House of Commons - International Development

Select Committee on International Development Written Evidence

Memorandum submitted by Save the Children UK

SUMMARY

1. Rising food prices create a rapidly changing environment for WFP, which needs to adapt in order to improve its effectiveness in tackling food insecurity.

— WFP needs to be better funded, including by DFID, and to expand its work beyond food aid, which by itself is a blunt instrument. It needs to better understand and respond to, the needs of the urban poor and those living in fragile states. Where it continues with food aid, it should increasingly purchase its aid locally.

— The UN needs to address the problem of what agency is responsible for the broader problem of reducing food insecurity.

— DFID, in common with other donors, does not well fund food security and nutrition interventions by comparison with its WFP donations. This needs to change, and it ought to appoint a nutrition champion and start to monitor its progress against nutrition targets. Given undernutrition is responsible for 36% of child deaths in developing countries, the Committee should consider an enquiry into where nutrition sits in DFID.

INTRODUCTION

2. Save the Children UK welcomes the Committee's inquiry into global food security. It has rightly identified that recent trends have put this issue at the forefront of the humanitarian community's collective mind. Furthermore, WFP is in a period of flux—it is in the process of developing a new strategic plan, question marks exist over the level of donor support to the agency, and its place within the UN system and in tackling food insecurity more broadly. The UK, as a major WFP donor, has an important role in ensuring the impact of these trends is not disastrous for the poorest and most vulnerable.

3. Save the Children has restricted its comments to those topics in which it has a particular interest.

4. Save the Children is the world's largest independent children's organisation, which works in more than 100 countries. Save the Children UK has extensive experience working in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and east and south Asia.

The effects on food prices and availability of increasing demand and changes in energy and agricultural policies

5. The price of staple commodities is high relative to the trends over the past 10 or 15 years and is likely to remain so at least in the medium term. There is clear evidence of this from price analysis and predictions from a variety of sources including the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation and the International Food Policy Research Institute.[104] These trends are well documented and we will not rehearse the arguments here.

6. The effect of rising food prices is to impact immediately on both the quality and quantity of the diet of poor people. However, an increase in the cost of food also has significant knock-on effects.

7. Recent Save the Children research shows that even before recent food price rises, the poor were struggling to provide a healthy diet for their children. In the poorest areas of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Myanmar, Save the Children found that between 15 and 79% of households do not earn enough to pay for a healthy diet for their family—even if they spent their entire household income on food.[105]

8. Price rises will expand the number of families who fall into this bracket—families who will either reduce their intake of food or switch to cheaper, less nutritious alternatives. Doing so dangerously undermines children's fragile immune systems and makes them more prone to sickness and death from infections and disease.

9. Food price rises also have a significant impact on other areas of life. For many, food is the single largest item of spending in the family budget. For instance, in one survey carried out by Save the Children in the Meket region of Ethiopia, poor families were spending 57% of income on food—and even this level of expenditure was not delivering sufficient diversity to maintain health.[106] Because food consumption is essential, rising food prices are likely to place other items of spending at risk rather than food itself—items including school and medical fees, soap, vet bills, land tax or productive assets. Rising food prices will therefore also put at risk children's access to education, healthcare, and their parents' ability to earn a living.

WFP's strategy to meet increased needs in the context of higher food prices

10. Food prices will affect groups of people differently, and WFP strategy needs to adapt quickly to this changing environment. Though some groups will benefit from rising food prices, especially families who produce a surplus of food to sell, most families in developing countries will not. In particular, people who purchase a significant proportion of their food needs will be particularly affected. Therefore the existing difficulties of the rural landless or land-poor will become more pressing, as will the needs of the urban poor, who rely almost exclusively on the markets for their food.[107] Until now, WFP has had little focus on the urban poor, and it is not clear which UN agency has responsibility for dealing with food security issues in this environment. Many of WFP's analytical methods are well adapted and honed over years of working in rural environments, but are poorly adapted to understanding hunger and predicting the impact of price rises in urban settings. Some of these tools exist and are used already by agencies like Save the Children: WFP needs to look at expanding its analytical toolbox to enable it to model and predict the impact of food price rises on different population groups as a matter of urgency. The UN needs to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the different agencies in combating hunger in an urban setting.

11. Fragile states are also likely to be disproportionately affected. Conflict disrupts and reduces domestic food production, leading to greater reliance on markets. Fragile states also suffer a lack of state resources, legitimacy or institutional capacity, leading to weak or missing government mechanisms to manage prices and respond to malnutrition (eg price controls, subsidy schemes, food fortification, safety net programmes). This exposes the population to the full force of the market without a means of protection. WFP strategy needs to explicitly set out how it will differentiate its work between fragile and more settled contexts.

12. WFP needs to continue its movement towards the practice of local purchase of its food aid wherever possible instead of importing donor-country produced food aid. This practice recognises that even in countries where some people are in crisis, surplus food may be available in different parts of the country or in neighbouring countries. This food, suited to local dietary preferences, can be purchased and delivered to those in need faster and more cheaply than international food aid, and has the added bonus of supporting local farmers and traders. By encouraging local purchase, rising food prices are more likely to benefit producers in developing countries, rather than food aid donor countries like the US.

