CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 493 - i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT committee

 

 

the world food programme and global food security

 

 

tuesday 22 april 2008

MS JOSETTE SHEERAN and MR JOHN AYLIEFF

MR SIMON MAXWELL and DR STEVE WIGGINS

MR ALEX REES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 64

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the International Development Committee

on Tuesday 22 April 2008

Members present

Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair

John Battle

Hugh Bayley

Richard Burden

Mr Stephen Crabb

Daniel Kawczynski

Jim Sheridan

Sir Robert Smith

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Josette Sheeran, Executive Director and Mr John Aylieff, Director, Programme Design and Support Division, World Food Programme (WFP), gave evidence.

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.

Q20 Richard Burden: If I could bring you on to the increasingly difficult issue of biofuels. You will know that the EU has its target of 5% biofuel content in road fuels by 2010 and we have our own target here in the UK, but the link between food production and biofuels is something that is getting a lot more attention at the moment, both in relation to using capacity for the production of fuel that could otherwise be used for food, but also even in areas where the biofuel production seems to be more sustainable, for example in Brazil, there is the issue of the knock-on effect on prices and so on. You have very diplomatically recently said that governments need to look more carefully at the link between the acceleration in biofuels and food supply and give more thought to it. Can I ask you to go a bit beyond that and say what assessment have you really made about what is the impact of the increased use of biofuels on food prices and on food production?

Ms Sheeran: First, access to energy at an affordable price is a critical issue for the world's poor and in part we are seeing farmers simply unable to farm today because of the high cost of inputs, including diesel. So in many countries I am very concerned about the next harvest cycles because they are simply unable to get the fertiliser and everything that is based on the very high price of oil. This is why I am not only diplomatic on this issue but it is one of those issues that requires a very careful consideration of the interlinking between needs and demands and how food security and energy now are so closely linked. It is a fact that perhaps for the first time in history food and fuel markets are now interlinked in a way that food prices and food demand is very linked to what is happening in energy markets, and this creates some new uncertainties, such as if the world were to produce more food next year would it go to energy uses or food? It really depends on what the price of oil is and what those larger dynamics are. So it does require looking at their supply and what inputs are used and I really leave that to the experts to look at the broader effects of this. We are seeing-and this is really a global phenomenon-that when the oil price is very high it becomes very attractive to use virtually anything that grows in the energy system and we now have the technologies to produce fuel from virtually anything that grows. So we are seeing palm oil and maize and wheat and oil seeds and cassava and sugar being used for biofuels. Our biggest urging-this may be a long-term opportunity for farmers; there may be some crops that make better sense than others-is that the experts really get busy looking at its impact and the fact that these markets are now interlinked and the need for renewable, accessible, affordable fuel is also very critical for the farmers and the poor, and critical to solving the hunger problem. I know I am not giving you great solutions there.

Q21 Richard Burden: Whilst the experts are looking at that-and I am sure you are right, there is a very delicate and complex inter-relationship there, which I think none of us have fully grasped yet, the issue of climate change is a major, major issue-whilst that study is going on and maybe investments are going on in extra technologies, looking at whether biofuels can be produced in a more sustainable way, the issue of rising food prices and chronic food insecurity in whole parts of the globe is there right now. In a sense whilst we are looking at the long term do you have a sense of what you should be doing in the short term?

Ms Sheeran: We do feel and have put forward with FAO[5] and IFAD[6] and WFP, which are the Rome-based agencies, but now interlinking with UNDP[7] and UNICEF and the World Bank and others, we are developing a short-term, medium-term and long-term response to the soaring food prices, all of which, by the way, if markets changed tomorrow are urgent business for the world, to look at the global food supply system, the plight of the poor farmer and finding permanent solutions to this. I have called the Hunger MDG the Gateway MDG because really you cannot reach any of these other goals without solving the hunger problem. Again, biofuels is one of the factors that I think is contributing to tight supplies and increased demand but there is a complex array of factors doing that. So we are really urging those institutions that focus more on a global economy and these kind of macro factors and how they interconnect as the World Bank is doing, in calling for a new deal on global food policy, and the IMF[8]-recently Dominique Strauss-Kahn did a piece in the Financial Times. I think this is the right kind of attention at the economic factors that are interlinking to cause this kind of challenge that the world is facing right now. We hope that the problem gets solved because the pressure on WFP is greatly increased with all these rising demands and we would much rather see long-term permanent solutions to hunger. But it is our business to really meet those urgent needs as they present themselves.

Q22 Sir Robert Smith: I should remind the Committee of my entry in the Register of Members' Interests that I own a farm from which I get rental income, which is relevant to this inquiry. On the role of the WFP in enabling development, feeding in schools and nutritional supplements for maternity, the 2005 evaluation, I understand, did not actually find that there was sufficient evidence of a positive impact of such activities. Has anything been done since 2005 to look at these programmes?

