USA

Oxfam Releases a Food Crisis Plan

This week, while world leaders continue their emergency summit in Rome to discuss the staggering increase of food prices around the globe, Oxfam International released a plan for short and long-term responses to the crisis.

You can download their report, titled, “The Time is Now: how world leaders should respond to the food price crisis,” from their website today.

A quick outline of the brief:

1) From food prices to food crisis
2) Provide immediate aid to prevent hunger and malnutrition
3) Support agriculture
4) Stop adding fuel to the fire by pushing biofuels
5) Help poor countries get a fair deal from trade
6) Get behind a ‘new deal’ for global food and agriculture policy
7) Conclusion: the time is now.

Again, all compliments of Oxfam’s great team, but I wanted to pass it along. The food crisis is going to be around for a while and there’s a lot of good information in this report.

-Virginia Simmons

Food summit: what’s the story?

A post by Alex Evans, cross-posted from his blog Global Dashboard.

One of the catches with this week’s UN food summit is that it’s not immediately clear just what deal the various heads of state and ministers assembled here are supposed to cut - and that leaves the (hundreds of) journalists here looking for story angles. Look at some of the main issues at play in the food prices issue and you start to see their problem:

Humanitarian relief. The World Food Programme’s urgent appeal for $755m needed to keep feeding the 73 million people dependent on it for help has been making headlines all spring - but now the funding gap has been plugged, thanks to a half a billion dollar donation from Saudi Arabia.

(Incidentally, it’s a mystery on a par with the Marie Celeste as to why WFP didn’t wait until the summit to announce the cash. Here in Rome, it would have been the story from the summit. As it was, the news - announced late on a Friday afternoon - sank with hardly a trace. One leading food journalist I spoke to this morning said he didn’t get the press release until two days later. You couldn’t make it up…)

Trade. Numerous policymakers have pointed to the long term importance of trade reform, and pushing ahead with the Doha Development Round. But as far as this summit is concerned, that’s off the agenda, since the Doha Round has its own, separate, negotiations.

Changing diet patterns. The growth of a global middle class eating a grain-intensive western diet is the single biggest driver of rising prices, and as I noted in another post earlier today, it raises the awesomely complex and politically difficult question of fair shares. But there’s no chance of any substantive discussion of that here this week.

Investing in agricultural supply. Everyone agrees that a ‘new green revolution’, or whatever you want to call it, will be essential given that demand is set to rise 50% by 2030. But while the UN’s High Level Task Force sets out a strong analysis in its newly published paper on elements of a comprehensive strategy, it’s hard to see what actual deal this week’s summit could cut in this area. Admittedly, several countries are likely to announce major new funding commitments while they’re here. But the amounts will have to be very big to become the story of the week.

So what does that leave? If I worked for the UN Secretary-General, I’d be putting all of my effort into persuading one or two of the really big producers who’ve imposed export restrictions on crops - like India, Russia, Kazakhstan or Argentina - to announce an easing of those restrictions. That would mark an important step forward, and represent a triumph for the UN and its Secretary-General.

But without that, it looks like the story of the week is likely to be about biofuels - where it’s hard to see any great strides towards consensus being made here in Rome. On the contrary, with the US and Brazil defending biofuels to the hilt even as others (including FAO head Jacques Diouf) fire broadsides off against feeding crops to cars, the risk is of a damaging spat. That will make for a lively story, if it becomes the angle that journalists here go for - but could also lead to all sides entrenching their positions, which would be a Bad Thing.

-Alex Evans

West Africa: stuck in a food / fuel pincer movement

A post by Alex Evans, cross-posted from his blog Global Dashboard.

I had a long chat with Pascal Fletcher at Reuters on Friday while he was writing this article on the effect of price rises for food and fuel in west Africa, where he’s based. He clearly knows the region back to front, and as his piece makes clear, the outlook isn’t good:

Africa’s cocoa makes the world’s chocolate, its fish, fruit and vegetables reach tables around the globe and its oil powers vehicles and factories from China to the United States. Yet far from benefiting from soaring commodity prices, African states are being squeezed as hard as any by the costs of fuel and food imports. Their desperate moves to cushion the impact for potentially restive populations threaten to wreck already stretched budgets, slashing receipts and swelling state spending.

As far as I can tell from the rough tally I’ve been keeping over the last few months, west Africa’s been one of the regions hardest hit by civil unrest related to food and fuel inflation, and Pascal’s article seems to confirm this. As a result, many governments have been under pressure to subsidise prices for both. Problem is, that doesn’t do their exchequers any good at all - quite apart from the inflationary impact of such measures.

The unplanned contingency measures, on top of global food and oil prices far above what most imagined a year ago, are wreaking havoc with governments’ finances. “This trend is throwing the budget out of gear,” Ghana’s President John Kufuor lamented last month when he unveiled a package of actions to mitigate the price rises…

As I argue in Pascal’s piece, the expense of subsiding goods across the whole economy, coupled with the inflationary impact, are two of the reasons for the current enthusiasm for social protection systems - be they food aid, vouchers or straightforward cash transfers - that are targeted at the poorest people. Expect to hear a lot about such ’social protection systems’ at this week’s UN food summit.

