| |
Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Development assistance by federal states: steady decline since 1990
Millennium Development Goals:
UNDP calls for greater efforts
AIDS: Africa faces prospect of economic collapse
UNCTAD: FDI declining by 20 percent
E-commerce: no business for the poor
Food aid and development – Doing more harm than good?
10/2003 |
|
[ International conference in Berlin ]
Food aid and development – Doing more harm than good?
Since the 1970s, the role played by international food aid in development cooperation has sharply decreased. In 1965, it accounted for some 22 percent of total international development assistance (ODA); today it makes up less than five percent. Even so, food aid is still one of the most hotly debated tools of development policy. At an international conference in Berlin on food aid’s role in the fight against hunger and poverty, staged from 2 to 4 September by the federal government jointly with InWEnt, GTZ and the Deutsche Welthungerhilfe/German Agro Action, the breadth of opinion about its pros and cons was apparent. The only thing on which the some 250 delegates from all over the world were all agreed was that food aid at times is a vital tool for saving lives in emergencies.
From a development policy viewpoint, though, it has long been found to be a “blunt instrument”, said Edward Clay of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). According to Clay, no evidence has ever been found that long-term food aid contributes significantly to food security and poverty reduction. At the same time, it often has very damaging side-effects: in many countries, a great deal of aid does not reach those in need but finds its way onto local markets and harms domestic producers. Moreover, the risk of a “dependency syndrome” is even greater with food aid than with other forms of development assistance. Hence the view taken by many in Berlin that food aid should be provided only in emergencies.
Representatives of the World Food Programme (WFP), USAID and the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), however, claimed that distinguishing between food aid for development and food aid for emergency relief was a “false dichotomy”. In many countries, they said, food aid makes an important contribution to improving the food situation, so it would be strategically wrong to confine it solely to emergencies. On the contrary, what needed to be done is eliminate the shortcomings which food aid – like any other development policy tool – undoubtedly displayed.
In the final document of the conference – the “Berlin Statement on Food Aid for Sustainable Food Security” – the critical view prevails. Food aid, it says, needs to remain the exception and must not become a usual measure. It should be provided only in cases where domestic reserves are exhausted; it must not undermine the capacity of people to feed themselves. Where food aid is distributed in emergencies, exit strategies need to be crafted to avoid the risk of dependency. The Berlin Statement also endorses a call for new, binding international guidelines for the provision and distribution of food aid. The Food Aid Convention, which came into effect in 1967 and has subsequently been updated five times, is deemed not to have fulfilled its purpose of preventing marked fluctuations in annual food aid provision.
In this connection, the Berlin Statement criticises some donor countries for using food aid to reduce their own surpluses and stabilise markets. The conference found it “unacceptable” that international food aid increases as soon as world market prices fall and decreases when market supply ebbs and prices recover. Food aid and commercial considerations should be kept strictly separate. In contrast to this, Mary Chambliss of the US Department of Agriculture – which is responsible for major US food aid programmes – frankly acknowledged at the conference that her country also sees food aid as an important export promotion instrument. Support for food aid programmes by the agricultural lobby, she said, is vital for Congressional approval of the necessary funds – and the agricultural sector supports programmes only if it profits from them. Uwe Werblow of the EU Commission Environment and Development Unit was openly critical of this US practice: “We should not call aid what actually serves one’s own commercial interests,” he said. And a participant from Mozambique voiced the conclusion that one of the uses of food aid was clearly to help secure incomes in the rich countries. (ell)
The conference papers are available on the Internet at www.foodaid-berlin2003.de
|
