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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC1188-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO NATURAL DISASTERS
Tuesday 11 July 2006 MR J J GRAISSE Evidence heard in Public Questions 236 - 274
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 11 July 2006 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Barrett John Battle Richard Burden Mr Jeremy Hunt Ann McKechin Joan Ruddock Mr Marsha Singh ________________
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Jean-Jacques Graisse, Senior Deputy Executive Director and Director of Operations, World Food Programme (WFP), gave evidence. Q236 Chairman: Good morning, Mr Graisse. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to our inquiry into the humanitarian response to natural disasters. You will be aware of what we are looking into and know that we have taken evidence on a variety of different issues. Incidentally, in our travels we have had discussions with the World Food Programme in Malawi and to some extent in Pakistan, for example. One of the matters of concern to us is the consequence of disasters in relation to development. They can knock development programmes off course. The World Food Programme is in the public mind and is associated mostly with responding to crises and disasters, but it has a broader range of responsibilities, including development activities. Can you give us an idea of how these balance out? If one takes the four categories - emergency operations, protracted relief and recovery, special operations and development activities - how is the budget split between them? In the thinking of WFP, how does development activity feature when probably a lot of the time it is driven by either slow or fast-emerging crises? Mr Graisse: Thank you very much. I am glad to be here a second time. I was with the Committee in November 2004 when we were talking about Darfur. Thank you for remembering that the WFP is also a development agency. Many of the members of the high-level panel on UN reform no longer know that, as we recently experienced when we discussed the future of WFP on the panel's visit to Rome. Equally, some of the members who produced papers on WFP ignored that because they defined it as being an emergency and life-saving organisation, as opposed to FAO[1] or IFAD[2]. For instance, in Rome they were looking at the three organisations. I am happy that your Committee still knows that we started as a development organisation in 1963. Many people believe that it was started essentially because there was surplus food available in some countries of the north that needed to be disposed of and the WFP provided a wonderful opportunity. Unfortunately, since then we have been living with the bad image of a surplus food agency that basically does development which could be done so much better with cash. This is unfortunately a debate with which we live. We continually have to try to make the case for what we do in development as opposed to what we do in saving lives, which nobody questions. The development programme which represented 90 % of our resources 15 years ago today represents about $250 million a year, or less than 10 % of our resources. In 2005 our resources were about $2.8 billion, out of which $250 million was devoted to development activities. About 40 % goes to emergency operations and 40% to protracted relief and recovery operations. Finally, less than 10 % goes on special operations. In a word, special operations are essentially those which give WFP the logistics capacity to move food faster and cheaper. That was the original concept of special operations. Therefore, one would repair roads, bridges and so forth to enable food to be moved at a lower cost. Emergency operations - the term speaks for itself - are fairly large ones and they are approved by the executive director of the World Food Programme and Director-General of FAO when a sudden emergency requires immediate action. In theory, they are not supposed to last more than two years. After a maximum of two years emergency operations must be transformed into protracted relief and recovery operations. In part the reason for that is to do with governance. Since the emergency operations are approved by the executive director of the WFP and the Director-General of FAO, the executive board of WFP in a sense would have no control over a large amount of funds being disbursed through the WFP, so after two years we have to go to the executive board for approval of Protracted Relief and Recovery Operations. Among the PRROs one has the classic assistance to refugees. As you know, as per our agreement with the High Commissioner for Refugees we feed all refugee populations above 5,000. We come in automatically and feed the refugees who are under the care of HCR. But protracted relief operations also enable us to get out of a crisis. Take the Pakistan earthquake. We approved an emergency operation in October 2005. As of April 2006 we had already moved into the Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation after the PRRO, as we call it, had been approved by our executive board in February. We do not necessarily wait for two years; we can move on to the protracted relief and recovery phase much faster when conditions permit. In other places where political instability or civil war continues we tend to remain in the emergency mode much longer. Q237 Chairman: If your development activities are less than 10 %, say $250 million, on what are they focused? Are they focused with a view to reducing the likelihood of your having to spend money on other areas? If you spend more could you finish up having to spend less on emergencies, for example because you can anticipate famine? Is that the focus, and do you believe that you are spending enough in that area? Mr Graisse: We are definitely not spending enough on our development programme. We are begging the donors to continue funding our development allocations. A number of governments no longer do so, including the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Sweden and others. They have discontinued all development assistance through WFP for quite a long while. What we focus on essentially today is more humanitarian than developmental aid. These are our school-feeding programmes, our nutrition programmes for pregnant and lactating mothers and children in nutritional centres, and assistance to HIV/AIDS patients or their orphans who are in need of nutritional support. This is basically how we spend the development resources nowadays. Unfortunately, we no longer have the necessary resources to carry out food-for-work programmes which we did for many years. They have achieved a lot in terms of creating circumstances that permit communities to resist the next drought. The best examples I can give are the large-scale operations that we have carried out in Ethiopia for a long time. Through food-for-work programmes we have managed in certain communities to improve irrigation and control water flow. They have enabled those communities to do without food assistance even in times of drought, because basically they have been rehabilitated to an extent that they can manage. I believe that that is exactly what you are getting at. If we can do more of that we would be able to spend less on emergencies. Q238 Chairman: Can I turn that on its head and ask whether there is an argument for saying that what the WFP does best is emergency food relief and other agencies do development best? I can understand that you started that way and you want to limit it. I do not suppose that institutionally it is a natural thing to want to accept, but DFID has suggested that maybe you should concentrate on emergency food relief and the associated things and let other agencies do the development. Mr Graisse: That is correct. However, the day that the WFP handles emergencies only the one job that I would not want to have in the World Food Programme is that of director of human resources. It is already extremely difficult nowadays when most of our staff are involved in one massive emergency after another and no longer have time not to rest but to work in a normal environment; that is, to do development work and be available when an emergency strikes. If we did not have a small development programme ongoing in Pakistan when the earthquake struck we would not have had an office or a bank account or the capacity immediately to hire locally a large number of people; and we would not have been able to begin distributing food within 24 hours and manage contracts for helicopters. We already had a presence in Pakistan in the form of development work, mostly school-feeding programmes for girls. That meant we already had food in the country which could