Ms Sheeran: We do think that assessment did demonstrate that there is a solid body of work that has potential there, that we have been doing. Certainly in the whole range of developmental work it is often hard, because there are so many factors that deal with long-term development, to ensure that they are having the broad ranging permanent kind of effects that they have. Our development portfolio has been greatly reduced with all the emergencies we have had. We have had four times the natural disasters today that we did in the 1980s, but we do feel that there is tremendous benefit to the kinds of interventions we do and we feel very solid evidence, for example in our new report on the long-term impacts of malnutrition and the critical interventions with mother/child health or with HIV/AIDS patients, in ensuring that the nutritional base is met. If I could for a moment show you, this is a red cup that I take with me everywhere. This is from our school feeding site in Rwanda and I often use this to demonstrate how a little bit can have such a huge impact because for many of the kids that we reach it is the only guaranteed food that they will have every day. I think for the first time really in history we can ask not only is the cup full but what is in the cup? If we put a drop of vitamin A in there we are reaching 20 million kids a year and with governments that number increases exponentially in the intervention with the very vulnerable group of children that happens through this cup. We have never really been able to ask-back in the days we got what was offered in the surplus programme where the knowledge of nutritional interventions was not that strong-what is in the cup, but we now know that if we put two cents' worth of vitamin sprinkles in here it dramatically changes the nutritional base for a kid and we can address basic nutritional needs. So I think this kind of work is critical. If I could for one moment give one example of how we are using local purchase to help with long-term development? In Senegal they produce an excess of salt and most of the salt for export is iodised but most of the salt for local consumption is not. So WFP is trying to look at how we do our interventions to have as long-term a developmental impact as possible. So in Senegal we decided to buy our salt from 7,000 village producers for our Senegal programme and invested in them the technology and the training to iodise salt. Today we supply 100% of our needs in Senegal from the 7,000, mostly women, producers at the village level, but they also iodise their salt for local sale. This deals with one of the major health problems Senegal faces, which is goitre. I am not saying this is the answer to everything but what I am saying is we are very busily looking at virtually all of our interventions and how we can do them in a way that embeds a long-term developmental response. I call this a revolution in food aid because, if we look at every intervention and ask how it can be as sustainable as possible and as developmentally beneficial as possible, I think we begin to embed within food aid solutions that can hand off to other partners.

Q23 Sir Robert Smith: The more recent research is saying on the mechanics that if you give someone the supplements there is a benefit, but is it saying whether the WFP enabling programme is the right route or whether other agencies in the way they do their own programmes should be taking on board that nutritional information?

Ms Sheeran: I think it is a partnership right now. WFP, WHO and UNICEF have formed a triumvirate to make sure that our nutritional programmes draw on the expertise of each agency. We do virtually all of these things in concert now. I think that is critical because none of us has the complete information or understanding without drawing on the expertise of others, so this kind of drawing on the strength of each agency and making sure we are doing this. We just did two pilots, one in Mauritania, which looked at how you get at the under-five nutritional challenge, and found that there was something like 30 different types of interventions that would be needed to really have a comprehensive response to that, drawing out virtually the entire UN and local government system. WFP was involved in a number of those, UNICEF in a number of those, and WHO. It just demonstrated that this really requires a team effort to get at these issues. We have found that specifically those three agencies are vital to virtually all these interventions. WFP is reaching people, many millions of people, and developing our expertise, which we do not have to build in. WHO has it. FAO has a great nutrition team, as does UNICEF, so they can help inform us about how to do this. We are also drawing on the private sector, DSM and others, to draw on their expertise of how to do this better. I think that is the future and how to get better at having maximum results. If you do not mind, can we see if John has anything to add, since he does our assessments?

Mr Aylieff: Only that you have stressed very much the key issue here, which is partnerships, because malnutrition is driven by more than just food and caloric intake of food. We need very much to have a partnership with actors in the health and nutrition sectors. What we have is a massive outreach-20 million schoolchildren currently would be one example of this-and what we can offer in partnership with others is a platform where all those needs across the health, nutritional and food areas can be dealt with through one platform. Again, taking the example of the school, there has been research showing that giving a meal in school boosts attendance, and in our programming we have made that particularly geared towards girls' education. We have had quite a lot of success in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan in that area. In addition to boosting attendance, with UNICEF and NGOs we have run de-worming programmes for children so that what they are consuming has a much better intake. We are dealing through the provision of much more micronutrient-rich foods within those programmes with some of the micronutrient-driven malnutrition which the Executive Director has mentioned. I think this is a good platform. It is about partnership and I think perhaps where some of our development programmes have gone wrong in the past-I am talking about the past 30 years now, the whole history of WFP-is in having insufficient partnerships to back up those programmes and to ensure that they have the greatest impact possible.

Q24 Daniel Kawczynski: Could I ask you how you will make the transition from being a food aid to a food assistance agency and what your donors think about that?

Ms Sheeran: This is currently the discussion that we have going on with our Executive Board, which includes 36 nations. Again, really only recently have we had the option of asking how we specifically do business, because we now have over half our budget that is cash, which allows for greater flexibility. For example, in this proposal that we put together for the Board, it would look at embedding our work in a much more coherent way with the long-term development agencies so that there is almost a seamless transition of what I call the value chain of hunger. Often we see a gulf between emergency activities, long-term development, where societies can keep cycling back into the hunger zone. One of the proposals is what I call our 80/80/80 solution, which is actually something we are already doing with the cash we have. Eighty per cent of our cash for food is spent procuring food in the developing world. This is a win-win situation, as I just pointed out in Senegal, where we buy from the 7,000 village producers. They have their first secure income ever. It allows them to invest in the technology to do it better. Eighty per cent of our land transportation is locally procured, which enables us to build in capability in trucking and infrastructure, storage and warehousing that is left behind when we leave. So we give birth to many local transportation and infrastructure solutions that are so critical to solving hunger in the end. Eighty per cent of our staff are hired locally within country and they become very expert at food security systems, which helps, again, embed local solutions and investment in local economies. I do not know of any other organisation that is so deeply embedded now economically in the very countries where the challenges are. In our strategic plan we are also proposing a broader toolbox of response, so if the question is hunger when all systems collapse, sometimes one response will be better than the other. Sometimes you have to bring in commodities from the outside, like Darfur, sometimes local purchase would be the answer because the food is just not getting off the small farms. In the Democratic Republic of Congo last year we increased threefold our local purchase in a conflict zone where the farmers' food would be trapped and would never even go to market. We have the logistical capability to be able to get that out of the farms and use that in our programmes. This is really a win, because you are protecting livelihoods as you do that. We are also asking for our Board to endorse an exploration of vouchers and cash where they are appropriate, and to develop our expertise to use that tool when appropriate. We really want to look at both the toolbox that we have, the level of nutritional intervention that is appropriate in those programmes, and also the use of our very process of providing emergency help to help build in the solutions. I do think that food for work, food for assets, where you rebuild the food infrastructure rather than just handing out food, becomes key in this also, so hopefully we can then pass on to long-term partners a functioning food security system that can then be a basis for further development.

