Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MS JOSETTE
SHEERAN AND
MR JOHN
AYLIEFF
22 APRIL 2008
Q1 Chairman: Can I wish you good morning
and thank you very much for coming in to share your thoughts with
us. For the record, might you introduce yourselves before we start?
Ms Sheeran: I am Josette Sheeran,
the Executive Director of the World Food Programme.
Mr Aylieff: I am John Aylieff,
the Director of Programme Design and Support Division, World Food
Programme.
Q2 Chairman: As I say, thank you
for coming in. We are doing at the moment a very short inquiry
specifically into the World Food Programme, but I think that people
would agree that the timing is more than a little topical. Clearly
food prices and a potential food shortage has shot up the agenda
in recent times and from the briefing that we have received so
far clearly there is a view that they are likely to stay high,
and this is clearly causing a particular challenge for the World
Food Programme. We understand that you have appealed for an additional
$500 million for the current year. Can you give us an indication
of how that appeal is going, and if there is a shortfall what
contingencies you have for meeting the clear needs and pressures
around that?
Ms Sheeran: Thank you and I want
to thank this Committee in particular for their deep investment
in this issue where we are looking at not only the root causes
of hunger but the appropriate responses. Indeed we are in a very
special period of time where not only the soaring food prices
but the aggressively soaring crises, starting last June, have
thrown an increased number of people into vulnerability, and this
has hit the World Food Programme in two ways. One is it hits our
own programmes, of which over 50% are cash purchases of commodities
in over 80 different countries; so we are able to purchase today
about 40% less food than we could even in June with the same contribution.
But also we are seeing increasingly intensified needs as we see
more people thrown into vulnerability who were not in that urgent
category just a few months ago. So it is true that in February
I had been advised that prices had reached a plateau by many experts
and we assessed what the gap was from our current budget and planned
already assessed needs that were approved by our Board, and it
was $500 million. I am not pleased to report that since that date,
25 February, that gap has increased to $755 million. One example
of this, on 3 March we were purchasing rice in Asia for $460 a
metric tonne; that increased five weeks later to $780 a metric
tonne, and two weeks later to $1000 a metric tonne. So what we
are seeing is a very volatile pricing situation in the markets
that directly impacts our ability to reach those who are most
vulnerable. We have put out this appeal and are getting a range
of very thoughtful and helpful responses.
Q3 Chairman: That does not sound
like money!
Ms Sheeran: We have seen some
money coming in from a number of governments but of course this
was just put out about six weeks ago, so I know it takes time
for governments to assess how they can respond. But we have about
$250 million that has been announced in support of our extraordinary
appeal.
Q4 Chairman: Does that include the
UK's announcement today?
Ms Sheeran: That does not include
that yet but I have heard that there is some helpful news.
Q5 Chairman: The statement we have
just received from the Secretary of State is an additional £30
million to support the World Food Programme, which is $60 million,
give or take; an additional £50 million a year on social
protection and safety net in Africa; £25 million to Ethiopia;
and—something on which I think we need a little more detail—they
say £1 billion of new funding for international research
including £400 million over the next five years for agricultural
research. I think one would need to know a bit more about what
that actually meant, but certainly that is a specific and positive
response. And, as you know, the Prime Minister has a meeting this
afternoon to try and pull some of these threads together. Having
said that, of course the WFP is the most important agency for
providing food, particularly emergency food but you are not the
only one—we understand that you provide about half of global
food aid. So, given the problems you have just stated, how are
the other agencies coping and what capacity do we have to meet
these needs? And perhaps just incidentally, when you mention these
soaring prices, for example of rice, is there an element of market
manipulation going on here? Are people withholding in order to
force prices up? Is that potentially likely to break at some point?
Ms Sheeran: Excellent questions.
First let me thank the people of Great Britain for their generosity.
This $60 million dollars—£30 million—will help
enormously in meeting this urgent call. The fact is sometimes
people are trapped beyond their capability to respond without
any food and WFP is really the leader in the global system that
is charged with the responsibility to meet the call of hunger
when all systems collapse. Ideally individuals take care of their
own food needs and governments are the next line of defence, but
we find in situations like Darfur, where we have more than three
million people a day that simply have no access to food, if WFP's
capability is reduced literally their daily ration goes down and
there is no other source of food. So I want to thank you for that;
it is very important and very encouraging to have that response.