13. WFP also needs to continue to move towards varying the types of assistance that it offers. Presently, the majority of its work centres around food aid. But other forms of assistance, such as cash distributions, offer viable and more effective alternatives in certain situations.[108] Furthermore, in a rising food price environment, WFP will receive decreasing in-kind food aid donations from countries like the US. This will make diversification away from food distribution increasingly pressing.

Cooperation between the WFP and other UN Agencies, for example the Food and Agriculture Organisation

The prospects for a "one UN" approach in meeting food security needs

14. These issues can be taken together. There is substantial scope for improvement in the relationship between WFP and other UN agencies. In tackling food insecurity, WFP has only part of the solution since its current mandate only allows a limited number of activities which are mostly focused at symptomatic relief of hunger. Its mandate does not presently allow activities or approaches more suited to tackling the root causes of malnutrition. There are signs that moves may be afoot to expand its mandate in this regard—for instance WFP is looking to expand when it makes use of cash distribution alongside or instead of food, in circumstances where there is a viable market. However these adjustments are still likely to be focused on relatively short term solutions, which are WFP's comparative advantage. A broader approach to tackling food insecurity is needed.

15. Presently however, though WFP receives most of the donor funding available for tackling food insecurity, there is no clear institutional home for the issue within the UN agencies. FAO also has a partial mandate regarding food security, focusing on agriculture, forestry and fisheries. There remain gaps in leadership within the UN on other aspects of food security such as income-generation, education and skills training, social protection and other broader forms of livelihood support. This retards progress and makes co-ordination difficult. DFID should ensure its support to the "One UN" approach will tackle this pressing problem.

DFID's contribution to the WFP and to achieving the MDG 1 hunger targets

Funding to WFP

16. The UK contributed US$100 million to the WFP in 2006—a little under 4% of contributions that year.[109] This represents a sizeable investment but one whose value is rapidly shrinking in the face of food price rises. With a shortfall of $0.5 billion (about a sixth of its project needs), it has already called for an increase in contributions.[110] Further increases in food prices could see this shortfall worsen. WFP's call for funding should be supported by the UK, as the alternative, that WFP significantly scales down its work in 2008, is certain to lead to a significant hunger problem among populations it is currently serving. Needless to say, it will also be unable to respond effectively to new emergencies that develop as food price increases bite hard on the marginal poor.

17. To assist with mitigating the harm of funding shortfalls that may nonetheless arise, the UK should encourage other donors to facilitate the prioritisation of WFP funds for those situations where humanitarian needs are most severe. This includes by providing aid in untied form, prioritising support for emergency contexts over developmental food aid programmes and, notwithstanding the previous point, providing un-earmarked contributions that allow WFP to allocate available resources to those emergency and recovery programmes where needs are greatest.

DFID approach to achieving MDG 1 hunger targets

18. However, as discussed above, achieving MDG1 targets is not only about funding to WFP. Food aid, though part of the solution, is a blunt instrument which is useful in certain circumstances, but poorly adapted to tackling food security, chronic malnutrition and their underlying causes. Unfortunately, the broader packages of nutrition interventions (including supporting breastfeeding, cash transfers and micronutrient supplementation) which would be better adapted are relatively poorly funded. According to the Lancet, global donor spending on undernutrition in poor and middle income countries probably only amounted to US$250-300 million per year in the first half of this decade. This compares with US$2.7 billion in contributions to WFP.[111] This is a massive and unacceptable imbalance. DFID and other donors must start to properly fund nutrition and food security projects.

19. Undernutrition, to which 36% of under-5 deaths in developing countries can be ascribed,[112] needs to be put at the centre of all these organisations' work. Unfortunately it rarely is, and DFID is a case in point. Save the Children conducted research with the Institute of Development Studies last year, to attempt to determine how seriously DFID takes nutrition.[113] The results were ambiguous at best. While DFID staff members felt nutrition was important in the department's work, the research revealed that DFID has no discernable nutrition strategy, no internal nutrition champion, and at the time of research had no dedicated nutrition experts. The research was unable to establish how much of DFID's assistance is spent tackling undernutrition, nor how effective these projects were, because DFID itself does not measure the nutritional impact of its work in this sector, as much of it is considered "indirect" support to nutrition whose primary objectives other areas such as health, agriculture or social protection. DFID should develop a nutrition strategy, and start to monitor how it spends its development assistance against nutrition indicators. It should appoint a nutrition champion. Save the Children would urge the Committee to consider a specific investigation into how DFID approaches tackling undernutrition.

20. The Lancet called the global nutrition system, of which WFP and DFID are two main actors, "fragmented and dysfunctional."[114] Save the Children's own experience bears this out, with a myriad of international actors with overlapping remits but none with the key purpose of ensuring the efficacy of international donors, development organisations and governments in reducing malnutrition. Save the Children UK is calling for a global nutrition summit to be attended by political leaders, as a first step towards addressing this failure in the international governance system.