Q25 Daniel Kawczynski: Your Executive Board I think will make a decision potentially in June. Could you indicate-I do not want to put you on the spot-whether you are likely to succeed in pushing this through with them?

Ms Sheeran: Fortunately, we have ensured that this is not a mystery process. We have had seven formal consultations with the Board, starting in August. We decided to start the whole strategic plan by really laying out the value chain of hunger from emergencies to prevention of emergencies and crisis to the handover from emergencies to long-term development and who are the key players in each zone and where gaps are in the system and what WFP can uniquely offer. We built the strategic plan from that, looking at what WFP's unique role could be, and we have refined this repeatedly over the past six to seven months, including, I think, the first ever full-day consultation with our key NGO partners to get their input and consultations at the country level with the countries themselves that are part of this. This is a very informed document. We have just finished our last consultation and we will refine the draft yet again based on the input of all our UN partners, and I think we are fairly close at least to a zone of winning the support that we will need to go forward with that.

Q26 Chairman: The World Food Programme, and indeed other UN agencies, have a good reputation for very rapid response to emergencies, but the UN has a terrible reputation for rapid organisational change and response. We had evidence from Professor Haddad from the Institute of Development Studies, and you have already indicated you are doing more of that, that the agencies, particularly the Rome-based agencies, should co-ordinate more. How do you think that could be better done? He specifically says "very few truly joint initiatives manage to transcend the institutional fights for resources and media limelight."[9] The Committee had an experience when looking at the earthquake in Pakistan. We simply asked for a meeting with the UN and that was the first instance of the lead cluster operating. When we actually went into the room there were 24 people representing different United Nations organisations. By the time we had completed the introductions the meeting was nearly over! Can you perhaps give some indication that you do have the ability to respond in a co-ordinated way and how you feel that could be done?

Ms Sheeran: This is a critical area to explore. First, for WFP, our focus is hunger, which sometimes involves agriculture and food production but often at other times involves conflict, marginalisation of people, attitudes towards women, children and the vulnerable, so hunger itself is not always about agriculture and food and food production. As we know, there is enough food in the world today to feed people, and we have 860 million people and growing who are abjectly hungry. I just point that out because the range of partners we need is very varied and sometimes it is the Rome-based FAO/IFAD agricultural experts but actually our biggest partner in the UN is UNICEF, and the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is probably our most totally coherent partner in that we do all the food for all the refugee work and we work hand-in-glove everywhere in the world. I also mentioned that a huge part of our network is over 3,000 NGO partners around the world, all the major NGOs and Red Cross/Red Crescent movement but also local NGOs, community NGOs, because our whole philosophy of delivery is that we do the major pipeline and the last mile, whenever possible, is done by local experts who have the understanding at the village level. There is virtually nothing we do that is not an extensive network of activity. With the Rome-based agencies, we have just completed a report that demonstrates hundreds of projects, many of them really inspiring, that we do together. There is probably more that can be done, simple things. For example, last year we did a joint energy bid for all our buildings in Rome and it saved a lot of money. We have looked at combining offices out in the field; that saved a lot of money. We are working very closely on some very exciting projects, such as working with FAO and IFAD on our local purchase initiative, which we are calling Purchase for Progress, where in Mozambique, if we provide a guaranteed sale for farmers, they can then get the credit and the seeds and the fertiliser to help increase yields and break the cycle of poverty. We are doing this together as three agencies rather than just WFP with its purchases. That does not mean to say there is not more room for growth and a coherent response, and we find, particularly on hunger, which is what we focus on every day, it just requires working with social protection people, with peace and security-now in Haiti the Department of Peacekeeping wants to work very closely with us because food is about peace and stability also.

Q27 Chairman: I think you are arguing that, apart from just being an emergency response to hunger, you should have more in your programme to actually prevent hunger, something which DFID does not appear to agree with. That is where the strategy is going. The point really is, are you going to be able to put yourself forward, or are you putting yourself forward as an agency that wants to lead on that, or are you going to have to defer to somebody else? People need to know who is actually going to provide the leadership.

Ms Sheeran: I would make two points on that without coming to a conclusion, because I think we are in the middle of a global discussion about how best to handle this. One is I think the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, pointed out that the investment in the hunger/malnutrition MDG is about 10% of what the very worthy investment is globally in HIV/AIDS-in the long-term solution to hunger and malnutrition and the cost to societies are huge. We recently did a study in Latin America that showed 11% of GDP can be lost without that investment. I do think this latest challenge, with the soaring prices, will have the world focus on how critical it is to invest in the food security/nutritional infrastructure of the world. Some of that is emergency work but a lot of that is longer-term developmental work. We will at least be a cheerleader for that work in all the different aspects that it can happen as the only organisation maybe in the world that focuses solely on the issue of hunger. Sometimes I feel like the soldier who comes back and becomes a great advocate for peace because they have seen the face of war. It just takes seeing a few mothers unable to answer the cry of their children to say we need to get out of this business of hunger in the world. What is intriguing to me is that the world actually knows how to solve the hunger problem. It does not require a new scientific breakthrough. I do think we are hopefully at the time in history when we have decided that hunger is simply an unacceptable part of the human condition. It requires everyone-governments deciding it is unacceptable, rebel groups deciding it is an unacceptable tool to isolate people from food, all of us deciding that it is the top of the political agenda-to say this is no longer acceptable. You cannot cut off what is usually women and children from access to basic food as a tool of war or politics or deny the kind of investment needed to ensure basic food security. We will be a voice on that. We will try to be part of the solution. We will try as much as possible to hand into the long-term work of the World Bank, the IMF, UNICEF and everyone on this. It is my hope and dream that in our lifetime we will see the world get very serious about hunger and making it part of history.