It is true that there are a number of important partners. WFP,
in fact 60% of our work is done through NGO partners, including
local NGOs. For example, I was just looking at our programme in
Colombia where we use over 1000 partners who have much better
knowledge at the village level of what is needed and the appropriate
specific responses at the local level, and we work very much with
a number of British NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children Great
Britain and others. But also they do their own work and so part
of our appeal is for the world to really step up and support those
of us on the front lines partnering with people in governments
to really cope with the challenge that this presents for the most
vulnerable. Your last question was what part can speculation have
on this? We assess that there are a number of factors that are
driving not only the high prices but these aggressive increases
that we started to see in June. First of all, the world has been
consuming more than it produces for the past three years, so we
do have a supply situation that drives up prices due to a drought
in Australia and other factors that put stress on the system.
We are seeing increasing industrial use demand from food as oil
prices are very high and the high oil prices are also increasing
the cost of farming across the board from the input to the fertiliser
and elsewhere. But also we are seeing greatly increased market
activity of investments and hedging in agricultural markets that
we think adds at least to the volatility of the prices and part
of the pressure that we are seeing right now.
Q6 Chairman: What seems to be unclear
is quite why it is as sharp as this. One of the suggestions we
had in an earlier briefing, for example, particularly in markets
like India and China people have been changing their eating habits
and eating more meats and less cereal—a conversion I am
sure the vegetarian lobby will tell us it is not so efficient.
Then the suggestion was, however, as prices rise and people have
only just got used to moderating their diet they may move back
a little bit and move back towards their more traditional diet
and this would take a little bit of pressure off. Is there any
evidence of that happening?
Ms Sheeran: In part I think some
of this has reached what Malcolm Gladwell, an author, called the
"tipping point" where the increased demand from growth
in China and India—and also in over a dozen countries in
Africa that have had growth rates over 7%—diets change—this
happens throughout history; it happened in the United States,
in Europe and elsewhere. As society has become more prosperous,
people tend to eat more protein and meat and it takes seven pounds
of grain to produce a pound of meat in grain fed agriculture,
so we are seeing protein consumption, for example in China, has
doubled since the early 1990s. Why the big change suddenly? I
think sometimes these things can accelerate and a couple of years
ago, for example, China was one of the major exporters in the
world of corn and today it is an importer, so that change of a
major supplier in global markets almost overnight becoming an
importer can really tip the balance in an area where you have
a pretty tight relationship between supply and demand. So I think
we have seen an acceleration of local demand that somehow reached
a balance where more countries were keeping their agricultural
outputs internal to meet local demand.
Q7 John Battle: Even with the price
changes and the price hike I think it is fair to say, is it not,
that your programme in the delivery of food aid has actually been
contracting? I think you are in 78 countries now and some 73 million,
a tenth of the world's malnourished get support from you. I know
it is not an exact science—I think it was two years ago
some of us were in the Congo—but in January there was a
political agreement that there would be peace in the Congo after
the traumas of the last 20, 30 years, but we know that today in
the Congo there are more people in East Congo being supported
again by the World Food Programme. I just want to ask you, if
the context is of a declining and a contracting food aid programme,
whether you buy it locally or ship it in, what assessment have
you made of having to reduce your operations quite substantially
in the next 12 months?
Ms Sheeran: First, let me say
that WFP is one of the most flexible programmes in the world in
the sense that we move our people and our attention where the
need is most acute. So if you look at that over many decades we
have moved from probably the majority of our programme being in
China many decades ago, Brazil, to really virtually being non-present
there, where those countries can now take care of their own internal
food needs. So first we do move, and during the tsunami, for example,
we concentrated our resources there. Today over a fourth of our
resources are in Sudan, in both Darfur and Southern Sudan and
the needs there.
Q8 John Battle: A fourth?
Ms Sheeran: A fourth. So we reach
over five million people a day with urgent food help in Sudan.
So we move where the need is because, again, our charge in the
global system and by all of you is to deal with the urgent call
of hunger when systems collapse. Secondly, there has been a decline
in food aid—I think we are at the lowest point since the
early 1970s. In part this has been a shift in our budget—now
over half our budget is cash, mainly from Europe, which allows
us the flexibility to respond in a more nuanced way when hunger
presents itself. In fact we have put forward in our strategic
plan, which the Board will consider in June, what I call a revolution
in food aid, where we look at that flexibility that has been provided
and how we can use that to respond to hunger in a more nuanced
way.
