House of Commons - International Development

Select Committee on International Development Tenth Report

1 Introduction

1. The World Food Programme (WFP) was established in 1962 as a UN agency with responsibility for reducing the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition globally. It is estimated that over 850 million people, most of whom live in developing countries, do not have enough food to eat.[1] At the 1996 World Food Summit, the international community committed itself to halving the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. This objective was reiterated in Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1, which has the targets of halving the number of people living in poverty, achieving full employment and halving the proportion of people living in hunger by 2015.[2]

2. Whether the MDG hunger target will be met remains highly uncertain. One in three people in sub-Saharan Africa lacks access to sufficient food. Although the share of undernourished people in the global population has decreased, in three regions—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Western Asia—the absolute number of undernourished people has increased since 1990.[3] Most countries in these regions will miss the 2015 MDG target on current trends.[4] Others, including Ghana, Botswana, Brazil, Chile and El Salvador, are on-track to meet MDG 1 within the deadline.[5]

3. We decided to undertake this inquiry in early March 2008 as part of a series of inquiries assessing the work of the Department for International Development (DFID) with multilateral agencies. Our inquiry has proved timely in light of the recent rapid food price increases. These have greatly exacerbated the already grave situation facing many people in the developing world. The G8 Summit in Japan warned on 9 July 2008 of the danger that high oil and food prices could have "serious implications for the most vulnerable."[6] Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, has said that the world food crisis could push 100 million people into poverty, reversing the gains made in poverty reduction over the last seven years.[7]

4. Whilst taking account of the current food crisis, we have kept our focus on a short and fairly narrow inquiry into one particular agency, the WFP, and on how the UK can best support both the agency and the wider issue of achieving global food security. Our report is informed by: the two evidence sessions that we held between April and June 2008; the two visits that we carried out to Ghana in March 2008 and to the UN food agencies' headquarters in Rome in May; and the written evidence that we received from a wide range of development organisations and individuals. We would like to thank all those who gave evidence to us, in person or in writing, and the DFID, WFP and other staff who made our visits so interesting and useful. We would also like to thank those who took part in informal discussions with us over the course of the inquiry.

The global food crisis

5. Chronic hunger and malnutrition were profound problems for the world before the food price rises of 2007-08 began. The origins of the current crisis lie not in a global lack of food—there is enough food in the world to meet demand—but in a long-term lack of access to food for many people.[8]Poverty and inequality sit at the heart of hunger: poor people often cannot afford to grow or buy food, and the resources needed to get access to food are inequitably distributed.[9] The term "food security" attempts to convey the range of pre-conditions needed to combat and prevent hunger. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has summarised these as "physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets people's dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life."[10] There is therefore a difference between hunger—a lack of food per se—and malnutrition—a lack of nourishing food or proper nutrition.

6. Poor people's lack of access to food is being exacerbated by current price fluctuations. The cost of eating nourishing food is becoming yet more unaffordable. The scale of food price rises has been so steep in 2008 that even wealthy countries such as the UK are feeling the impact. The UK Government has undertaken an analysis of the domestic impact of current food price rises led by the Cabinet Office. Its final report was delivered to the Prime Minister on 7 July 2008. One of its key messages was that global food production must increase to meet the needs of the world's "growing, wealthier population".[11] We will return to this issue in Chapter 3.

7. It is in developing countries that people's lives are being endangered by the crisis. A "perfect storm" of factors has conspired to send wheat prices spiralling by 122% and rice by 250% since 2000.[12] The crisis has contributed to the threat of famine in countries such as Ethiopia, where the increasing cost of food imports has combined with drought, crop failure and conflict to double the number of people needing emergency assistance to 4.6 million.[13] Four African countries—Lesotho, Somalia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe—are classified by the FAO as having "exceptional shortfalls" in food production and supplies.[14] There have been food riots in countries as diverse as Egypt, Malayisa and Yemen. In Haiti, where up to 75% of food is imported, riots during April 2008 forced the resignation of the Prime Minister.

8. What has made an already severe situation much worse is the confluence of short-term 'shocks' and more long-term structural factors.[15] The supply of food has been constrained by prolonged under-investment in agriculture and by climatic changes leading to both droughts and floods. Stocks of cereals, especially wheat, are currently at their lowest levels since the early 1980s.[16]This situation has coincided with increasing demand for food as a result of general population expansion and sustained economic growth rates in some rapidly industrialising countries, notably India and China, where increasing amounts of meat and other foods are now being consumed. Rising oil prices and a range of other factors, including urbanisation, trade barriers, biofuel production, export restrictions and market speculation, have also contributed to the food crisis. We return to these causal factors and what agencies such as DFID and the WFP can do to address them below in Chapter 3.