Q28 Jim Sheridan: I have just read the very interesting article in The Economist with the rather profound comparison made of this being a silent tsunami. In answer to the previous question you indicated that you would provide us with figures for security costs which comes out of your budget. That would be of real interest to the Committee if we could have those figures.

Ms Sheeran: I think we have them here. It is $47 million a year and, with our overhead budget of 7%, that is probably nearing 20% of our overhead budget.

Q29 Hugh Bayley: Ms Sheeran, your last answer left me deeply depressed. The donor community desperately wants the UN to reform, to streamline its operations, and your answer makes me think the UN just does not get it, and I think that is very serious. I think in the longer term donors are going to become more and more reluctant to support a UN structure which is so fragmented. We face a global food crisis which is pushing more and more people over the brink into hunger. We know that we need a response which is multifaceted, which deals with child nutrition and global economics and energy policy as well as putting food in people's bellies, yet I see no serious moves from the UN to streamline its operations, to merge agencies, to cut down on bureaucracy, to put more resources into dealing with global problems. Just because you deal with problems that tear at people's heartstrings, like hunger and child health and reproductive rights and human rights and refugees, it is not a reason for inaction. It is all the more reason for action, because we want more efficiency and more delivery. Would this not be a classic case where there is a growing human need for action on the global food system to actually provoke UN change and some agency mergers and some cuts of bureaucracy? Why is it not happening?

Ms Sheeran: I am trying to think of what I said to leave you with any impression that was different than what you have just outlined.

Q30 Hugh Bayley: You seem to be justifying the status quo and saying "We will co-operate a bit more together and we will try and share some offices in the field," but something radical needs to be done. The UN is a huge bureaucracy, which makes it much less efficient than it otherwise would be. It has some incredibly important missions and I believe those are weakened and undermined by the failure to reform. When is the UN going to get serious about reform?

Ms Sheeran: I will tell you that I have seen in response to this food crisis a pulling together not only of the UN system but the global system as I have never seen before. The Secretary-General just pulled together all the agencies of the UN to come up with a coherent response, in fact organised by Sir John Holmes in his role as OCHA[10] Co-ordinator, and virtually everything we have done in response to this crisis is to develop a short-term, medium-term and long-term plan that really looks at the role that individual expertise and agencies can bring to the table to contribute in a coherent way to that response. Each agency was started with a different mandate for a different reason. I was not there when all these were born. I think the key is: can we bring those to bear in a coherent way to provide solutions when the challenges come? I do see that happening in the food prices. It has to. I was trying to make the point that with hunger it can never be a single agency solution because while the High Commissioner for Refugees has a responsibility for protection, I think they accept that they do not have to be a food delivery expert to do that. I will just give you a couple of examples that I hope will leave you hopeful. When I came to WFP, I immediately went down to the humanitarian response depot-and I think you all went to the one in Accra. This is the result of a major humanitarian reform in the UN, which ended up with a cluster system but also with WFP being the lead agency in co-ordinating logistics. What happened over the decades when WFP was delivering food is we became an expert on huge pipelines, and the question someone else asked-I cannot take any credit for it-is, does the world really need 10 pipelines? No, it does not. So WFP can virtually reach any corner of the globe in 48 hours, as we proved in Lebanon, when we were in there, reaching 800,000 people with a customised basket. It was not just food: it was medicines from WHO, water, tents. That was all pre-positioned and all negotiated with governments, the landing rights and access to be able to get it in. That is a huge reform. It is not a fractured system; it is one response happening. Margaret Chan of WHO, for example-we do all their delivery of medicines now globally. That is a huge change in how institutions function. If you think about the UK government and all the different departments-Treasury, Education, and all this-they all have different mandates but to be able to combine strengths for solutions I think is key. I think there have been some things; in fact, in the Coherence Panel we found that the humanitarian area had really gone through much more reform and coherence, with a couple of areas still needing exploration, like the handover, the early recovery area and the IDP area, but huge improvements, and that handover to long-term development I think is where we identified not only a gap but sometimes a chasm. The only thing I can think is, rather than WFP becoming permanently a development agency, making sure we provide strong handshakes between what we do and the long-term, permanent solutions in the area of expertise we have. I think the new Secretary‑General's endorsement of the Delivering as One report, the fact that this is being debated in the UN... I will tell you I ran the process on business harmonisation in the UN. The fact is that everything is apples and oranges in UN systems. You could not even cross-check accounting systems, how much the UN is spending in Haiti. It is very hard because all the accounting systems are different. This has already gone through and been approved. This will be a revolution in just harmonising systems so that you can compare programmes across the board. That is a big victory. It was approved by the General Assembly. It is moving ahead. It was endorsed by Shaukat Aziz and the President of Tanzania and Louisa Diogo that to at least get these systems harmonised. I would just say for WFP that I am very proud that we are often at the leading edge of looking at the kinds of systems that will allow for coherence across the board. We will be the first UN agency to adopt international accounting standards of IPSAS.[11] This is a huge effort, especially for an agency which has 7% of its overhead on all of these matters, but harmonising systems, getting everyone on the same page, and being assured that when we are faced with a crisis we are not all running off in our own directions but pulling together is a big step-but no doubt not all the steps that need to happen.