Q9 John Battle: But does that nuance
include, in a situation of contraction, for example—countries
that we target and the flexibility we understand that but what
about target groups and populations? Does it sometimes say only
women and children, only children under five in some neighbourhoods
and not men? What is the real impact is what I am trying to ask
of people on the ground? Do you have to say to less people that
really need it, "Sorry, you cannot be in the queue because
unfortunately we can only go for infants and mothers?"
Ms Sheeran: No, we can reach less
people. I think this year we are targeting reaching 73 million.
I think we reached a few years ago 89 million. Listen, there are
860 million people that have been identified as lacking adequate
nutrition and we still lose a child every six seconds to hunger,
so we are trying to address the most urgent needs that can most
efficiently be addressed with that help, but by no means is the
world able to address all of that.
Q10 John Battle: I am not criticising
your efficiency or management of the problem, actually I am trying
to put some weight behind your campaign to increase your resources
and back-up. On which note, if I shifted the question then, if
you have a graph of rising food prices—and that looks likely
for all that we talk about the peak of food prices, it is looking
likely with the shift to meat eating, frankly, as you said, in
China and less rice and increased cost of grain corn—what
projections have you put in the medium term into your strategic
plan? Do you see your programme being an increased bid, if you
like, asking for governments to give more and more money? You
have said already that it has gone up from a bid of $500 million
to $750 million; what is it looking like in the medium term?
Ms Sheeran: The World Bank has
come out with the first assessment figures of increased need based
on the high food prices, which they estimate about 100 million
people are being thrown into increased need. So we have two challenges:
one is our core group of work, the people are becoming more desperate.
I just came back from Kenya, in the slums there, and every little
household I dropped into people have been cutting out milk, vegetables,
just the basics of their diet, and so the local stew that could
be made with chicken before can no longer be made with the meat.
So we are seeing a nutritional reduction among these very vulnerable
populations. But then there is a whole new group of people who
would not have been identified even six months ago as acutely
hungry, as requiring an urgent intervention. For example, we put
out an appeal with the Government of Afghanistan for 2.5 million
people who were not on the urgent hunger list even last June who
simply are priced out of the food markets—they cannot afford
it. So we do have burgeoning need. I will say that you will hear
us being the biggest advocate for long-term solutions to this,
medium-term solutions—we need to get supply up, we need
to help with livelihoods. As a part of this, though, we need a
short-term emergency response to help alleviate some of this pressure.
Our concern is especially among young children if they go for
a period of time without adequate nutrition that stays with them
for a lifetime, and so I have been talking and working very closely
with UNICEF,[1]
for example, to look at how we can pair some of our school feeding
programmes with some food for the younger children of those families
to help alleviate the nutritional pressure right now that they
are experiencing. This is work in progress and we are really drawing
on experts like ODI[2]
and others to help us bring in these new assessments and figure
out the best, most adequate response. WFP is only one of the players
but on the front line of that urgent need we are seeing real increased
pressure.
Q11 Hugh Bayley: Hunger is increasingly
an urban problem and you have different challenges in urban areas.
I know that WFP has been looking at cash-based vouchers as a response.
To what extent do you think the WFP has the skill and expertise
and will be capable of building the community networks that are
necessary to deliver programmes in urban areas?