be immediately utilised. If we were literally jumping from the tsunami to Darfur, from Darfur to North Korea and from North Korea to the Democratic Republic of Congo there would be a moment when our staff would become entirely and continuously involved in serious emergencies. More than half our people no longer live in family duty stations, and more than half the people with dependants no longer live in family duty stations. There is a limit to how long one can carry this on. In that respect there is perhaps only one organisation which has a similar situation: the International Committee of the Red Cross. Other humanitarian organisations like UNICEF or even HCR have plenty of officers in countries which are not in crisis. One has a number of UNHCR people in London looking after refugees in the United Kingdom. UNICEF still has 130 offices worldwide. Basically, we have closed down about 30 offices, most of them family duty stations, in the past 10 years because we have graduated quite a number of countries from food aid in the past 15 years. Q239 Ann McKechin: We are aware that there has been a growing controversy about tied food aid. A provisional agreement was reached at the WTO talks in Hong Kong in December of last year about eliminating most of that by 2013. To what extent has your organisation assessed the implications of food aid for WFP on the basis of that provisional agreement? What if anything will change in relation to food aid in future? Mr Graisse: It depends entirely, I assume, on the definition that the agreement reaches on what would be all right for food aid in kind to be provided, for example if it was for life-saving activities in big emergencies and food aid in kind was still accepted under those conditions. Nowadays, our largest food aid in kind donor, the United States, basically no longer finances development. Essentially, it finances our large-scale operations such as Darfur, Sudan and so on. In that respect the contributions of the United States in kind could continue even in the context of the Doha agreement, if the negotiations finally go in that direction. In short, the answer is that we do not know yet but we do not believe there will be a major change for us, particularly because nowadays the majority of our contributions are in cash. The remaining large-scale food donor is the United States. Canada is no longer present with its 50-50 split with cash or food. Incidentally, when I say "food", in relation to the United States the cash element of its contribution is still larger than its food cost contribution because of ocean and land transport, handling, storage facilities and so on. Q240 Ann McKechin: Is that the cost to transport it from the US to wherever it is needed? Mr Graisse: That is correct. Most of our contributions today are in cash, except for the United States. Canada has changed in the past year or two. Our new donors tend to give us food. When I say "new donors" I refer to India, for example. We hope to get contributions from countries like Malaysia. It would not be surprising if Malaysia decided to give us vegetable oil, for instance, while India basically provides us with wheat for high-energy biscuits which are prepared in that country. The new donors, not the traditional ones, very often are countries with large food resources that they make available to the World Food Programme. Q241 Mr Hunt: When the Committee visited northern Uganda it met a very impressive World Food Programme officer called Pedro Amalat who was working in Gulu. We saw first hand the incredibly valuable work that you are doing there at the IDP[3] camps. If you are making emergency food provision, often with food flown in from the United States for example, how do you make sure that that does not negatively affect the country's long-term capacity to support itself and develop its own food security? Mr Graisse: I should not say it, but you have given me a wonderful opportunity. Uganda is one of those countries where basically we procure most of our food in that country. We are by far the largest customer of Ugandan farmers. I believe that last year we purchased more than $80 million worth of food in Uganda, mostly for that country but also for the region. That is the place where we procure food for delivery to our programmes both in that country and in the region. Seventy-five per cent of the food that WFP procures with the cash it receives is purchased in developing countries for national or regional consumption. Uganda is an excellent example of a country where we have assisted farmers to get stable prices for their commodities, because we tend to buy at times when prices are firm, not when we can depress the market which is always a danger to be borne in mind when procuring locally. In Uganda we have bought food consistently over years and years. In other countries, for example Ethiopia, there have been years during which we have not imported one grain when the harvest has been good, whereas two years later we may import 200,000 or 300,000 metric tonnes of food depending on availability. The notion that food aid creates dependency and distorts markets is simply a series of myths about food aid which were probably valid for programme food aid of 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Certainly, they are not valid for project food aid where you target food distribution on people who basically do not have the resources to go to the market. If you look at the IDPs in northern Uganda, these are people who are totally destitute. Even if one had effective markets in northern Uganda they would not have the resources to buy the food. We procure food in the fertile parts of Uganda for delivery in the north to people who could not have procured it anyway. We have had a number of evaluations, some carried out by national governments like Denmark, the United States and France. One was carried out by four donors two years ago: Norway, Canada, Holland at the beginning and Germany. That looked at the effectiveness of our development portfolio to see whether there was any truth in the distortion of markets and all these elements. That evaluation arrived systematically at the fact that it had not come across one case where our food aid had distorted markets or changed price structures. I mentioned at the beginning that emergency operations have to be approved jointly by the executive director of WFP and the director-general of FAO. Many people wonder why on earth the latter would have to look at emergency operations of the WFP. The reason is simple: all other operations are reviewed and approved by the executive board. In time of emergency we can approve the emergency operations on our own. Why is the FAO's endorsement necessary? It is for only one reason. The FAO, having looked at our project proposal, determines that there is no risk to farmers or agricultural production or any distortion of markets in the country in which we have the emergency operation. That is the specific reason for the continued endorsement by FAO of our emergency operations. Q242 Mr Hunt: To return to northern Uganda, you talked a lot about the link between emergency food provision and development assistance. In northern Uganda, for example, is there not a risk that the fact you are supporting so well all the IDP camps provides a disincentive for the Government of Uganda to resolve the situation politically? It has 1.7 million people in those camps and to a certain extent it does not have to worry about them. All of the NGOs are coming in, you are helping to provide food and so on. Is there a danger that an emergency can become entrenched rather than properly addressed? Mr Graisse: It is certainly a preoccupation in WFP. In the case of Uganda, if the Government could get rid of the problem it would do so because it is certainly a heavy burden on President Museveni. We have an incredible situation involving the Lord's Resistance Army that nobody seems to be able to handle militarily. The fact that it has been assisted probably by Sudan for a long time can explain part of it, but it is just an incredible and miserable situation. President Museveni himself moved to the north of Uganda for a long time trying to sort it out militarily, but that has not yet been done. I do not believe that food aid enabled the continuation of the crisis. One can look at a number of places where we have had big programmes. Angola is a country to which we provided massive assistance for years. We are now shrinking our assistance to the point where basically we are planning to phase out totally of Angola by the end of 2007. We believe that by then we should totally close down our operations in Angola. People talk about dependency on food aid, but how could we have closed country after country and