Memorandum submitted by Lawrence Haddad,
Institute of Development Studies
THE WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME AND GLOBAL FOOD
SECURITY[99]
Thank you for inviting me to submit testimony
to this timely and important inquiry.[100]
I have organised my responses around some of
the questions posed in the Inquiry's TORs.
The effects on food prices and availability of
increasing demand and changes in energy and agricultural policies
It is tempting to over-assign the blame for
food price increases on biofuels. We do not really know, for example,
if palm oil prices are now more determined by the biodiesel industry
than by the edible oil industry. There are many incentives for
assigning the blame to biofuels—it diverts attention from
previous poor agricultural policies in the developed and developing
worlds, from a lack of long-term investment in agriculture, it
feeds into narratives of those who advocate different responses
to climate change and the narratives of those who advocate no
response to climate change etc. Certainly there is diversion,
but it is not clear how large or complete this is, and whether
the mid-term effects on energy prices (and hence food prices)
may make biofuels worth it. Much more analysis is needed on this
complex set of relationships. I suspect we will find lots of counter-intuitive
results popping up from more careful and contextualised work.
The prospects for a "one UN" approach
in meeting food security needs
There is a desperate need for a one-UN approach
to meeting food security challenges. Roughly speaking, the model
devised 30 years ago, assigns agriculture-for-food-production
to FAO, agriculture-for-poverty-reduction-and-empowerment to IFAD,
food access-for-children to UNICEF and food provision-in-emergencies
to WFP. The World Bank has additional roles in the broader "rural
space". (It is not clear which agency is really responsible
for urban food insecurity.) The three Rome agencies should do
much more work together at four increasingly integrated levels:
(a) information sharing and common measures, indicators and standards,
(b) coordination of strategies, (c) joint action and (d) a pooling
of resources under one leadership team. While there are exceptions,
very few truly joint initiatives manage to transcend the institutional
fights for resources and media limelight.
On WFP, I am a fan. I think they "do development
where other agencies do not". They work in risky and fragile
environments where the World Bank and others are absent. They
work in post-conflict situations where a huge number of decisions
get made that determine the trajectory for development in that
context for the next five to 10 years. The institutional, professional
and financial boundaries between emergency and relief—constructed
in the mid 70s—need to be torn down. It is clear that development
actions which proceed as if risk is an infrequent visitor will
only lead to more risk, and emergency work that is not cognizant
of the road map it is inadvertently laying down for development
will not necessarily generate good enough development pathways.
If it were allowed to, WFP could be playing a greater preventative
and developmental role than it is now.
DFID's contribution to the WFP and to achieving
the MDG 1 hunger targets
I have long been a critic of DFID's stance on
food security and nutrition. In my opinion they have been complacent
about child nutrition and have allowed themselves to succumb to
donor fashion on agriculture. DFID is a tremendously important
bilateral and is big enough and has enough in-house expertise
and at its disposal to resist such temptations.
There are welcome signs that this is changing,
and DFID should work with the key countries affected by rising
food prices, the UN agencies, and the Bretton Woods agencies on
a three pronged approach:
— Get more emergency resources to WFP
and other agencies that are committed and capable of quickly improving
people's ability to get foods in their hands and stomachs. Divert
these resources from other alternatives in the short run. If infants
are born malnourished because their mothers are malnourished,
then (if the kids survive) the effects of getting them into school
and into work will be severely undercut because of irreversible
brain damage.
— Do a better job of linking social
protection interventions to protecting and building up human assets.
Social protection as we know it today was designed in Mexico in
the mid 90s in the aftermath of the peso crisis that drove up
prices for everything. The price rises forced parents to mortgage
the future to survive today by pulling kids out of school and
not taking them to health clinics. The Mexican government linked
PROGRESA cash payments to the poorest with getting kids immunized,
getting them health checks and keeping them in school. Social
protection, where possible, should be linked to behaviours that
promote early childhood human capital.
— Double Investments in agriculture
in sub-Sahara and in South Asia. The recipes for achieving the
desired outcomes are different in each of the 100 or so agroecological
regions in each area, but the ingredients are the same: better
inputs, better information, better input delivery, better market
institutions, more farmer-driven design of interventions, greater
priority to women's expertise and preferences, better market infrastructure
and higher yield technology. The public agencies should be teaming
up with the private agencies (The Gates Foundation is putting
$3 billion into agriculture in the next three years—more
than the World Bank, even after the doubling in lending announced
by Robert Zoellick in mid April). Most smallholder farmers are
net food purchasers too, but allowing them to respond to food
price increases in ways that drive down prices for all but allow
them to increase their own profits (this trick can only be done
by improved productivity) is win-win both in a spatial and temporal
sense.
Finally, while there is a very real and enormous
crisis on the world's plate (and I agree with FAO's DG, Dr. Jacques
Diouf—the UN Security Council should be holding meetings
about the current situation through a security lens) it is important
not to overreact and throw out potentially promising solutions
to medium term problems. Only three years ago the UN was advising
developing country farmers about how to deal with low food prices
in the foreseeable future. It is telling that in three hours of
searching I cannot find a 20-30 year time series of world cereals
prices. Most reports—official and unofficial—begin
with trends from 2003. We need a longer view -one that places
the current food price increases in historical perspective and
situates responses in terms of the future consequences of action
and inaction.
13 April 2008
99 Incidentally the term Global Food Security can be
misinterpreted to mean food security at the world level. Global
supply meets global demand so there is no problem at this hypothetical
level. The problem is essentially lack of access to food. The
lack of access can be physical (not enough food in fields or markets
due to weak incentives, weak infrastructure and weak inputs for
smallholder farmers); economic (not enough income relative to
food prices to buy food), social (some family members eat last
and least) and physiological (not enough clean water and good
sanitation to allow food consumed to be used for physical and
mental growth and development). Back
100
In the interests of full disclosure, IDS and the WFP are planning
to collaborate on how experiences from the field to fight hunger
and food insecurity can be better captured using SMS and video
technology to better drive national and international strategies
to secure food security. Back
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