Food Aid

Bridging the ‘Food Gap’ in Ethiopia

Sep 2nd, 2011 12:59 PM UTC
By Nora Coghlan

Nefisa used to struggle to feed her family in July and August, two of the driest months in the highlands of Ethiopia’s Oramia region. They were usually able to borrow from neighbours, but Nefisa says her five children were often sick. Their farmland dry, she and her husband would travel from town to town looking for day labour.

July and August are still difficult for Nefisa and her family, but thanks to Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (known as the PSNP) they have now have a reliable supply of food during the months that used to be known as the “food gap.” Ethiopia launched the PSNP in 2005 to help “chronically food insecure” people build resilience to the country’s recurring drought. Each month for six months, families like Nefisa’s now receive either food transfers (15kg of wheat per person) or cash. This extra support means that those families don’t have to sell assets like livestock to make it through the dry months.

Ethiopia’s PSNP is now sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest safety net program, covering roughly ten percent of the country’s population (nearly 7.5 million people). In a year like this one, when the Horn of Africa’s worst drought in 60 years has left 12.4 million people in need emergency food relief, the impact of this program is huge.

The food provided through the safety net isn’t a handout. In exchange for their monthly transfers, Nefisa and her husband work on community projects that range from school and hospital maintenance to building irrigation systems. The benefits of these projects extend beyond safety net participants to reach entire communities. For example, terracing in the highest areas of Nefisa’s village has protected local farms against flooding and soil degradation, enabling some farmers to triple their incomes through increased production.

Higher incomes mean that families can now save and plan for the future. Nefisa is a committee member on her Savings and Internal Lending Community (SILC). The SILC’s 20 members (all of whom are women) have increased their weekly contributions from 2 to 5 Ethiopian birr. Collectively, they’ve saved 3,000 Ethiopian birr over the past year (roughly $176), money that can be lent to members to start small businesses or pay for education or health care.

Although the PSNP helps Nefisa “bridge the gap” during her family’s hardest months, she doesn’t have access to the capital and training she’ll need to graduate from the safety net. These are issues that the government and its partners are now tackling through programs like PSNPlus and PSNP Grad. Though challenges lie ahead, one thing is certain: alongside the tales of suffering and hardship coming out of the Horn right now, Nefisa’s story – one of remarkable resilience thanks to innovation and investment – deserves to be making headlines too.

Do we have another global food crisis on our hands?

Sep 13th, 2010 10:46 PM UTC
By Emily Alpert

Headlines have reported the food crisis in Niger as a “silent crisis” and a “double disaster,” where roughly 8 million people and 1 million undernourished children have been hit by devastating drought and flood in the course of less than a year.

Rising costs of bread in Mozambique last week spurred riots on the streets of Maputo, causing seven deaths. Massive floods in Pakistan affected 2.5 million people, says the BBC, leaving thousands food-insecure and homeless.

Russia has experienced severe droughts and has banned all exports of wheat, barley, maize and flour through the end of 2011. Global wheat prices have been on the rise since late June, notwithstanding that prices are much higher than historical averages, and over the long-term, predicted to keep going up.

According to the FAO food price index — at a score of 176 — wheat prices have reached their highest since September 2008. Does this raise cause for concern? It should.

According to Reuters, global leaders are called upon to heed this “wake up call.” Olivier de Shutter, the U.N. special rapporteur, says that “donors are not living up to their commitments” when it comes to a person’s right to food. In fact, the 2008 global food crisis is what promoted the G8 and others to reinvigorate investments in agricultural development.

We are now two years out from the height of the crisis and it’s not evident that a whole lot has been accomplished. Sure, there have been strong milestones, such as the U.S. Feed the Future Initiative and the creation of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, but what has been delivered so far? And better yet, has it been enough? Will it be enough?

The G8 Muskoka Accountability Report –- released by the G8 at the most recent summit in Muskoka Canada in June 2010 –- reveals that as of April 2010, L’Aquila Initiative donors have disbursed $6.5 billion and remain committed to disburse the full amount of the commitments by 2012.

