Examination of Witness (Questions 50-59)
MR ALEX
REES
22 APRIL 2008
Q50 Chairman: Thank you very much, Alex,
for coming in, and I am sorry that you have been kept waiting.
We are very grateful because you have a different slant to give
us. Perhaps just for the record you could introduce yourself.
Mr Rees: Yes, thank you. It is
very nice to be here. My name is Alex Rees and I am a Food Security
and Livelihood Adviser working in Save the Children UK's Policy
Department and, as I am sure you know, Save the Children UK is
a leading UK international NGO working for children's rights in
many countries around the world.
Q51 Chairman: Thank you. You have
obviously given us evidence which is taking a different approach,
first of all, looking at urban problems, and clearly, the growing
urbanisation and the growing numbers of urban poor suffering from
hunger, and specifically an assertion that perhaps in that context
the World Food Programme is not the best agency. Perhaps you could
give us an indication of how you can assess the impact of food
price rises on urban populations and your own view on how those
can best be dealt with, given you do take the view that WFP may
not be the best agency to do it.
Mr Rees: I would say that perhaps
WFP has a role. I think the important thing to realise with these
food price increases is that, if you are a net purchaser of food,
which, of course, urban populations are, buying the vast majority
of their food, they are hard hit by food price increases, and
they are not the only ones. There are many other groups in rural
areas as well. Just considering the urban environment, there are
a lot of families, a lot of children, who are hard hit and it
will mean that people are forced to buy a narrower diet. They
will focus much more just on buying grains, the staples, and will
not be able to supplement those and get the important nutrients
that are needed for children to grow and develop properly. There
has obviously been quite a bit of emphasis so far in the previous
discussions on how important nutrition is for children, and that
is incredibly important. The food prices issue does bring to the
fore the urban environment, because humanitarian agencies all
together have had a fairly limited exposure to responding in these
environments, so whether you are talking about Niamey in Niger
or Nairobi, Kenya, there are often vast populations, lots of families,
lots of children, who will be affected and, while the infrastructure
of humanitarian agencies and methods to assess what is happening,
who is most affected, what kind of responses are most appropriate,
is quite well-established for rural areas, in urban areas we face
assessment challenges, knowing simply sometimes how many people
might be in particular informal settlements, very large ones,
often millions, for instance, around Nairobi. They are often very
close to the political centre and therefore there is a significant
chance that they will move if they are unhappy with the kind of
access to food that they have. They might take steps to show their
grievances, and that is obviously a concern for a whole range
of players.
Q52 Chairman: In that context, what
is the best way to meet their needs? We have discussed cash and
we have discussed food. In an urban environment, generally speaking,
apart from in extreme circumstances like war or famine, the problem
is that food prices are too high, not that food is not available.
Is it a matter of just giving them cash?
Mr Rees: You are right. Food is
available in most instances. We would obviously have to look out
in those conflict environments where food may not be available
in those fragile states, but for the most part it will be, and
it is about the economic access issues that have been mentioned
in the earlier discussions. Cash, of course, certainly comes to
the fore because that is the vital ingredient needed to essentially
go to the shops to buy the food that families and children need.
At the moment, while the World Food Programme is coming round
strategically and in policy terms to the idea that cash and vouchers
are options, there is a long way to go at country level to be
able to make the transition, because a great number of their systems
for decades have been set around food aid. There is a significant
mentality still around food aid. Admittedly, Ms Sheeran is pulling
the organisation along and they are making some significant strides,
both in assessment terms and developing some good market analysis
tools. There is still the issue of how they would run those cash
programmes, whether it is actually their responsibility to be
leading with that, given that government in many instances should
be taking ultimate responsibility for meeting people's food needs.
Q53 Chairman: We were talking about
adding vitamin supplements. If you think about wartime and post-war
Britain, they were targeted specifically at children. Those of
us who are old enough might remember National Health orange juice,
or whatever it may be, free milk in schools, those kinds of things.
Are you suggesting those kinds of mechanisms can be valid?
Mr Rees: While there have been
some developments in rural areas on predictable safety nets, there
is a great chance to consider the agencies and get government
involved in looking at hunger in urban areas, which has been with
us for a very long time. Often populations are hidden; they could
be in informal settlements and services are extremely low, and
therefore it is about identifying who is vulnerable and working
with government to set up a system to see what levels of food
security they have, and potentially looking at the levels of assistance,
whether that be in cash or vouchers, would need to be made according
to the context on the ground.
Q54 Hugh Bayley: You, Alex, have
highlighted the need to move away from food aid to cash and vouchers.
You have raised some of the practical difficulties and some of
the ethical questions about whether this is a donor responsibility
in all but the poorest countries, a government responsibility,
to ensure that you address gross disparities in income. If you
were in charge of the WFP rather than an official of Save the
Children, what would you actually do? What would your approach
be in urban areas in particular?