Q31 Chairman: The whole issue of UN co-ordination is something we never get very far away from when looking at these kinds of international crises. Thank you for the evidence that you have given us. We are hoping to visit your headquarters in Rome as part of this inquiry. There is no doubt at all that the WFP does deliver vital supplies to people who would otherwise simply die if you did not make it. You have already indicated to us that many of the people who are involved in that are risking, and in some sad cases losing their lives and I think we should record that. Never mind the politics and the admin, those facts should be fully recognised, that people are prepared to put their own lives on the line to ensure that other people do not die. That has to be something that the world should acknowledge and appreciate. Clearly, if this existing food crisis is to persist, as the indicators suggest it may, your organisation is going to be crucial but we also have to have longer-term solutions, as Hugh Bayley said, and effective co-ordination. I actually think I need to say you were on Kofi Annan's High-level Panel. We all have a lot of frustration with the UN, but it does not mean it never works. It clearly does work in many areas. Thank you very much indeed for giving your evidence. We have overrun on time but, given that this is a report into the World Food Programme, it was important that we had the opportunity to explore all these issues with you.

Ms Sheeran: Thank you so much and I am very pleased that the Prime Minister has pulled together much of the world today also to discuss coherent responses with us. That kind of leadership is critical. Thank you also for the support you have given to looking at coherence in the UN system. I know this Committee has been a leading voice and advocate of solutions that can drive not only efficiency but effectiveness. So thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Simon Maxwell, Director, and Dr Steve Wiggins, Research Fellow, Overseas Development Institute, gave evidence.

Q32 Chairman: Thank you. I am sorry to have kept you waiting, although I know you were sitting at the back listening to that. Perhaps, again, formally for the record, you could introduce yourselves.

Mr Maxwell: I am Simon Maxwell, the Director of the Overseas Development Institute in London. My colleague is Dr Steve Wiggins, who is a specialist on this subject.

Q33 Chairman: Thank you very much. I am sure the questions will not surprise you very much. You are obviously aware of the context of the discussion. This inquiry is specifically into the role of the World Food Programme. I think it would be fair to say that the issue has escalated since we decided to undertake the inquiry and, as we have discussed, the WFP is crucial but is not the only agency that has to address this. I just wonder if we could perhaps start by exploring your thoughts about how you think the WFP should respond to the current situation. Hugh Bayley was asking about the role of cash and vouchers. Do you think they should be more widely used and what are the risks and the possible negative downsides of doing that? Tell us really in your own terms how you feel WFP should best respond to this situation.

Mr Maxwell: I think, Chair, you are asking two questions. The first is about the role of the WFP. You have seen Josette Sheeran in action. She is charismatic and effective and one of the best UN leaders of the current generation, engaged on a project which is hard but necessary: to move WFP from being an agency which concentrates on the logistics of delivering food to emergency situations to one which is concerned with tackling hunger more widely. The move will need a different attitude by donors and different skills in WFP but, for the kind of reasons that Hugh Bayley was hinting at, it will put WFP in the right position in terms of the UN as a whole. The key to the problem is the shift between cash and food that you talked about in your evidence session with her, which is a constant problem because markets are constantly changing and the right answer to the question of whether to provide food or whether to provide cash can change at very short notice. I hope donors will support what she is trying to do, and the strategy exercise they are engaged in is an important one. If it is successful, that still leaves your second question of where the UN system is as a whole. When Josette Sheeran was a member of the High-level Panel on UN reform along with Gordon Brown there were three sets of recommendations. One said work more closely together at country level, and pilots are beginning to happen, although mostly in development situations rather than emergency situations. The second was to have one single governing body. That has not happened at all. The third was to have one single fund for all of this, and that has not happened at all either. It would be interesting to explore the reasons why, but the food crisis does provide an opportunity to make progress. It would be very helpful if the large countries like the UK would say to the UN system "We want one ten-page summary of what you want to do as a UN system, signed by the Secretary-General and delivered to the series of meetings that is happening through the summer", the Call to Action, the G8 and so on.

Q34 Sir Robert Smith: Obviously, the World Food Programme is looking for increased resources in the current situation. Without those resources being delivered there is going to be narrow targeting and tighter prioritisation, so in the longer term how should the Programme ensure the immediate need of food assistance for the safety net?

Mr Maxwell: The place to start is to look from the inside out rather than the outside in. Something that has not been very much discussed this morning is the importance of country leadership. In the aid world more widely, the conversation, especially this year, has been around the importance of alignment behind country-driven priorities and harmonisation of donors. That is an agenda driven by the OECD[12] and known as the Paris Agenda. The first answer to your question is to ask the countries themselves what they want to do in terms of safety nets for poor people, and then to look at how those can best be supported by external donors. The FAO published figures this week that say that the total extra import cost for low-income food deficit countries this year will be $20 billion. That dwarfs many times over the resources required by WFP for their particular safety nets. We know that although WFP is reaching 20 million children, did Josette Sheeran say, there are 150 million children who are malnourished in the world. So the whole question of social protection and safety nets needs to be at the heart of an agenda, driven by the countries themselves. Then we need a range of resources to deliver support to that, most of which will be in the form of cash.

Q35 Sir Robert Smith: Are the 20 million the worst affected of the 150 million?

Mr Maxwell: Not necessarily, because WFP has historically been moved to a position by donors where it focuses mostly on long-term political emergencies, such as Darfur or Southern Sudan. There are very many children below the 80% cut-off which marks severe and chronic undernutrition living in south Asia and in countries in Africa which do not receive that kind of assistance. WFP also has a school feeding programme but that is highly selective and reaches only relatively small numbers of schools, and there is a debate about whether or not that is the kind of thing that should be rolled out in an emergency.

Q36 Hugh Bayley: To what extent is agriculture the solution to food shortages, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa?