Who has actually disbursed these funds and for what purposes remain a mystery. Even though the full $22 billion was not explicitly linked to the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halve hunger and poverty by 2015, it certainly will not be enough to reach MDG1. And the global response looks unlikely to prevent another major global food crisis without a better plan and more resources.

Without more attention to sustainable and effective investments in agricultural development, the smallholder and women farmers — which the G8 and other donors promised to target their funds to — will be no more affluent to afford higher food costs, no more resilient to the deteriorating effects of food that stays out of reach and no more capable to take advantage of market opportunities.

Worse yet, the donor community is largely ignoring a massive and recurring food crisis in the Sahel. Arguably if it’s recurring, we can be smart enough to recognize the underlying causes and start to correct course. “Securing the Gains”, a new Oxfam report shows the damage that drought, flooding and climate
change continually cause across the Sahel region. It calls on donors to “learn from their mistakes” and “provide greater financial and technical support to strengthen existing government agricultural policies and contingency plans” to begin building resilience to weather and economic shocks.

This seems like a sensible alternative to responding to the same humanitarian emergencies time and time again, especially when the emergencies go underfunded. Currently, the World Food Programme is experiencing a funding shortage of $80 million, limiting its food distribution to just 40 percent to those in need.

Surely as a global community we can do better. By investing in agricultural development, with a particular focus on women and smallholders, we can prevent another food crisis and should be at the top of global leaders’ priorities at the upcoming MDG summit in New York next week. If we can’t manage to meet MDG 1, how ever will we accomplish the other seven?

Reactions in the News to the World Food Summit

Nov 20th, 2009 9:51 AM UTC
By Pooja Gupta

As you know, the FAO World Food Summit took place this week in Rome. Check out the articles below to see a variety of reactions to the Summit:

World leaders’ low turnout hits UN food summit (Reuters Africa)
The absence of world leaders at this week’s World Food Summit presented a challenge from the start. The Summit’s final declaration did not result in additional financial commitments; some have attributed this lack of progress to the lackluster attendance by heads of state. Less than a third of the 192 heads of states and governments invited by the FAO attended the Summit. Many sent their agriculture ministers instead.

What is the point of the world food summit on food security? (The Guardian Blog)
Despite criticism that the World Food Summit did not result in substantial increases in aid for agriculture, the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Kanayo Nwanze, expressed that the point of the Summit was not to gather pledges, but to encourage the leaders of developing countries to commit themselves to making agriculture and food security top priorities.

Food security – collective race against crises (This Day; allAfrica.com)
At the three-day summit in Rome, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declared that food and nutritional security are the foundations for a healthy life for all people. He called for immediate action against food insecurity and hunger and laid out a comprehensive list of measures to combat food insecurity, which, he said, will be exacerbated by population growth and climate change.

Declaring a vision for world hunger (Oxfam International Blog)
Yesterday, the summit released a declaration outlining its vision on international food security and how it can be achieved. The declaration focuses on the poorest farmers but critics are saying that it does not go far enough to address issues affecting food security, including the global economic crisis and the onset of climate change.

World Food Summit Opens

Nov 17th, 2009 10:39 AM UTC
By Beth Adler

Yesterday marked the opening of the World Food Summit on Global Food Security which is being held in Rome through Wednesday. The meeting, which brings together officials from the UN food security-related institutions (like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] and the World Food Program [WFP]) and an estimated 60 heads of state, is designed to garner political will to address global food insecurity. The UN FAO has asked those in attendance at the Summit to commit $44 billion per year in official development assistance (ODA) for agricultural development, and to adopt 2025 as a deadline for eradicating global hunger.