graduated them from food aid? The last three countries that we closed down in 2004 and 2005 were Morocco where we had programmes to assist basically the education of girls in school, the Dominican Republic where we had basically a school-feeding programme and China which we closed down in December 2005. In Morocco and the Dominican Republic the programmes continue and are being taken care of entirely by the Governments. In China our massive food-for-work programmes which have brought people from destitution to what they call middle-class level are another signal that with food aid one can gradually pull out and eliminate the need for it. We have now demonstrated it in about 30 countries since 1996 when I joined the World Food Programme. There is a long list of countries in Latin America, Asia and even in Africa where basically we have walked away, congratulating governments for having graduated from food aid. Many of them have been very gracious; they have given us wonderful farewell receptions and sent us nice letters to say that they are pleased. One of them was from Vietnam. They said, "We are happy that you can leave us and trust that we will remain very good commercial partners", because we now buy a lot of rice in that country. Q243 Richard Burden: I should like to continue the same line of questioning but specifically about food aid in situations where there is not an emergency. A number of agencies, our own Department for International Development among them, increasingly look at things like safety nets and social protection mechanisms as an alternative to food aid in chronic situations. In DFID's document about working in partnership with WFP[4] it says: "In non-emergency situations food aid should be provided only after careful consideration. It is usually less suitable than other resource transfers." You said that you gave careful consideration to these matters, but do you agree that it is usually less suitable than other resource transfers? Mr Graisse: It depends entirely on the agricultural production in the country itself, the efficiency of the market and the existence or non-existence of a banking system. We make some interesting comparisons in Sri Lanka, Georgia and Malawi. We are now carrying out experiments of cash versus food. In some cases it works. We have tried it also in Ethiopia, and I believe that DFID has also tried it in Zambia and other places. The evidence never points clearly in one direction or the other. It depends totally on the efficiency of the market. In countries like Sri Lanka, which has a good banking system, money is distributed to the beneficiaries in those places where we previously distributed food and if the market functions very well and the harvest has been good it works extremely well. The point is that very rarely does the WFP operate in those types of countries any longer. The countries where we have only development activities per se, with no emergency or any protracted relief, now number about 45 to 50. Those are countries with a GNP of less than $900 where the stunting of children under five is above 25 %. These are fairly extreme cases. In many of those countries food is still the best modality because of the dire situation. But if one talks about middle income countries with well functioning markets unquestionably there is no need to bring your own food. We are trying various things. Immediately after the tsunami in Sri Lanka there was plenty of rice available in the market. We stopped including rice in our food basket and replaced it with cash because people could buy rice locally; we did not have to do it ourselves and distribute it. We are trying experiments of this type whenever we can. The debate is very much alive in WFP and partners like Oxfam, IFPRI and many other organisations with an interest in food aid. Q244 Richard Burden: Referring to your last point, I should like to ask a supplementary question. Clearly, you have a lively debate within WFP about these assessments, but in relation to other partners how does the dialogue take place? Over the past two to three years have there have been many occasions when you have come to different conclusions; and, if so, what are they? Mr Graisse: The example that I have just quoted, Sri Lanka, was the subject of a study carried out with Oxfam which is presently being reviewed by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). That is reviewing the results of the Sri Lanka experience. The question we are considering is: if in certain situations cash, vouchers schemes or whatever are better than the direct distribution of food, should we or someone else do it? Should the WFP be involved at all if there is no food involved? Some people say that the WFP should continue because it has the expertise to determine vulnerability and the habit of working at village and district level. Why would WFP not do it? Others with more traditional views of WFP say that if there is no food involved it should be left to others. The debate is very much alive. What is interesting is that we have not so far had any large-scale demonstration of a very effective cash programme. Most of it has been done on a small scale pilot basis, say 2,000 families here or there. It is not something from which we shy away. As I said, unfortunately the amount of resources devoted to these programmes in a development situation is so limited nowadays that it would not make or break the organisation anyway. We want to have a totally open mind. Q245 Richard Burden: Are there any recent examples of areas where you have come to conclusions radically different from those of other partners? Mr Graisse: I do not believe that other partners will disagree with us when we say that it all depends on the situation in the country in question. What may be true in part of one country may not be true in another. If one has markets that do not function properly, there is high inflation, there is not much of an incentive to travel hundreds of kilometres to try to sell cereals or products like corn soya blend, which traders do not normally sell, and one does not have all the conditions that are required, why would cash work better? Q246 John Barrett: I should like to explore how the WFP may improve the way it actively engages with recipient governments and beneficiaries. The Committee had a very interesting visit to Malawi during which it established that DFID had set up its own programme to supply food at $100 per tonne compared with $240 per tonne which was the rate at which WFP supplied it, saving about $30 million. That allowed the distribution of an extra 70,000 tonnes of food. Clearly, there was a concern there. Although we discussed it with the head of the WFP in country who said that it was not exactly comparing like with like, there appeared to be a huge discrepancy in the cost of delivering aid. That makes one think about the effectiveness of aid and whether the maximum amount is getting through and whether costs are being monitored. There is a range of issues there. One of them is that the WFP had set up a programme which did not really involve the Government of Malawi. It was doing its work and delivering food but at a very expensive rate which resulted in a reduction in the volume of food for the amount of spend. Mr Graisse: Malawi is the one country where that problem has been greatest in the past year. We do not distribute food without involving government. Incidentally, a very large contribution came from the Government of Malawi which in turn was thanks to budget support from the United Kingdom, the EU and so on. But the money was channelled by the Government through WFP, so the Government understood what we were doing and was certainly involved because we were using its own money. There are many ways to distribute food. Some do not necessarily mean that one tries to cover the most difficult places where one needs special trucks to travel much further distances. There is also a benefit from all the work that WFP has done in terms of assessing the ability of people, crops and availability of food in given regions. A lot of the work that we do is done at cost and others benefit from that; in other words, they do not have to do the same thing that we do. In Malawi it was perhaps a little extreme because of the fact that this was a regional operation covering six countries where maybe there were cross-subsidies. It may be that Malawi was paying a lot more in subsidising an operation in remote places in Lesotho or elsewhere. Q247 John Barrett: The World Food Programme did reduce its costs in the end but said that it could not absolutely justify what it was doing and how, so there must have been an acceptance by the WFP that it had not quite got it right? Mr Graisse: We did indeed work hard to get things right