Mr Maxwell: We know from many, many years work on nutrition, and particularly the work of the Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, that people on the whole do not die of hunger because there is not enough food in the country or in the market. They die of hunger because they do not have access to that food, what Amartya Sen called entitlement to food. So in dealing with long-term problems of hunger, we need to ask the question how people access food, what the source of their livelihood is and how markets provide the food. Sometimes we need to provide food directly. More often we need to provide cash. As we then think about the needs of farmers, they will often find the best source of livelihood growing crops which are not food: coffee, tea, sisal and cotton are very important sources of livelihood and very important sources of entitlement for many poor producers. So it is important not to be driven by a kind of food fetishism in thinking about the solution to global food problems. This is something that my colleague works on a great deal and may want to add to if he is allowed to, Chairman.

Dr Wiggins: Just to add a little bit to that, the role of agricultural development is probably best seen through two lenses. One is that agriculture is a source of employment and income, not only to farmers and farm labourers but also to people who are engaged in the food chain, to people who gain their livelihoods and incomes through multiplier effects as farmers spend additional cash. A vibrant agriculture and vibrant agricultural development is something that can raise incomes generally in the rural economy, where 75% of the world's poor are located. But the other side of it is equally important. If you look at what has happened to world food prices until recently, since round about 1950 you have a very large fall in food prices, and that has been driven by agricultural development. If you take a country like Bangladesh, which at independence, just over 30-odd years ago, faced a very poor prognosis. Between the year 1980 and the year 2000, the wholesale price of rice on the market in Dhaka, the capital, was just about halved. That was largely owing to a green revolution. Halving of the real price of rice was an immense benefit to the poor of Bangladesh, whether they were farmers or not. This is why the recent rise in food prices is so alarming, because if we argue that the fall in food prices is so beneficial to the poor, we have to be alarmed about something that pushes us backwards.

Hugh Bayley: Some strategic changes, climate change, oil prices-I do not think they are going to drop back-are generating a doubling of food prices. What I am not clear on is whether the Amartya Sen truism that there is enough food in the world and one needs to look at the economics and the distribution systems will hold true in 10 years' time. Do we need more food production, particularly more regional food production? Is Africa's solution a green revolution in Africa, new seeds to deal with the changed climate, more irrigation, or have things not changed?

Q37 Chairman: Can I reinforce that? Dr Clay in his evidence to us says, "The prevailing wisdom now is that, against this strong demand scenario, aggregate foodgrain supply response in the short term will be insufficient to pull prices down very much", and yet DFID says prices have already weakened.[13] There are signs that the market is already responding. Just on the facts-well, not the facts because they are projections, and projections by definition are not facts-what is your take on that? It seems pretty crucial that we actually know what we are dealing with.

Dr Wiggins: If you look at the history of world food prices, since 1950 there has only really been one major spike, which was 1973-74, when the prices of most cereals went up by something like two, three or four times between 1972 and the peak in 1974. At the time those events were seen as almost apocalyptical because that was a time when world population was rising faster than we had ever seen it. In fact, in retrospect, it was the maximum rate of population growth. It was also just after the disastrous droughts of the Sahel from 1968 to 1972 so there was a snese of environmental crisis. But that particular price spike was over something like 18 months after---

Q38 Hugh Bayley: It was triggered by oil, was it?

Dr Wiggins: It was triggered by some harvest failures, particularly in the Soviet Union, some of which at the time were seen as the result of climate change. It was also triggered by the oil price, which made fertiliser much more expensive and caused a breakdown in the application of fertiliser over a short period. However, 18 months later most of that spike had gone and the long-term downwards food prices trend was re-established. There was a small spike round about 1995, 1996 and again, it lasted something like 18 months. Price spikes last about as long as it takes for the big farmers in the world who can react to prices fairly quickly to get to work. So we have every expectation that the current price spike will be largely overcome once the northern hemisphere's harvest is in in the third or fourth quarter of this particular year, but what all the projections are showing at the moment-and there are at least three sets of major projections-is that the medium-term forecast over the next five to 10 years is for prices to be at something like 20 to 40% higher than we have seen them in the recent past. That may sound quite a long way higher and it is not desirable, but against the historical record of declining food prices, that takes us back to food price levels that we saw in the early 1990s.

Q39 Hugh Bayley: What, if anything, could be done? You are saying we should not overreact to the price spike we are in at the moment, but what could be done to reduce the cost of food to the poor given a market projection that basic costs will rise by 20 to 40%?

Mr Maxwell: What we have to do is to take short-term measures which will not undermine long-term solutions. The big international agencies like the World Bank are advising countries strongly against export bans or tariffs which will inhibit trade, and strongly in favour of targeted safety net programmes. There are some countries where that is relatively easy because such safety nets or food subsidy programmes already exist, for example in Egypt and in some countries in Latin America with cash transfer programmes. There is a group of countries where the basic social protection infrastructure is not in place which are going to be the most problematic countries over the coming year or two.

Q40 Sir Robert Smith: I just wanted that reinforced, that you think in a sense that, despite all the headlines, there is going to be enough food?

Dr Wiggins: Yes.

Q41 Jim Sheridan: To experts like yourselves, this may seem a rather off-the-wall or naïve question but do you see any comparison between the current food crisis and the fuel crisis, i.e. the production of oil is limited and restricted and therefore prices are forced up. Could that happen in the food industry?

Mr Maxwell: There are lots of interesting parallels to other things going on in the world at the moment and oil is a very good place to start because, if there is an oil crisis, most countries have reserve stocks that they can release. What has happened in the food area is that the stocks have run down to their lowest level for a quarter of a century. There is very little room for manoeuvre in the system to manipulate the market other than through the kind of distorting tariffs or taxes that we were talking about a moment ago. Another very interesting current comparator is the credit crunch. We see some very assertive moves being made around transparency, a greater degree of regulation and accountability of the institutions involved. We do not quite see that translated across to the food area. That is one reason why having a strong role for the Secretary-General is so important. For example, it provides the same kind of focal point for information and transparency in the food area as the IMF plays in the banking area. It is a very good point you have made that we should be looking across these different sectors to see what best practice might be.