Ms Sheeran: That is an excellent
question. Just a bit of historic perspective: WFP was really started
as a surplus food programme when the world suddenly found it was
producing more than it needed for its populations and countries,
first starting with the US and then Europe, Japan, offered the
surplus food to help those in need. That is a fairly blunt instrument
if it is the only one you have to address the call of hunger,
and as you remember during the 1970s and 1980s sometimes communities
that had never used dried milk, it was all we had and you would
respond with what you had. It saved lives but much better that
you have a nuanced toolbox to respond. With the evolution now,
fairly recent, that half of our budget is cash we can begin to
ask for the first time what is the appropriate response? So if
I can give you a couple of examples. In Darfur there is no food
to be had and so we could drop off bags of cash there and people
would starve, so in that situation we have to bring in food from
somewhere else to meet that need. It was a very different situation
in the floods in Mozambique recently, where there was food from
local farmers but they did not have the logistical capability
to connect it with the victims of the floods but WFP did. So 70%
of the food we used in that flood was locally purchased and so
it is a win-win for the local farmers and for the flood victims
and we could do our emergency response that way. We think with
this new face of hunger we are going to face situations where
there is food on the shelves but people simply cannot afford it
and they are thrown into the ranks of the desperately hungry because
of that, and some of these protests that you are seeing around
the world are really the urban poor who suddenly cannot afford
the basic foodstuffs that they could a number of months ago. In
those situations we are asking our Board for a more flexible toolbox
where we could consider targeted vouchers, of which we have limited
experience but some successful experiences, for example in Indonesia
after the financial crisis there in the late 1990s and in Pakistan
we have done some of this, in Georgia and elsewhere. We have pulled
together our NGO partners to talk about the expertise any of us
have in this area and I think while there are pockets of experience
there is limited expertise and "scaleability" and so
we have started a process at WFP to pull together all of our experts
in-house to draw on the experience we have had and work with NGO
partners and other partners in the world to look at the most viable
approaches and the most effective approaches. I will tell you
that the Productive Safety Net Programme, we have worked with
the Government of Ethiopia where we use a combination of food
and, as appropriate, cash and sometimes subsidised access to food
which we feel is a good example of the kind of flexibility that
can respond in a nuanced way to what is causing the hunger. So
we have here one of the world's great experts, a citizen of Great
Britain, John Aylieff, who is in charge of our vulnerability needs
assessment area and we have now been able to develop this tool
to look at the market causes of hunger so that we can match our
response more accurately to the cause. So in short we do think
we need an expanded toolbox and we need to develop the programmatic
strength to be able to deploy that toolbox as needed. It will
take some time and we are now in a situation I think where those
tools are probably urgently needed, so we will do our best to
try to gather that expertise and scale up as appropriate.
Q12 Hugh Bayley: I start as being
a passionate advocate of moving away from food aid as food to
food aid as cash to purchase food where possible in the local
market, and I take your point about Darfur. But doing this poses
a whole range of problems, the problems of how you distribute
the vouchers, how you assess people's needs, how you prevent vouchers
corruptly or through other ways getting into the wrong hands.
There are also some economic problems of course. I remember when
this Committee went to Malawi during a famine and there was food
there but people could not afford it; but if you just pump in
money you inflate the price, do you not?
Ms Sheeran: Yes.
Q13 Hugh Bayley: How would you avoid
those sorts of problems?
Ms Sheeran: It may be that John
can offer some insight here. I would just say that it is critical
and urgent business for nations and the world to figure out how
to meet the urgent call of hunger in a way that is the least disruptive
to markets and as supportive of long-term solutions as possible.
There are as many causes of hunger as there are causes of human
suffering. Sometimes groups are forcibly marginalised and they
are being deprived food and sometimes the very perpetrators can
be the government. In those situations it requires a completely
different strategy than in a situation where inflation is out
of control, people cannot afford it, so developing that kind of
sophisticated analysis and response is something for which I want
to thank DFID and all of you for supporting us and strengthening
our needs assessment and vulnerability analysis. Is the world's
understanding of this state of the art? Probably not. Have we
made vast improvements over the past couple of decades? Yes. Will
we keep driving that, WFP as the UN agency that is in the lead
of this? Absolutely and we look forward to working with you more
on that because I know this Committee's interest in that. But
can we ask John?