there. We also changed regional land transport, storage and handling prices as opposed to national ones in the six areas. Q248 John Barrett: Were lessons learned there that could be applied in other regions? Mr Graisse: Definitely. Q249 John Barrett: If it is not put right there presumably similar problems could arise elsewhere? Mr Graisse: Definitely. Q250 Chairman: As a supplementary, DFID also told us it felt that WFP had not done enough to support capacity building within the Government of Malawi which sadly had a recurrent requirement for food aid, and part of the reason the department set up its own competitive one-off programme - about which it assured us - was because it felt it wanted to help to do that. Do you acknowledge that there is a responsibility on WFP not only to ensure that food gets through but to develop the capacity within the host country at least to participate in that? Mr Graisse: Unquestionably. We had programmes in 75 countries and have closed down nearly 30, presumably because governments have had the capacity to continue on their own programmes that we used to fund. It is interesting to note that the programmes we used to fund did not disappear after we left; they continued. We had a number of reviews 10 years later to see what happened to programmes that we were funding in Brazil until 1996. They are still alive today. Yes, we make efforts to do that when conditions permit. Not all governments unfortunately have the capacity, resources or budgets to allow them to become very effective in that regard. Q251 Mr Singh: Can you tell the Committee a little more about the insurance policy that you have just contracted with AXA? I believe that that is unique. What has made you go down that road? It seems fairly expensive. Is it a price worth paying? Mr Graisse: That is a very good question. It is a pilot programme that we have been authorised to carry out in Ethiopia alone which in a sense makes it a bit unusual because we are insuring one risk. Therefore, the donors that have contributed and paid the premium to AXA realised that these were not normal commercial circumstances in which insurance was undertaken. But it was an attempt to demonstrate that with properly functioning meteorological stations available in the country one could have a mechanism that permitted insurance and payments whenever rainfall did not reach a certain level. Payment by the insurance company would then be automatic and would not have to wait for further assessment of the consequences of drought, the ability of people and so on. All of that has been done in advance. Therefore, the simple fact that rains have failed triggers payments, but that is only in fairly exceptional situations which occur in Ethiopia on average every seven years or so. Q252 Mr Singh: They pay out $7 million. How would that claim be settled? Do you have to make an application on an insurance form? Mr Graisse: Everything has been foreseen with such clarity and precision that the 28 meteorological stations providing daily reports continue to function regularly. Once the drought level has been reached payment is automatic. The process is all foreseen. Will it happen? Will AXA decide not to continue the programme after two years during which it has been a lucky beneficiary? We and the two or three donors who have paid for this still believe that it is something worth researching to see whether that is truly a better way to answer natural disasters than the classical way of waiting for disasters to happen. I do not know whether or not it will be conclusively demonstrated because the executive board is very hesitant about giving us the green light to proceed to other countries which would make the example much more valid. If one was insuring against drought in 10 countries in Africa, it would occur in some and not others and certainly the principle of insurance would be more easily demonstrable, but I believe it is something that is well worth trying. I understand that other attempts are being made in the IFC in Washington in relation to hurricanes in Central America and the Caribbean which may or may not be piloted by that organisation. I believe it is something that needs to be explored among international organisations and we are happy to have been able to do so. Q253 Mr Singh: In terms of risk transfer in relation to food aid, are there any other options available, such as the futures market or insurance through the World Bank? I do not know whether or not that is possible. Are there any avenues that can be or have been explored? Are you looking at them, or have they been rejected? Mr Graisse: We are exploring a number of alternatives, for example hedging. We are now considering a programme in South Africa where we will do hedging on future purchases of commodities; in other words, looking at commercial approaches, we try to bring about a satisfactory solution which decreases the cost of food aid as such. Unfortunately, it is something that governments are hesitant to let us try too much. Not many donors are coming up with the resources that we need to try the experiment. So far it has cost American and Danish taxpayers about $1 million. Q254 Mr Singh: What is DFID's attitude to this approach? Mr Graisse: DFID has not contributed to it. I believe that like other executive board members it is watching the situation. We are to report back to them in November. The executive board had a good but inconclusive discussion last June. It wanted more analysis and proof before it would allow us to embark on an expansion of the pilot project to other countries. Q255 John Battle: I want to ask about UN reform. Proposals have been made to make changes. For example, the UK has led the way in suggesting that, for example, there might be just one expanded Central Emergency Response Fund. I am thinking particularly about greater co‑ordination in emergencies. There is some criticism that the UN's organisations are a bit unwieldy, long established and locked into silos. What would be the view of the World Food Programme on reform? Would it be willing to go as far as seeing the WFP become the logistics arm, for example, of another agency, or is it holding on to its silo? Mr Graisse: I believe that Hilary Benn has been the main actor so far in encouraging reform of the humanitarian sector. The Chancellor is also looking at broader issues of development, humanitarian aid and so on. I believe that the expansion of CERF in New York into a fund which so far has received pledges of $280 million for 2006 is good. It is a system that will permit perhaps sectors other than food aid to benefit from CERF. The reason I say that is that on the whole WFP in the past has been reasonably successful in resourcing its emergencies better than other UN organisations, in part because food is more understood as something that one cannot afford to do without, while sanitation for example is perhaps less understood as an immediate and essential need. Clearly, water is perceived as being in the same category as food. WFP welcomes the expansion of CERF. It has received some $35 million from CERF since the beginning of the year for various operations in Sudan, Chad and a few other places mostly in Africa. We believe, however, that reform which centralises matters much too much is probably not the best answer. The best answer remains to have a number of highly effective organisations that know how to do their job. The more one pays for co‑ordination or the management of central resources the less money one has available to reach the beneficiaries. We have to be careful not to create a bureaucratic monster somewhere that sucks out resources which otherwise would go directly to the beneficiaries. I am sure that Mr Egeland, who I believe has also been a witness before the Committee, is very concerned about it. We have recently discussed with him the possibility of simplifying a lot of the administrative work that is now carried out. Each time a loan is approved there is a long memorandum of understanding. We have suggested that we sign one general memorandum with him so that whenever an emergency strikes there is a much simplified format because all the main elements do not have to be repeated over and over again. We also hope that it does not create an additional burden on reporting. We are concerned by the fact that apart from Hilary Benn and a few other enlightened donors many do not see this as an answer in the long term because they can never associate it directly with a given crisis. I will take the example of your neighbours in Ireland. When a big crisis arose we asked if they could help us. They said, "No. We gave you all the money we had at the beginning of the year for you to handle." But the minister would come and tell us, "I need some