But there’s a catch, too: in many places, the infrastructure for administering these systems just isn’t in place. Helping countries to get it set up has to be a top priority for donors - starting right now.

-Alex Evans

Preview: Next Week’s Rome Food Summit

A post by Alex Evans, cross-posted from his blog Global Dashboard.
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Next week, the UN is holding a major summit on food security in Rome - I’ll be there throughout (and blogging regularly on what goes on). Ahead of the kick-off, I’ve updated the Global Dashboard page on where to get briefed on food prices, and put out a scene-setter press release through Chatham House that sets out a few thoughts on what the summit needs to achieve.

This week’s already seen a couple of new items on food prices that are worth a look, starting with a new annual FAO / OECD outlook report - which this year looks all the way out to 2017. It finds that although prices will come down in the short term (which you already knew, since you read it here on Global Dashboard on March 18th), nominal prices over the medium term will remain “substantially above” levels over the last ten years. In other words, it’s not just a blip.

Also worth a look is World Bank President Bob Zoellick’s ten point plan for food prices, published in the FT this morning. His article confirms that he’s well ahead of the curve on understanding the need for an integrated approach to scarcity issues:he says collective action is needed on “the interconnected challenges of energy, food and water [which will be] drivers of the world economy and security”. (I’ll be publishing a paper on how the multilateral system needs to be reformed to cope better with scarcity issues just before the G8 in early July.)

What will actually happen at the summit is currently anyone’s guess. It’s fair to say that FAO haven’t been very proactive in briefing the media on likely outcomes or what they’re hoping for, which puts them in the rather hazardous position of allowing high expectations to emerge without really managing them. Another risk is that a major spat over biofuels could erupt: Ahmadinejad and Chavez will both be at the food summit, and would like nothing better to embarrass the US over its support for ethanol - and while US subsidies for corn-based ethanol are certainly problematic, it’s hard to see these particular interlocutors opening up much political space on Capitol Hill as legislators contemplate the Farm Bill.

But on the upside, great progress has been made on financing the immediate humanitarian needs (after Saudi Arabia stunned everyone by coming up with half a billion dollars last week - a coup for WFP head Josette Sheeran and for UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Sir John Holmes, who’s invested much time encouraging Gulf countries to contribute). This, together with the prospect of some short term relief on prices, gives policymakers a chance to look ahead towards the longer term challenges as well as short term crisis management.

It’s also hard to remember a time when the UN system and the international financial institutions have worked together as closely or as effectively as they seem to have been doing on the UN’s food task force - a great story, given how fragmented the international system usually is, but one that’s gone largely unreported. Even so, the real work in pulling together the longer term agenda is still in front of us…

-Alex Evans

World Bank Offers 1.2 Billion in Food Aid

The World Bank will offer $1.2 Billion UDS in food aid, setting aside grants for the countries most at risk.

From BBC News.

“It is crucial that we focus on specific action,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick.

“These initiatives will help address the immediate danger of hunger and malnutrition for the two billion people struggling to survive in the face of rising food prices.”>

Countries will be able to access money to provide food for schools and other core services as well as to buy essential items such as seeds and fertilizer.

UPDATE: See the WorldBank’s press release here.

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

Beating the Hunger Crisis

You signed ONE’s petition to President Bush about the global hunger crisis—137,000 of you did, in fact. Our nation’s leaders are hearing our voices. But this crisis is still in the news. People are still going hungry.

You can keep the pressure on by taking another next step.

Join ONE partner Bread for the World’s emergency online campaign, Recipe for Hope. For six weeks, from Mother’s Day through Father’s Day, you’ll receive an email with an Ingredient for Despair—more information on the causes of this crisis—and an Ingredient for Hope—specific actions you can take to help end it. Bread will tell you something you can do and something you can say to our nation’s leaders. Then we’re all doing our part to help hungry people around the world at this perilous time.

Go to www.bread.org/recipeforhope to sign up.

One step leads to another, then leads to another. It’s the only way we keep moving forward.

-Kimberly Burge, Bread for the World

Notable Food-Aid Debate Shift

Last week, we reported on the continuing calls to alter food aid policy so that 1/4 of the food could be purchased local to its distribution location (rather than shipping it all from the U.S.) Today, Reuters reports on a tide-changing shift toward that change.

Some excerpts:

President George W. Bush, taking a harder line in recent weeks, appears closer to victory in persuading Congress to accept a proposal to use some U.S. food-aid funds to buy crops overseas in the end game of a long-delayed agriculture law.

Giving poor countries the authority to buy food aid locally “seems like it’s becoming a requirement to get this farm bill passed,” said Rebecca Bratter, who follows trade at U.S. Wheat Associates, an industry group….

Although no final decisions have been made, according to one congressional aide, lawmakers are more likely than ever to set aside sharp agribusiness opposition and vote to allow up to a quarter of the largest food-aid program, run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, to buy crops overseas.

-Virginia Simmons