Q42 Richard Burden: You probably heard me asking Josette Sheeran before about how the biofuels debate fits into all of this. What is your take on that?

Dr Wiggins: Biofuels are clearly part of the problem with the current spike because in the last year, in 2007, something like 80 million tonnes out of the US maize harvest went to ethanol distilleries and that surely has some effect on the maize price. On the other hand, it does not explain all of the story, because one of the most alarming events over the last six months has been the rise in the rice prices and, as Ms Sheeran was telling us, paying up to $1,000 a tonne in Asia for rice is quite astonishing. The rice market is almost completely unaffected by biofuels. Wheat is to some extent linked into the maize market by displacement effects in North American planting but North America is not a significant producer of rice, so it is more than just biofuels but biofuels to some extent are part of the issue.

Q43 Richard Burden: I suppose what many of us are trying to come to terms with at the moment, as Josette Sheeran said, is that there are some very complicated issues around biofuels in the long term and the relationship between biofuel production and food and different sorts of biofuel production. Whilst all that is going on, are there short-term policy imperatives for us either to adopt or ones that we have assumed are good that now need to be rethought?

Mr Maxwell: Let me say something about that. We need to be careful not to demonise biofuels. I do not know whether you saw the BBC headlines this morning about statements from the Presidents of Peru and Bolivia attacking Brazil for its investment in biofuels. We would say from our research that there are much more plausible targets, including EU policy, which has provided high levels of protection for biodiesel particularly and also bio-ethanol, and, of course, the United States. There is no doubt that 80 million tons of maize going into biofuel in the United States has an impact on the market. If there were to be a one-year moratorium on using maize for biofuel, that would make a big contribution to bringing food prices back down to normal levels, and I know some people have recommended that.

Q44 Chairman: What about the rice price? That is interesting. I asked before whether or not people who have moved into meat and different diets then find the prices moving away from them and move back. There is some evidence that people have gone back into rice and are actually contributing, ironically, to pushing the price up, or is it wholly unrelated to that?

Dr Wiggins: I really am at a loss to explain how steeply the rice price has risen over the last couple of months. A working hypothesis would be that, with so many major rice exporters putting in place either an outright ban on rice exports or only allowing rice exports out at a very high price, such as the Indian case of $1,000 a tonne, there is now so little rice on the world market that the price is a residual for the very small amount that is traded.

Q45 Sir Robert Smith: There could be surpluses in these countries?

Dr Wiggins: I think farmers in Thailand would love to be able to export more rice at $1,000 a tonne. They must be champing at the bit.

Q46 Chairman: People are not paying that. It is a spot price, is it?

Dr Wiggins: Yes.

Mr Maxwell: The question of what we should do in the short run was Mr Burden's other question. Clearly, this is about making sure that people who do not have access to food do have access to food. The important questions are then: is the food available and what would it cost? If you think there might be 200 million people at the most really affected by this-I think Robert Zoellick said 100 million might be seriously affected and pushed back below the poverty line but say 200 million-if you needed 100 kg per person in order to prevent famine, that is 20 million tonnes. Global cereal production this year is estimated by FAO at about 2 billion tonnes, so we are talking about less than 1% of global cereal production. In fact, it is usually the case that when we look at the cost of alleviating or reducing poverty and undernutrition as a share of total global income and as a share of total food supply, it is relatively small. The key thing is to put in place measures to enable people to access food, preferably using cash but in some circumstances food, and making sure that countries take the lead and are then supported by the international system. As we support the international system-let me just make one quick point-creating a new fund is probably not a good idea. We already have a large number of funds and programmes working on this. UN agencies, apart from their incoherence, as Hugh Bayley rightly observed, are very much handicapped by the very high share of funding, up to three-quarters in some cases, that comes in the form of special-purpose trust funds and special-purpose vehicles, which make it impossible to manage these agencies. How do you manage an agency where three-quarters of your money is coming in dribs and drabs for special things and there is no coherent priority setting? What we need to do here is to find a way to put extra money into the agencies in order to support the short and then medium-term food programmes, and to do it by supporting their core budgets and not by setting up special-purpose vehicles.

Q47 John Battle: I am still working over the comments that our colleague Hugh Bayley made in the previous session because I think a major issue is this business of the UN and whether it is possible to have the UN streamlined to deliver one food security agency. Do you see good prospects for having one UN initiative on food security? We have heard from our previous witness, and she might be championing it, but what are the chances and what are the major obstacles to it? Otherwise I am with you on this one. I can see why we all say the UN is the way forward, that we have a crisis of confidence in the UN and they end up getting even less money and the appeals all fall foul.

Mr Maxwell: I would say that the key issue about reform of these agencies is never 'why' and never 'what', but 'how'. It is how do you create an incentive structure which makes it plausible and possible to deliver change? It does seem to me that we have two absolutely key factors working in our favour at this moment. The first is the sense of crisis, the need for urgent and co-ordinated action; and the second is that we are living at a time in which, with some qualifications, aid budgets are rising. In thinking about how to lead the change, a very important lever is money. We can put an offer on the table to the developing countries and to the UN agencies which says "There will be very significant rewards for you." The UN currently accounts for somewhere between 10 and 15% of total aid. If aid is in the process of doubling over the next five years, as has been promised following the Gleneagles summit, we have the prospect of doubled budgets for the UN. We could go from say $15 billion to $30 billion. If we take a three-year or even a five-year planning framework, as we do in the UK, we could be talking about somewhere between $90 billion and $150 billion on the table for the UN. That is a conversation that donors should be having with the UN and saying "What can we have in return?" That would be attractive to the UN agencies, of course, but it also ought to be very attractive to the main stumbling block, which has historically been the G77. What we need to then do is build a political conversation with the G77. The Select Committee and others like it around the developed world have an enormously important responsibility and opportunity to open this conversation with your counterparts in developing countries and see whether we cannot build a consensus for radical change in the UN over the coming years.