visibility here. How do I explain to my taxpayers that they have given you a cheque at the beginning of the year but there is no Irish flag on the bags of food that are sent to this particular crisis?" Many donors are hesitant about contributing to CERF, as we have seen, for the reason, amongst others, that no longer will the US flag or Japanese flag appear on every single bag of wheat because it cannot be associated with a given donor for the particular emergency. It remains to be seen whether or not CERF can develop into the $1 billion fund that Gordon Brown now envisages in UN reform. Personally, I have some doubts about that because the largest contributors, at least to the World Food Programme, the United States, the European Union and Japan, are not at all favourable to the concept of a central funding mechanism. It remains to be seen. But it has certainly considerably helped other sectors which traditionally have not been as well funded as the food aid sector. That is encouraging, because if one has a case of total destitution and the only thing that people receive is food they will by definition sell some of it in order to buy whatever they need, whether it is shoes, drugs or something. Therefore, if they have nothing else but food because other sectors have failed some of it will be sold in order to buy something else. That is not a wise investment in the cost of food. In short, I do not believe that it will help food but I think it will help other sectors which traditionally have done less well in being resourced. Q256 Chairman: The UK is sufficiently enlightened that in Pakistan we saw that it was prepared to see a Norwegian flag on a project which was funded 55 % by DFID. We are certainly not guilty of flagging. Mr Graisse: But many are. Chairman: Thank you very much for coming here and giving us your views. We are seeing Jan Egeland next week when we will be able to explore those points further with him. Mr Graisse: You will have a very upbeat view of CERF. Chairman: We have met him once before.
Witnesses: Dr Camilla Toulmin, Director, and Dr Saleemul Huq, Head, Climate Change Group, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), gave evidence. Q257 Chairman: Thank you both very much for coming and agreeing to give evidence. As you will appreciate, there are a number of aspects of the response to natural disasters and their causes. We are very glad to have your views on a number of points. We will come to climate change in which I know both of you, but particularly Dr Huq, have an interest. But environmental degradation is not caused only by climate change. There is a tendency for that to be so fashionable and many of us think that it is such a serious concern that we forget we are constantly doing things to the environment which have negative consequences. It may be worth starting with the question of the extent to which development players take sufficient account of how to deal with the potential for natural disasters in their development programmes; in other words, to make specific investments in either avoiding them or acknowledging the threat that they pose and building them in. Do you believe that they do so; if so, can you give some examples of where they do the right things, or seriously the wrong things? Dr Toulmin: Let me first introduce Saleemul Huq who runs our climate change group. I am very pleased that he is available to come with me today, because particularly in relation to climate-related matters he is the man to ask. We see the growing importance of climate change as being, if you like, a very useful way to remind people of a whole range of other risks in respect of which many communities in poor countries have been vulnerable for many decades. If you like, climate change gives us the opportunity to flag up the persistence of those risks and their heightened impact with the sorts of changes that are under way at the moment. Our experience is as much of what national governments are doing as with development projects per se; that is to say, a lot of our work involves work with local partners on national policy, legislation and approaches to development. We would probably be at least if not more comfortable talking about that than specific DFID or other donor approaches. Q258 Chairman: I think we are looking for specific examples. It does not matter who did them. Dr Toulmin: I have given to the Committee's staff a copy of a paper on Africa and climate change that we put out last year[5]. That reviews a number of the factors that make good development sense in a variety of different sectors, including the importance of working through and strengthening local institutions as being one of the best means of tackling risks of all sorts, whether it be in relation to flooding, harvest failure or a number of different things. We are trying to tease out what might be some of the generic lessons of addressing climate change for broader good development. Therefore, we are considering the importance of local institutions in seeing how one can work to strengthen them. I believe that on the previous occasion we were here we talked in particular about whether or not the push towards direct budgetary support would weaken in many ways the strengths of the local structures that provide day-to-day contact and means by which many communities meet their needs and address risks of various sorts. Q259 Chairman: Would an example be something like deforestation where in partnership with the host government an organisation would say, "We will give you support to stop the deforestation and do other things as part a development process that prevents further degradation and perhaps even restores some of the watercourses"? Is that the kind of thing that one is talking about and, if so, does it happen? Dr Toulmin: To some extent it does. I suppose we would say that we must look at this from various different standpoints. There might well be good ways in which one can use markets for ecosystem services as a way to try to address questions of deforestation by linking people downstream of a particular forest who suffer from sedimentation and poor water quality with those up at the top of the watershed who are responsible for much of the deforestation but do not as yet have an incentive to change their land use practices. Quite a lot of work in which our group has been involved in a number of countries with DFID support has been to look at whether one can have good arrangements set up between downstream and upstream users precisely to address the problem of externalities associated with a particular form of land use. Perhaps the other really important factor is the clarification and confirmation of rights over land, water and forest resources so that there is a much closer association between rights and responsibilities and people can make long-term decisions about how they will use that land and those forests rather than others coming in, making a quick buck and rapidly retreating, leaving devastation behind them. Q260 Chairman: You talk about the Sahel and the extension of desertification and migration. You have also mentioned wells and various preventative measures to be taken, but the net effect is that it is not cost-free; people have had to migrate. That appears to be a retreat in the face of environmental change - I accept you say that that is not entirely a retreat - as opposed to a concerted effort to deal with it. What if anything can we do to halt this process? Dr Toulmin: The Sahel is a particularly good example, if one is interested in looking at some of the long-term impacts of climate change and how local communities have adapted. What one sees is a whole set of adaptive processes led by people themselves with little or nothing from government, with the focus on improving local management of resources particularly in relation to soil and water conservation, so that whatever rain does fall can be captured and used most effectively. We see a lot of really innovative practices in terms of clever micro-catchment and water management, combined with long-distance migration from much of the Sahel, often by parts of families to wetter areas, in particular to Côte d'Ivoire with many of the attendant difficulties and examples of civil strife that are now apparent. Therefore, there is a process of adaptation which in some sense has been successful, in that people have survived and they are still managing to grow crops in dry areas, but with quite damaging costs in terms of some of the social and political tensions engendered by it. Q261 John Barrett: When looking at the humanitarian response to natural disasters more and more governments, donors and aid agencies are aware, for instance, of the impact of food supply on local markets. One does not want to have