Mr Aylieff: Thank you for the
question; I think your concerns are very valid. As Josette has
already said we and our NGO partners collectively have much less
experience of working in urban areas than we do in rural areas
and this is something that we collectively are working together
on to try and make sure we have the right tools and can deal with
some of the realities about which you have spoken. I think one
of the key things to all this is, when we assess, to really properly
understand the markets. And over the last three years where donors
have helped us, WFP, to bring ourselves and a partner through
a strengthening programme for assessments one of the main things
we put emphasis on is getting better market tools and there could
be no better time to have better market tools than now with this
crisis. So if the market analysis shows that the market could
respond to a cash injection then that is the tool we would be
recommending if it is deemed to be feasible. One other issue which
you have touched upon is targeting and again it is much more difficult,
we feel, in urban areas than in rural areas. We have experience
in Afghanistan, for example, after the 2001 crisis, where we did
urban distributions in places like Kabul and they were difficult
because we got beneficiary lists working with the government and
we then had to be very careful to verify that those lists were
accurate, that there were not inclusion or exclusion areas. There
are ways that we and our NGO partners do this, verifying that
the list is correct through random visits to households both before
the distribution starts but also in the course of the distribution
refining the list and making sure that the eligibility criteria
that we have established for vulnerability are respected in the
list; random visits to households etcetera. So over time the lists
are refined; but certainly urban targeting is trickier. I think
it is worth saying that with cash and vouchers, while an excellent
and appropriate mechanism in many of the contexts, we will find
in the light of the rising food prices and fuel prices that while
it is an excellent mechanism it is not the only mechanism. We
will also use food as a transfer where appropriate, either where
markets cannot respond or where we already have very good set-up
institutional arrangements for that. One example is working through
health centres in urban areas where we will already in some countries,
like Mozambique, Afghanistan and others, add on to the government
health system an additional nutritional ration for the mothers
and children attending those health centres and looking at ideas
such as giving a take home ration so that those health centres
can become a network for the distribution. But the key, I think,
is having a flexible response and in discussions with some of
the NGOs, including Save the Children and Oxfam, this has been
very much emphasised. Often it is a combination of cash and food
which is required. The blend of cash and food will change with
the seasonality; in the lean seasons probably a tendency more
towards food and outside the lean seasons a tendency towards cash.
But being able to switch back between one and the other I think
is critical.
Q14 Daniel Kawczynski: I was interested
that you said a quarter of your resources are in Sudan at the
moment, in Darfur. I visited Darfur myself last year and was quite
shocked by some of the things that the NGOs said to me about the
deliberate obstruction of their activity by the government. Is
this something that your organisation has faced as well and will
you be publishing any information on that?
Ms Sheeran: On the delivery structures
in Darfur?
Q15 Daniel Kawczynski: Yes.
Ms Sheeran: As you may have heard
recently we are in a real crisis in Darfur with our delivery structures.
We have had over 40 of our trucks attacked since just 1 January;
we have lost seven lives in Sudan since September. We have many
drivers who are missing in action even as we meet today and we
are getting about half the food in that we need to get in there—we
have a real crisis in our delivery capabilities in Darfur. So
we are looking at alternatives but it is very life threatening
work and very difficult work, and we are entering the lean season
there so this is very high up on our list. We have a range of
needs in Sudan. Darfur of course has been getting the most attention,
but Southern Sudan where we have everything that we had been hoping
for in Darfur, which is peace and a government in Southern Sudan
that is seeking to stabilise and bring refugees back, the nutritional
situation is quite acute with over half the provinces being at
emergency levels of malnutrition there and there being virtually
no infrastructure for food security, including a whole series
of roads that are destroyed or mined due to the war. I am very
proud of the fact that the Government of Southern Sudan became
one of our top 10 donors last year because of the value of the
work that we have been doing with them to reopen food supply routes
so that we can reduce general food distribution and we have been
able to cut our case load in Southern Sudan in half during the
past year because farmers can now get their food to market. We
have also shifted from general food distribution to food for assets
and food for work, so in exchange for food we give training on
road building, building of schools and hospitals to help the country
rebuild so that refugees can come back and resettle. This will
help the situation in Kenya, Northern Uganda and elsewhere. But
people simply cannot get back to a normal life if they cannot
get access to a secure food supply, so we are very busily trying
to work again with the Government of Southern Sudan and we have
many hundreds of our top people there to really be able to reduce
the dependency there. One thing that I have come to fully understand
in my work at WFP and previously is that no one in the world wants
to rely on anyone else for access to their basic food, to ensure
that their children have food—that kind of vulnerability
is the worst kind of vulnerability to have. So our goal is whenever
possible to restore that self sufficiency and in Southern Sudan
we have a real shot at it, but the needs there are still quite
big; also elsewhere in Sudan the needs are quite big. So it is
why I made my first trip in WFP to meet with the Government in
Sudan to urge them to do what it takes to build in a solution
to this challenge and also many of the other rebel leaders and
forces in Sudan that can contribute to stabilising the situation.