Q48 Chairman: I am conscious of the fact that we have overrun and you have other engagements, so can I say thank you very much, both for coming in but also for the evidence you have given us, and for all the work we do together in any case. We are really doing a short inquiry into the World Food Programme and these other issues we are raising. We may come back to it in more detail at a later date if we feel it has raised questions that need more detailed analysis. I am slightly encouraged by your comments on how prices will be determined and the ability perhaps if we can get organised to respond to it, but I am also confused because the comments we get are pointing in different directions. I will happily take your analysis as more optimistic than some of the others.

Mr Maxwell: It would be dangerous to assume that we are not facing a very serious issue with food prices over the next few years and that an increase of 40% will not cause a great deal of hardship to a large number of people. It is a problem but it is also an opportunity.

Q49 Chairman: I take your point; what you are saying is that we should try to grasp that opportunity.

Mr Maxwell: We wish you luck with your inquiry and thank you for listening to us.

Chairman: Thank you very much.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Mr Alex Rees, Food Security and Livelihoods Advisor, Save the Children UK, gave evidence.

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.

Q60 John Battle: We took evidence from the Executive Director of the World Food Programme, and I know that Save the Children talked about the need for the UN to sort out who has the lead responsibility in tackling the food crisis. Which UN agencies should be responsible for reducing food insecurity, in your view? How would the structure look?

Mr Rees: It would be very nice to blow it open and reconstruct the architecture but reality dictates that we cannot do that and we have a number of institutions that have a role to play. As Save the Children, we would really want to highlight the importance that nutrition plays. It is not just a little sector; it is an outcome for children, for adults, of a range of sectors and therefore the architecture globally and at country level needs to focus more effectively especially on outcomes.

Q61 John Battle: UNICEF. Richard Jolly was saying that 30 years ago, so you would go with UNICEF, would you?

Mr Rees: There is obviously a lot of work to do still. The Lancet series in January clearly highlighted the fragmented and dysfunctional nature of the nutrition system. There are many elements to that. One of them is within DFID itself, which is that there is recognition of its importance, there is some good analytical perspective on nutrition, but there are few strides to put it up there as a target and therefore to get the kind of incentive---

Q62 John Battle: One organisation that did that when we were tackling polio and the rest of it was UNICEF, that went on nutrition, and they have always focused on the balance of nutrition. I am really wanting to focus on the architecture. Are you saying that Richard Jolly should have really started to pull the bolt through, as it were, and reorganise the architecture of the UN with UNICEF-he is not there now but should he have done it? We have heard an almost implicit idea that it should remain the World Food Programme that should headline the initiative. Who should do it? I do not want you just to tell me that it is unreal to imagine a fresh start with the architecture. What should this architecture look like coming through the other end to deliver what we need to be delivered?

Mr Rees: At the end of the day, it has to work at a country level to be able to impact on children and families. There is no doubt that UNICEF, the World Bank, the WFP, and the FAO all have a role to play. As we move down the road of One UN, if malnutrition and nutritional outcomes more broadly can be considered as one of the absolutely key, fundamental, driving factors, it is much more likely to move the institutions together and ensure that, whether that be work on healthcare, water and sanitation, household food security, building up livelihoods, they all combine to provide the kind of outcomes on nutrition that we want to move towards MDG 1.

Q63 John Battle: I accept that. In your evidence you are suggesting that it is not just through nutrition but there is a range, is there not? There is income generation, education, skills and training, and social protection. At the end, I am left a bit confused thinking it is everything again, that there is not a clear headline focus that pulls the thing together. Do you think it will be nutrition? Will that be the theme that pulls it together?

Mr Rees: I think nutrition is incredibly important because it is measurable, for a start. Food security, as a food security person, has always been slightly airy-fairy. There are all sorts of technical debates around how you might measure food security. Nutritional outcomes are extremely tight. You can measure children. You know if they are stunted, you know if they are wasted and they are not getting enough food. That is why it is the second indicator of MDG 1. It just has not been taken up to the kind of level it needs to to be absorbed into systems of planning and frameworks and such like. There is at the moment rather an over-focus on food, and there has been, although it is declining, and also there is a lack of emphasis on the whole economic generation, or, let us say, the economic focus that is most people's livelihoods, whether you be in south Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Very few people are growing more of their food than they are buying, so therefore support to agriculture can only go so far. What we need to put in place, whether that be trading opportunities, other types of investment, processing, those are the ways that most people earn their living and therefore can buy food and all sorts of other important items.

Q64 Chairman: We did of course devise a system of agriculture in Europe which was designed to achieve self-sufficiency but rather overdid it. Thank you very much for that. It is obvious that this is an issue where there are a lot of different mechanisms in different circumstances. In an ideal world each country would be doing the leading and the co-ordination, the governments of those countries. Clearly, many of those governments do not have the capacity to do so or are suffering from conflict or whatever, so we are inevitably going to have to work through a whole variety of different agencies. I appreciate that you have a somewhat different approach from the other witnesses, so thank you for coming and sharing that with us. If you could give us a summary of that Swaziland case, that would be helpful.

Mr Rees: Absolutely. Thank you very much for this chance to give evidence and if there is the opportunity to look into nutrition more broadly within DFID, that would be good.

Chairman: You are not the first person who has been encouraging us to do that.

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[1] UN Children's Fund

[2] Overseas Development Institute

[3] New Partnership for Africa's Development

[4] Internally displaced persons

[5] UN Food and Agriculture Organisation

[6] UN International Fund for Agriculture Development

[7] UN Development Programme

[8] International Monetary Fund

[9] WFP 15

[10] UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs

[11] International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board

[12] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

[13] WFP 6