heavy trucks going in and destroying the roads. But do you believe that the impact of humanitarian aid on the environment is creeping up the agenda? This is something of which we are aware, but we appear to have greater awareness of the impact on water and sanitation projects, food supplies and local markets. Do you agree that for a variety of reasons the environment does not seem to be creeping up the agenda? Do you believe that the actors or players are now looking at this as part of their strategy, or whatever they are doing in response to natural disasters? Dr Toulmin: I do not believe that we have looked specifically at, say, the hinterland of big settlement camps, but I can well imagine that it must be pretty devastating. That is not something we have looked at in particular. Q262 John Barrett: Certainly, after a major disaster there is a huge impact by the aid community. I just wonder whether that is on the agenda along with all the other things that appear to be fairly detailed and analysed so they do not have an adverse impact. Dr Huq: My impression is that that does not happen very much, particularly the environmental impacts, because much of the emergency humanitarian response perhaps tends to be very short term and, therefore, environmental impacts which might be of a longer-term nature do not get picked up during the course of the evaluation. But to my knowledge it has not been done. I know of one case where we had a large number of refugees coming over from Burma into Bangladesh. There was a major environmental impact in terms of deforestation of the hill tracts in Chittagong in southern Bangladesh where a large number of people settled. Dr Toulmin: In places like northern Uganda where people, sadly, have been in the camps for up to 19 years presumably there are whole areas of land that have not been used at all and will require quite a lot of investment to bring them back into productive farming. Q263 Chairman: To add a footnote, in Malawi where there have been recurrent famines the point was made to us that food aid enabled people to say, "Well, when there is a bad year food aid will come in", and yet we had discussions about the fact that people subsist on maize, which is not an indigenous crop, and do not regard anything else as food. Therefore, mangos rot on the trees and people are malnourished. Cassava is also available but people do not see why they should eat it. One feels that sometimes simply by saying that maize is coming in from, say, the World Food Programme or whatever may perpetuate a problem which at least in part could be solved within country? Dr Toulmin: Indeed. One sees in a lot of countries increasingly the replacement of diverse coarse grains such as sorghum, millet, manioc and others, which are locally much more appropriate in terms of farming conditions, by maize and rice. That is certainly so in the Sahel. That makes the area very much more dependent on outside sources. Q264 Mr Hunt: You referred to climate change as a way to highlight good development practice. I thought that you were talking about a rather stronger relationship between climate change and development. At one time there was perceived to be a conflict between environmental objectives and developmental objectives. Now what most people believe is that if we do not address climate change we will see a massive increase in the number of natural disasters, those with a rapid onset like tsunamis and those with a slow onset like famine in the horn of Africa or the desertification that we have been talking about. Do you believe that the world's failure to make progress towards the Kyoto targets will mean a significant increase in the number of disasters that we are likely to face? Dr Toulmin: We most definitely do. You will have noted that our organisation is the International Institute for Environment and Development. We see development as being increasingly jeopardised by not tackling environmental issues. The issue of climate change is of particular significance because it hits everything, but other environmental issues are obviously of more localised significance. Dr Huq: You will recall that I gave evidence to the Committee a couple of years ago during its hearings into climate change. Subsequently, DFID has funded a research programme on climate change and also other things like the adaptation fund. Perhaps one matter that is relevant here and of which we have not heard enough is mainstreaming the notion of climate change into regular work, not thinking of it as something that needs more research because we know that it will happen in the future but do not need to worry about it immediately. I do not believe that that is the case any more. The evidence emerging from the scientific community increasingly demonstrates that we are already living in a world of climate change and, therefore, the past is no longer a sufficient guide to the future. We will have to incorporate climatic shifts into all the kinds of things we are doing. Humanitarian disasters are a particularly good example of that. They simply cannot afford to ignore climate change any more and must incorporate that in their humanitarian work and response strategies, particularly those that are climate-related disasters. Q265 Mr Hunt: Are you able to quantify this? In terms of mobilising public opinion, it would be very helpful if there was research which said that, whereas 30 years ago we might have expected one tsunami every 200 years, we can now expect one every 50 years, the incidence of famine has increased and so on. Do you have any evidence or research to show the increase in the frequency of natural disasters? Dr Huq: Quite a lot of research is taking place on a variety of fronts with respect to observing climate changes. As you know, the evidence is compiled every few years under the aegis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That panel is currently preparing its fourth assessment report which is due out in April of next year. I am lead author of one of the chapters, but until the report comes out we are not supposed to disclose what it will say. One of the differences that the fourth assessment will identify compared with previous ones is that now it will have quite a lot of observational data, whereas in the past it said that a number of things would happen if we did not do certain things; it was all based on model projections. Now there are observations. From the information compiled so far on chapters that consider a whole variety of ecosystems from the polar regions to the tropics and look at hurricanes and drought-prone and flood-prone areas, the events observed over the last decade of the 20th century compared with the previous nine decades of that century are way off the charts. The only explanation cumulatively is that climate change is already happening. One cannot attribute a single event to climate change, for example Hurricane Katrina or a drought in Africa, but cumulatively there is a very strong signal. More and more scientists are willing to attribute it to that cause and say that climate change is happening. Therefore, the one in 50-year flood is likely to be a one in 20-year flood, and a one in 20-year flood is likely to be one in 10 or one in five. But in order to determine that one needs a lot of observational data. It is only with hindsight that one can say things have changed, but it is easier to predict that these events will become more frequent. Dr Toulmin: We have the advantage of Nick Stern's review on the economics of climate change which will come out some time in October. All of us are very much looking forward to seeing how much of that hard evidence can be pulled together to start putting some figures on different pathways and the cost of "business as usual" and the cost of addressing climate change in various ways in terms of investing in a lower carbon economy, which I believe is increasingly vital if we are to make any progress with the MDGs and other development objectives. Q266 Joan Ruddock: I just spent a weekend with parliamentarians from G8 plus five countries. What was so striking when one raised the issue of climate change was that within developing countries there was virtually no access to information. When one talks about mainstreaming one is considering donor thinking, but tragically the people who might ask for the programmes, be partners in them and might be trying desperately to bring about their own development plans do not have information. How on earth can we tackle that issue, and where is our responsibility in that respect? Dr Huq: That is a very big issue, and in a small way it is one of the things that our climate change programme in IIED tries to address with partners in developing countries, focusing particularly on the 