Over 1 billion people worldwide suffer from food insecurity, and the challenge ahead will only be exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and rural-urban migration. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon cautioned today that food security cannot be tackled without addressing climate change. “Food security and climate change are deeply interconnected,” he said. “Today’s event is critical, so is Copenhagen.” The FAO predicts that we will need to grow 70 percent more food by 2050. At the same time, however, farmers, particularly in places like Africa where crops are rain-fed and rainfall is becoming increasingly erratic, could see drastic declines in harvests.

In the lead-up to the Summit last week there were concerns about attendance and outcomes. News reports indicated that the Summit might not set measurable targets for addressing food insecurity, and a draft communiqué released last week by the FAO contained promising language, but also lacked specific and measurable goals. Thus far at the Summit leaders have only reaffirmed the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015; it seems unlikely that the UN’s more ambitious targets will be ratified.

Ethiopia: 25 years on

Oct 23rd, 2009 11:02 AM UTC
By Helen Palmer

It’s now 25 years since the world learned of the famine in Ethiopia that was to leave a million people dead and millions more destitute.

In October 1984, the BBC reports of Michael Buerk and Mohamed Amin brought images of biblical suffering into living rooms across the world.

A massive international response was launched. ONE advisor Bob Geldof formed the group ‘Band Aid’ whose single topped the charts from its release in November 1984, and was followed by the ‘Live Aid’ concerts in July 1985. Together these efforts raised £150 million for emergency relief.

The famine touched a generation and laid the ground for the future anti poverty campaigns in the UK and beyond.

A quarter of a century on, hunger is still stalking the Horn of Africa. More than six million people are now in urgent need of food aid in Ethiopia; 23 million in the region as a whole.

And yet, the crisis is nowhere near the scale of 1984-85. Much has changed for the better in Ethiopia, although new threats – especially the effects of climate change – threaten to derail this progress.

In coming weeks ONE will be looking at the causes of enduring hunger in the Horn of Africa, but also the progress that has taken place and potential solutions for the future.

Read our Questions and Answers to find out more.

ONE Partners Propose Strategy to End Global Hunger

Feb 27th, 2009 1:35 PM UTC
By Beth Adler

On Tuesday, a broad-based coalition that includes several of ONE’s partners launched A Roadmap to End Global Hunger – a comprehensive strategy for addressing global hunger through short, medium, and long-term initiatives and reaching the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving hunger by 2015. Representatives Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) joined the co-sponsoring NGOs* at Tuesday’s release on Capitol Hill, and new bipartisan legislation that incorporates the key points of the Roadmap to End Global Hunger is expected to be introduced in the coming weeks.

The Roadmap pitches several strategies for addressing the dire situation of global hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 963 million people are hungry around the world, the majority of whom live in developing countries. As the document notes, despite previous U.S. commitments to end global hunger, the number of hungry people continues to rise as global hunger is exacerbated by continued higher than average food prices and the global economic downturn. The Roadmap calls for a total of approximately $50 billion in U.S. funding for agriculture and food security initiatives over five years.

The document details the need for a faster, more efficient response to food emergencies and emphasizes the importance of flexibility in the provision of emergency food assistance, including options for buying food locally and regionally, and implementing voucher programs where food is available but families are too poor to afford it. The plan calls for donated food aid, like bags of rice or maize, as well as cash assistance that can provide timely and appropriate emergency assistance. The plan also calls for additional funding for safety-net programs – like cash-for-work and school feeding programs – to prevent the most vulnerable populations from descending further into hunger. It also stresses the importance of establishing and expanding early childhood nutrition programs.

In order to promote the development of the agricultural sector in the developing world and break the cycle of hunger and poverty, the Roadmap suggests a more than quadruple investment in market-based agriculture and market development. The suggested $1.38 billion over five years would be aimed at initiatives supporting low-income, smallholder farmers – particularly women. Considering that agriculture employs nearly two-thirds of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa, programs that assist farmers in producing more goods, and helping farmers access markets in which to sell these goods, could have a wide-spread, positive impact on household income and food security.

The Roadmap calls for the (more…)