Q16 Sir Robert Smith: On the Darfur
situation where you are taking such a high risk and facing casualties,
how do you make that judgment as to what level of risk you take
because obviously the security comes from others in a way? How
do you make that judgment?
Ms Sheeran: We do call upon the
world to really stand with the humanitarian workers who do put
their lives on the line. Our people are armed with nothing other
than their vest with the World Food Programme insignia on the
back. I am very proud of the fact that when I went to Sudan the
World Food Programme was respected by all parties for having just
one mission, which is to reach those trapped in severe hunger
against their will, who are really usually innocent of any of
the causes. Sometimes that protection serves us well but sometimes
we find our people lose lives, as has happened since I have been
at WFP, all too often. We, as you may have read, have over 1.2
million people totally dependent on WFP food in Somalia. In order
to get that food there we run a gauntlet of pirates, our ships
are seized; we have lost people on those ships who were attacked.
Once we get in the country our people face grave danger, so I
will just say that in many situations we do not have the option—unfortunately
we are called on in the most difficult situations in the world.
But it does take a global concerted repeated message that it is
unacceptable to use food as a weapon; it is unacceptable to politicise
food; it is unacceptable to block access to food for those who
are cut off against their will from the basic access and ability
to feed their families. That kind of message heard over and over
again does help and it is the one that I go around the world trying
to make to do that. But we do owe thanks to Red Cross, Red Crescent,
WFP, Oxfam, Save the Children, the aid workers from governments
that really do put their lives on the line—it is a very
real reality for them. I will just mention that our security costs
are burgeoning. As you know, the World Food Programme limits its
overhead to 7% and I will get from my staff here the percentage
of our budget spent on security, which is astronomical. Often
we are out in the front lines where we do not have any support
structures really in security from anyone. We are out in these
villages on the front lines and so this is a very real part of
what we do. If you go to our camps in Darfur our people have to
live with just basic security to ensure that they can get a night's
rest and it becomes very challenging.
Q17 Mr Crabb: Your description just
then of how conflict and organised criminality disrupts not only
your work but local food distribution networks is really helpful
because one of the issues that we are very concerned with on this
Committee is the lack of real progress in much of sub-Saharan
Africa towards meeting the hunger-related Millennium Development
Goals, so it would be useful if you could set out what you consider
to be the main reasons why there is such a lack of progress in
much of Africa towards meeting those MDGs?
Ms Sheeran: First let me say that
a lot of governments are doing the right thing and I am so inspired
by the examples in Ghana, Botswana, Brazil, Chile and El Salvador
where governments are really turning around the situation and
have it within their reach to meet the Millennium Development
Goal of cutting hunger in half. When you look at these examples
there are some consistent things that are there, and number one
is a government making it a top priority to deal with the rural
poor. In many countries this is up to 80% of the employment and
60% of the GDP or over can be due to the rural agriculturalists
and pastoralists. Half the hungry in Africa are farmers who cannot
produce enough even for their own families and if you look at
the cycle in which they are trapped they virtually have no access
to credit, risk mitigation, markets, roads, input such as fertiliser
or seeds, so we know what needs to be done. But step one is really
governments making this a priority. So we very much support the
African Union and NEPAD's[3]
call for governments to spend 10% of their budgets on agriculture
and investing in the solutions to try and also just break the
cycle of poverty that many of these farmers are trapped in. So
that would be our first real call. I also have a very strong desire
to bring the issue of hunger to the attention of finance ministers
and others; I do not think it is just an agriculture issue. All
of the studies on nutrition show that if you do not invest in
the nutritional foundation of your country you pay in GDP and
lost wages and in future building of your societies. So we think
that it really requires a shift in mindset of how important the
investment in food security and nutritional security is and how
it pays off for a country in future development. I was just at
the African Union speaking with finance ministers and I think
one of the silver linings in the recent challenge that we are
facing with soaring food prices and tight supplies is a realisation
of how important it is to focus on some of the root causes of
hunger and food insecurity. So I am finding it almost as a wake-up
call for the whole world, including in Africa, to pay much greater
attention to these issues. Just to pause here for a moment on
conflict. One thing farmers need to produce is security and I
was just in Kenya and met with many farmers who were recently
displaced by the violence there. I think there is a global tribe
of farmers who are very similar. These IDPs[4]
were so frustrated because the planting season is there and they
cannot get to their land and they were all there just anxious
to get to work. Kenya needs them to produce. Right now one-third
less of the planting is happening in the Rift Valley than was
happening last year at this time. This builds in and you can see
how disruption can add to food insecurity. So I am very pleased
that the government is moving ahead there because Kenya needs
to plant; we need good harvests there. I think in WFP we become
more impassioned about ensuring that the causes of hunger are
taken care of because, frankly, there is more need than the world
can meet here and we need to solve these problems at their root.