50 poorest and least developed countries in the world. Under the Framework Convention they are recognised as being very vulnerable along with the island states. We are working with partners in those countries to enhance their understanding of the issues and availability of information and provide it to governments, civil society and vulnerable communities in those countries, but there is still a long way to go. The level of awareness is rising, but the next step - what to do about it - is still missing. They need information and advice on what they should be thinking about and planning to do, and that is a big gap which needs to be addressed. That is a particular avenue which donors like DFID could support, but if they wait for the recipient to ask for it, it will not happen. This is one case where a little bit of donor-driven agenda-setting might be appropriate given that this is a long-term problem. It is not seen as an immediate short-term issue when they speak to their counterparts in the finance ministries of the countries; they do not see climate change as an immediate problem because they have many other things on their plate for which they want assistance. One may try to persuade them that this is a matter that they should now start to think about in order not to jeopardise future development. Dr Toulmin: This is relevant when one is thinking about investment in energy systems to see how one can get particularly LDCs[6] in Africa onto much more sustainable energy pathways. The reason why I say that climate change is such a useful tool for us is that it permeates absolutely everything. Equally, it permeates the enormous growth in urban population that we are likely to see over the next 20 or 30 years. It is a useful tool if that urban population is to be handled in a way that provides long-term low-carbon urban settlements with transport and energy systems that make sense and if it is to be in a situation which reduces its vulnerability to the sorts of climate-related risks that will emerge. There is an enormous investment agenda, whether it is in urban areas, energy or transport, and I do not believe that people have yet got their heads round it. Q267 Joan Ruddock: Are you confident that there is enough science behind it? The people to whom I spoke - they included South Africans who obviously are relatively much better resourced in terms of the science base - felt that there was insufficient predictability in linking climate change with vulnerability to natural disasters. Globally, it was understood but when it came to country-specific tasks what would you recommend? What would you describe as the threat that the particular nation faces? Dr Huq: That is the gap. I believe that at the global level it is well recognised and understood and the evidence is overwhelming. The ability to localise that in terms of particular places, regions, countries, cities or communities is still missing. A lot of work is going on and there are now much more local and much better models, but it is not necessarily a matter of predicting what is going to happen; it is more a matter of giving a view that things are likely to become more risky in terms of climate change. Therefore, any kind of risk-reducing strategy is what one should be thinking about in terms of climate-proofing. There are things that one can do without having a particular prediction that, say, there will be a flood in exactly three years from now. But we know that there will be more floods and therefore flood protection and preparation is a useful investment in terms of both helping now as well as improving conditions in future. Further, obviously from the perspective of our planet change to take a low-carbon versus a high-carbon path makes sense when looking for alternatives in terms of investment in transport and energy infrastructure. It can inform investment decisions even now with the level of information that we have, and obviously we need to improve it. Climate change is a long-term, not a short-term, problem. Therefore, one of the best investments we can make in the short to medium term is just to have the capacity to understand it at local level within countries so they do not depend on the IPCC for a report every five years to tell them what is going to happen but are able to monitor conditions themselves and make judgments as to what they need to be doing on a continuous basis. Q268 John Battle: I think that it is the connecting of the long to the short terms that worries me, but it is also about connecting environment to development. Some of the Committee recently visited Pakistan and looked at the work of rehabilitation following the earthquake. The work being done was impressive, but I kept asking myself perhaps the perverse question: how did this help bring villages in Kashmir closer to meeting the targets set in the Millennium Development Goals? Are we just rebuilding what they had before? Can a disaster be used as a catalyst to development? Sixteen years ago this week I went to the Philippines where a terrible earthquake had occurred. Everybody has now forgotten about it. Five months later there was a typhoon which was the equivalent of a tsunami. More people died there than in Kashmir, but that is forgotten about. Someone told me recently that we still have not moved on in terms of development. Do you see any chance of the crises resulting from great earthquakes and tsunamis creating within the UN a dynamic for development, or does the UN just respond to those crises and see them as a separate agenda, almost an environmental one, and then move back when there is a bit of space to the development agenda? Do you see a thread whereby if a crisis emerges we can grasp it as an opportunity for development, including shunting along girls in school, new sustainable employment projects and maybe new agricultural approaches? Is that on the agenda? Dr Toulmin: Absolutely. Following the tsunami, it was interesting to follow some of the debates as to responses in terms of rebuilding post that event. In many ways what one saw was rather an adverse model of response; that is to say, a lot of poor communities did not have rights to the land from which their shelters and housing had been swept away. The situation post-tsunami was a more inequitable pattern of access to land and shelter than had existed before. On the environmental front, I am aware that there was some talk about trying to get rehabilitation of mangrove populations and things like that as a way to provide a better buffer, but clearly it makes a great amount of sense to see how one can use these reconstruction efforts to build a better, more sustainable and equitable pathway. Q269 Chairman: We have received a paper from Lisa Schipper and Mark Pelling on disaster risk, climate change and international development[7]. They comment: "Poverty Reduction and Strategy Papers provide a vehicle for integrating risk reduction into poverty alleviation programmes, but so far emphasis has been on early warning and relief and not on prevention." They go on to say: "A notable exception is Vietnam's PRSP which combines education, planning and risk-reduction policy." Can you comment on that? Do you know anything about the Vietnamese programme? Dr Huq: It is true that by and large the criticism of the PRS process in many countries is that it has not made that linkage with environmental issues and particularly the long-term implications of climate change. Vietnam is a good example of where they have tried to do that. In a sense, countries like Vietnam and perhaps China, where central planning has been a very long tradition, are able to take a longer-term view than other countries which have very short-term perspectives, particularly when there is a crisis. It is just crisis management and it is very difficult to start thinking about the long-term implications of the investments that are made at that point. Increasingly, that is being recognised, even in the US which has experienced Hurricane Katrina. One sees the debates about whether or not they should rebuild to the previous standard or a higher one given that the likelihood of hurricanes of that magnitude occurring in future is now higher. The US Government and the US Corps of Engineers are debating this point. Crises can often stimulate an opportunity to debate the issue. Q270 John Barrett: It is not just about providing the poor with more solid house structures; it is perhaps about dealing with poverty, and I am not sure that that is yet on the agenda. Dr Huq: Perhaps not. Dr Toulmin: Vietnam is an interesting case. I think you will find that what lies behind that much greater attention to climate change is probably a building up of climate change capacity within Vietnam which is then able to argue that case