Mr Rees: First of all, there is
obviously a realisation around the limit of the mandate of the
World Food Programme that we need to recognise before going forward
as a response to problems rather than trying to solve the underlying
or root causes.
Q55 Hugh Bayley: You would keep the
mandate they have for emergency responses, but you would say if
you want to address a systemic food affordability problem in a
slum in Nairobi or Naimey or São Paulo you would do it
in a different way?
Mr Rees: I think one of the key
problems is that the roles and responsibilities about who is supposed
to assess a situation, who is supposed to lead with that and co-ordinate
that, and continually monitor safe food prices in urban areas,
and then the point at which you might want to make an intervention.
Again, there is a lack of clarity because typically in rural areas
it is a combination of the Ministry of Agriculture and other aspects
of disaster management authorities within government working with
agencies such as the WFP or Save the Children that make those
kinds of decisions, but in urban areas there is a little bit of
a vacuum at the moment in relation to the types of programmes
that are going on in those areas, what arms of government are
responsible for different types of interventions, and ultimately
who within government should be saving lives and which UN agency
is best placed to support government to respond to that hunger.
Certainly, WFP would be near the forefront and that is something
that we see them hopefully doing more of: less of delivering food
and more system building, more working with government and, as
Ms Sheeran mentioned, that is the direction they are going in.
I think it is a case of strengthening assessment capacities within
government, working on the types of triggers that would cause
an intervention, the monitoring systems, the logistics, the whole
predictable element of ensuring that families do receive ...
Q56 Hugh Bayley: Down from the level
of a national plan to what you do on the ground, which I am sure
with Save the Children's background, you have some practical examples.
When I put this question to the WFP the answer was "Well,
we are finding our way in how to do this, we will work with NGOs,"
which I think was a very good part of the response. "Maybe,"
she said, "you could distribute vouchers at child health
clinics," which seems to me to be a good idea, but then I
think of Kibera as a slum. People there told me that if they need
HIV treatments they cannot get to their health clinic, which is
outside the slum, and too far away. If you were trying to do two
things, to identify the households in Kibera who have a chronic
food shortage, and then to provide for those households but not
for other people a voucher, shall we say, how would you actually
set about doing it?
Mr Rees: To some extent, that
would change, obviously, by context but clearly, there is a need
to work out the socioeconomic status of a particular household,
how vulnerable they are to particular different types of shocks
and, essentially, there is no silver bullet for assessment in
that sense. It is about working out. It is a lot of crunching
and talking. First of all, you would need to work out the population
in that area, and that is one of the major stumbling blocks we
have in many urban areas. There is not knowledge within the government
and within the UN of the kind of levels we are talking about.
At Save the Children we would want to focus strongly on particular
age groups, and that would be nought to twos, because during that
age growth of infants is so important, and getting a diverse diet
for those children means that they will not be permanently affected
by chronic malnutrition, which is very often the case. So we would
not focus on aspects of school feeding, for instance, which is
not focusing, importantly, on that age where most impact can be
felt. There are other aspects to look at in terms of food prices
in urban areas. Subsidies of food could well be a way forward,
and I think it would vary significantly according to which particular
country and which urban area you were talking about.
Q57 Hugh Bayley: If a third of a
population needed some or all of the cost of their food being
paid for with cash or a voucher, what impact would that have on
the price of food? You might end up with an aid programme which
made food wholesalers very rich and did not significantly increase
the supply of food to the poor.
Mr Rees: You are talking about
the impact of an intervention on food prices?
Q58 Hugh Bayley: Yes. If you put
more cash in to buy a certain volume of food, you may just increase
the cost of a bag of rice or flour?
Mr Rees: Absolutely, and that
may well be the case, but it may also not be the case. That would
depend on the country, it would depend on how the markets were
functioning, and it would be important to get a good understanding
of those right at the beginning and to monitor the prices, suppliers
and volumes coming in as you went through that particular intervention.
Just as an example, in Swaziland we have been working, with DFID
support, in a large cash and food programme with the World Food
Programme, who are doing the food component. We are doing the
cash on top of that and, despite the overall situation of food
prices globally, over the past seven months food prices have been
entirely flat. So there is no automatic association between a
cash transfer and the food prices that are in that area. Whether
that be in urban or in rural areas, it is simply a case of monitoring
it very carefully. You may need to change to food aid, obviously,
if prices are going up, or change the balance between the two.
Q59 Hugh Bayley: I did not spot that
in your evidence. Could I ask you to give us a note afterwards
on that case study?
Mr Rees: Sure, absolutely, no
problem.[14]
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