The World Food Programme's response

9. In February 2008, the WFP announced a $500 million shortfall in its emergency funding (later raised to a $750 million shortfall) due to the price rises and called for urgent additional funding. The agency aims to feed 73 million people this year in around 80 countries. The fact that the price of food purchases has more than doubled since June 2007 decreases the WFP's purchasing power: 50% of the agency's budget is given in cash and this now buys only half the food supplies it did a year ago.[17] As a result, food aid deliveries declined by 15% over the course of 2007, dropping to 5.7 million tonnes—the lowest level since records began in 1961.[18] The WFP's call for extra funding was eventually met on 23 May by a $500 million donation from Saudi Arabia and $250 million from other sources.[19] Additional funding pledges were made at the Food Summit held by the FAO in Rome from 3-5 June 2008.

10. The WFP launched a new four-year Strategic Plan on 13 June 2008 which its Executive Director, Josette Sheeran, told us represented "a revolution in food aid".[20]The Plan aims to deliver aid more flexibly and in a way that supports local markets and prevents, as well as responds to, hunger.[21] Chapter 2 of our report will explore the WFP's evolution and its response to the food crisis in more detail.

DFID's response

11. Through direct contributions and via its funding to pooled international emergency funds, DFID is the WFP's fourth largest donor, with an average annual contribution of £60 million over the past five years.[22] This supplements DFID's longer-term support to food security in poor countries, which includes social protection programmes such as those we heard about during our visit to Ethiopia in 2007. Such programmes provide a mix of cash and food 'transfers' to poor people to help protect them from food price fluctuations.[23]

12. But, as we will discuss in Chapter 3, we are concerned that vast swathes of people going hungry are not reached through the current portfolio of donor support. 850 million people regularly do not eat sufficient food to meet their nutritional requirements. The WFP feeds 73 million, less than one-tenth, of these people.[24] Our concern is who is meeting the needs of the remaining 775 million people. Clearly the ultimate responsibility for people's needs lies with their national government; however, the international community—and especially influential donors such as DFID—must do more to reduce hunger and malnutrition, which has been termed the "forgotten MDG" by Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank.[25]

13. As Save the Children said in their written evidence, food aid is only part of the solution: it is a "blunt instrument which is useful in certain circumstances, but poorly adapted to tackling food security, chronic malnutrition and their underlying causes."[26] As well as exploring how the "blunt instrument" of food aid can be used to best effect, our aim in this report is to stimulate thinking on the part of DFID and the WFP about how to respond more effectively to the structural barriers, including poor nutrition and insufficient agricultural development, that have prevented millions of people from accessing nutritious food for many years.

Structure of this report

14. We begin our assessment of global food security in Chapter 2 by casting the spotlight on the WFP itself. We will explore how the agency has evolved from a food surplus agency distributing excess supplies to become a flexible food assistance agency capable of responding to the current food crisis. We will look at the WFP's role both as a humanitarian actor—providing an emergency "pipeline" for food and logistics in crisis situations—and its longer-term 'enabling development' activities including improving nutrition. In Chapter 3, we look specifically at the current food crisis: at its causes, the trends in its development and the appropriate response from the WFP, DFID and the international community. Chapter 4 looks ahead to how the processes and structures that underpin global food security could be strengthened or revised to reflect the changing global context. This will include specific discussion of, firstly, the current UN approach to food security and, secondly, the need to reprioritise agricultural development in light of the current food crisis.

1 Ev 51 Back

2 Progress towards the hunger target is measured using two indicators: the proportion of the population who cannot meet their minimum calorie requirements; and the prevalence of underweight in children under five. For further details see www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ Back

3 Ev 37 Back

4 MDG 2007 Progress Chart, online at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/mdg2007-progress.pdf Back

5 Q 17 Back

6 'Concern at sharp rise in oil price', Financial Times, 9 July 2008 Back

7 Speech to Rome World Food Security Summit, 6 June 2008 Back

8 Ev 60 Back

9 Ev 37 Back

10 FAO, Trade Reforms and Food Security: Conceptualising the Linkages (2003), Chapter 2.2. Online at http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y4671E/y4671e06.htm Back