within government. I know there has been a very long-standing and good relationship between the University of East Anglia, now the Tyndall Centre, and the Vietnamese climate change science base. Yesterday we heard colleagues talking about trying to get the environment into the PRS in Tanzania. That seems to be developing well, in part because there are well established key figures within the Tanzanian environmental and agricultural sectors who can lobby and push. Building that capacity in country is an absolutely key factor. Donors can do a certain amount, but one needs a set of people who can argue their corner within their own countries. Q271 Chairman: Later this year the Committee is to start an inquiry into water. It raises the issue that if one is facing projections of reduced rainfall this is a good moment to invest in better water infrastructure, storage and capacity. One may extend fertility and reduce the risk of desertification as part of a development strategy rather than a disaster reduction strategy? Dr Toulmin: Absolutely. Q272 Ann McKechin: I should like to ask about the UN Convention on Climate Change which called on countries to pay particular attention to this problem. How does this involve the development actors? You are probably aware that recently the World Bank has announced that the element of sustainability is to be effectively downgraded within that organisation. Can you comment on the extent to which development actors such as the World Bank or DFID over the past 10 years have been investing more in climate change programmes? Have they been changing their policies to suit the scientific evidence which is now available? Joan Ruddock has commented on the extent to which developing nations are being involved in that process. Dr Huq: My impression of the development funding agencies is that in the past couple of years they have started to take it more seriously. Before that the answer would have been "no". Mr Hilary Benn, the current Secretary of State, has certainly made a number of speeches which have highlighted the situation. His predecessor did not; she did not agree that this was a poverty or development issue, and that was very much a prevalent mindset in the development community in the past. I believe that that has changed and it is beginning to be addressed. What they have been doing has been largely to look at climate change impacts on investments. The World Bank has now come out with an investment portfolio - DFID is doing the same thing - which looks at key countries like Malawi and the extent to which their own investments might be jeopardised if there are climate change effects in those countries. That is a good first step, but it needs to go a lot quicker in terms of raising awareness, building capacity to deal with this and the acquisition of the relevant science in terms that can be used locally in country. There is still a long way to go in that respect. Even large countries like India, which has quite a lot of scientific capacity and capability and good people, have not been able to make a lot of progress in affecting their own national development agenda yet. Although they are trying that gap remains. In relation to development agencies mainstreaming it in their own activities, I believe that those in DFID concerned with the humanitarian sector still do not regard climate change as an issue. Their mindset is very much an immediate post-emergency reaction. Q273 Ann McKechin: Is more emphasis needed on staff in the field in developing countries to make sure that they are aware of these considerations? Dr Huq: Yes. One is talking about investment in the countries themselves to enhance scientific capacity and their own civil society's capacity to cope and adapt. A lot of work is now happening in adaptation to climate change, again using that knowledge and experience and sharing it across countries with good examples from one country to another. A lot can be done there. Dr Toulmin: One of the things we do each year under the climate change convention is hold a day-long session on development and adaptation. Saleemul brings together a wonderful collection of people from around the world to talk about their personal experience in a particular place and what lessons it has so that we begin to share the experiences of countries that face different circumstances but very similar risks. Q274 Richard Burden: Early warning systems have been shown to be effective in saving lives in a number of places. An example of that is the incidence of cyclones in Bangladesh over the years. You referred to some of the work being done in Vietnam and Tanzania in getting them to think about climate change issues. What more do you believe can be done specifically to get developing countries to invest more economic and political capital in disaster mitigation and preparedness? Dr Huq: I believe that investment in disaster preparedness is reinforced by climate change. Almost invariably, any climate-related disaster, be it flood, drought or hurricane, will be made worse by climate change. Therefore, for policymakers in those countries to assume that just because they have had a one in 20-year flood this year they do not have to worry for another 19 years is no longer true. In Bangladesh last year there was a one in 20-year flood, but it was the fourth one in that 20-year period. Therefore, it has become a one in five-year event; it is no longer a one in 20-year hydrological event. It covered about half the country. What disaster preparedness can do when it is done well will not reduce damage to zero but it will be reduced by significant orders of magnitude. Bangladesh is a very good example. We had floods last year which covered almost half the country. About 30 million people had to be evacuated, but the number of deaths was very small, perhaps 100 or 200. Most of them died by snake bites, not drowning. There was a good deal of early warning, evacuation and preparedness, with people helping each other, not just depending on external assistance. It did a lot of damage to crops and infrastructure; there was a good deal of economic damage, but the loss of life that might otherwise have occurred from an event like that in the past did not happen. Preparedness can be very effective. Dr Toulmin: Last week we had a useful interchange with Nick Stern about his review. He said that he had had discussions with the chairman of the African Union, Alpha Konare, who said, "My presidents have no sense of urgency or inkling of the importance of this particular issue. Please will you come after the climate change meeting and talk to some of them?" It is that sort of thing at that level, and a whole number of others, that would really help to alert people to the fact that this is happening and is inevitable. There needs to be some clever thinking and learning of lessons between countries as to useful ways to take forward preparedness for what inevitably will be a more difficult weather pattern particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Instead of seeing this as some kind of act of God, which events like the tsunami can reasonably be inferred to be, we have to see the impacts of increasing climate change-related events as acts of man. They are the consequence of the process of global warming that we in the rich world have helped to establish. I believe that there is a consequent moral responsibility upon us to think more carefully about how to help communities and countries cope with those changes, as well as the moral responsibility significantly to reduce carbon emissions. To think about both adaptation and mitigation is a key factor and we need to see much more rapid progress. Chairman: Joan Ruddock and I were at the same meeting at the weekend. We heard some opinions, one of which was that, following Hurricane Katrina, 13 % of Americans thought that it was caused by spiritual factors. The gods were angry. If that is true in America it is probably less true everywhere else! It brings to mind the practicalities. You referred to Bangladesh. Ordinary people can help themselves if they have information. I thank you both very much for coming today and sharing your thoughts with us. It has been helpful. [1] International Fund for Agricultural Development [2] Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations [3] Internally Displaced Persons [4] DFID, Working in Partnership with the World Food Programme, April 2006, http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/dfid_wfp_institutional_strategy_2005-08.pdf#search=%22dfid%20wfp%23%22 [5] Reference to follow [6] Least Developed Countries [7] 'Disaster risk, climate change and international development: scope for, and challenges to, integration', Lisa Schipper and Mark Pelling, Disasters, Blackwell |