Q18 Jim Sheridan: Can I pursue the ongoing
Millennium Development Goals—and you may have partly answered
this question—what should you put the focus on and what
indeed should the priority be for the WFP? Despite your best efforts
African countries are still significantly dependent on buying
food from America and the EU, but what should your priorities
be in terms of trying to develop it even further? Should it be
more investment in agriculture? Should it be to develop more markets?
Or should it be, as DFID is suggesting, that we have some sort
of social protection programme?
Ms Sheeran: I think it is really
a case-by-case situation but I will give you my macro answer and
then we could explore a couple of specific situations. I think
that it is important to raise awareness that food security is
not necessarily a natural outgrowth of economic growth and development.
It actually requires separate strategies and it is why even a
very rich country like the United States has a very extensive
food security infrastructure and social protection networks because
people fall into the ranks of the needy for a whole range of reasons,
and children are specifically vulnerable even in very wealthy
societies. So one thing I think we have been partnering with governments
is looking at what WFP does to build food security infrastructure,
such as just simply the ability to connect farmers who have produced
more than they require to areas of need. Even that basic infrastructure
is not existent in many countries. I do not know what percentage
of global hunger is an infrastructure and market information issue,
of which villages have surplus, which ones do not, how you match
them, where the infrastructure works, but a huge percentage has
to be due to broken infrastructure and food distribution. Plus
you then have to look at taking care of vulnerable groups—those
with HIV/AIDS, children, specifically children under two, mothers
who are expectant, mothers who are nursing—those may always
require special attention by society. So we have built into our
new strategic plan, which will be considered in June, what I call
handing over our food security knowledge to governments so that
they can build it into their own structures. For example, we have
done work with El Salvador, where many villages were simply cut
off from food distribution, to look at warehousing and distribution
methods where they could provide some kind of a safety net for
those areas traditionally not reached through local markets. So
I think that is very critical work; it requires a country-by-country
assessment of where the vulnerability is and what the best infrastructure
is. I will say that WFP's work where, rather than just handing
out food, we do asset building is very critical. For example,
I have just awarded a team at WFP that helped Angola open 3000
kilometres of roads that are vital to food distribution so that
we can get out of the business of feeding people. There were three
generations of landmines in those roads, we lost one of the crew
doing it, but this then allows food to flow and then we can move
back. So we are talking about a whole range of challenges from
basic infrastructure, knowledge of where surplus is and where
need is and then social protection systems in some countries.
Q19 Jim Sheridan: Are you confident
that the WFP alone can deliver these ambitious targets, these
challenges, as you call them, or are there other organisations
that could assist you?
Ms Sheeran: As you may know, I
was part of Kofi Annan's High-level Panel on coherence in the
UN system between humanitarian and development work. I never dreamed
I would work at the United Nations. I did not know much about
the World Food Programme until I started studying the institutions
of the UN there. As we outlined in our report there is virtually
no problem that the world faces today that can be solved without
a coherent action, not only throughout the United Nations but
with governments and with villages, which often have the best
knowledge and the most acute understanding of how to solve the
problem. During the High-level Panel I went to Pakistan to a little
village called Jabori and there was a lot of investment after
the earthquake there to solve the hunger and health needs—there
was a reoccurrence of polio after the earthquake there. I met
with five women of the village and I said, "If you had a
magic wand what is the one thing you would want?" and they
said, "Our buffalo; we lost our buffalo in the earthquake.
The buffalo provides all the milk needs for the newborns."
This was a simple solution that they knew could take care of those
nutritional needs and I am pleased to report that the buffalo
is on the way up, and we raised the money for that independently.
But it really requires working with the wisdom at the ground level
and at the national level to build in those structures that allow
people not to have to rely on outside help.
1 UN Children's Fund Back
2
Overseas Development Institute Back
3
New Partnership for Africa's Development Back
4
Internally displaced persons Back
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