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DEVELOPMENT: Think Tank Urges Major Changes in U.S. Food Aid

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 29 2008 (IPS) - The United States should urgently implement major changes in its emergency food aid and overseas trade and development policies to deal with the record rise in global grain prices that is threatening recent gains in poverty reduction in many developing countries, according to a report by a bipartisan task force sponsored by a major foreign policy think tank here.

The study, released Tuesday by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), calls for at least doubling emergency U.S. food aid to 3.2 billion dollars a year and overhauling the way that aid is delivered to needy countries abroad as part of a “bipartisan compact” that can muster strong political support from both Democrats and Republicans.

It also calls for moving rural development and agricultural productivity in poor countries to the top of the U.S. foreign aid agenda, reassessing Washington’s continuing subsidisation of biofuels to mitigate its impact on the availability of key food crops, and making the promotion of developing country agriculture a major goal of U.S. trade policy.

“The cost of not doing anything, of sitting on the sidelines, is unacceptable and could lead an additional 100 million more people to slide into hunger,” said Democratic Sen. Robert Casey, who headed the task force along with the former Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“This is the moment for American leadership on the world stage,” he added. “In a time when American leadership is perceived as weak and morally bankrupt abroad, this is our chance to demonstrate U.S. strengths and moral commitments.”

The task force report, entitled “A Call for a Strategic U.S. Approach to the Global Food Crisis”, comes amid international alarm over grain prices that have skyrocketed to record heights over the past year. Coupled with a comparable rise in energy prices, the food crisis has threatened to push as many as 100 million people worldwide into absolute poverty, according to the United Nations.

Many cash-strapped governments have been forced to sharply increase food subsidies to contain popular discontent, while some 30 countries have limited or banned grain exports in order to keep domestic prices as low as possible.

Indeed, the food crisis reportedly contributed to Tuesday’s collapse of the latest round of global negotiations under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva, as poor countries resisted pressure from the U.S. and other big western grain exporters to give up their use of tariffs and other measures used to protect and spur domestic food production.

In a letter to the Group of Eight leaders in advance of their summit in Japan earlier this month, World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) alone needed some 10 billion dollars to provide short-term credit to help needy countries cope with what he called a “man-made catastrophe”.

The new report cited half a dozen major causes for the crisis, including the sharp rise in global energy prices; the sharp rise in production of corn-based biofuels; the increased demand for cereal grains, particularly in fast-growing economies, notably China and India; reduced food production resulting from “bad weather, linked possibly to global climate change”; and “gross underinvestment in the past several decades in agricultural production and technology in the developing world”.

It also cited “grave distortions” in the global agricultural production and trading system that “structurally favours production among wealthy countries and disadvantages producers in poor developing countries;” and a system of emergency food relief that, in the case of the U.S., can result in a six-month delay in reaching its intended beneficiaries due to requirements that virtually all of the aid be homegrown and transported by U.S. shippers.

To address these problems, the report offered five “priority recommendations” beginning with reforming the U.S. emergency aid programme. It proposed at least doubling Washington’s annual commitment to food relief to 3.2 billion dollars, of which as much as 50 percent should be provided in cash to agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP) and private charities outside the United States that are as close to the area of need as possible. Within five years, as much as 75 percent should be provided in this manner, according to the report.

At the same time, Washington should exercise strong diplomacy in persuading other donors, and particularly oil-exporting nations, to increase their own aid commitments, with a particular focus on efforts to build food security and emergency social safety net programmes in recipient countries.

The panel also called for making rural development and agricultural productivity in poor nations a priority in U.S. foreign aid programmes by devoting at least one billion dollars a year to providing credit, basic inputs and extension services to farmers in developing countries; helping fund a global network of universities engaged in agricultural research and training; and expanding research and pilot projects on mitigating the effects of climate change on food production.

Washington should also support the doubling of agricultural programming of multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and work with China, India, and Brazil to promote agricultural development in Africa.

On biofuels, the task force called for the U.S. to accelerate efforts to develop cellulosic-based and other biofuels to reduce the domestic industry’s dependence on corn and reform the trade regime to reduce barriers to imports here and elsewhere from the most efficient biofuel producers, such as Brazil.

The report calls for reforms to U.S. trade policy that promote investment and trade in developing-country agriculture and thus bolster the chances for a successful conclusion to the WTO’s Doha Round. It also urges strengthening the U.S. government’s capacities to address the crisis both by upgrading relevant agencies and concluding a “National Intelligence Estimate” on global food security by the time the next administration takes office in January.

Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the Rome-based WFP through which the U.S. currently provides most of its emergency food aid, hailed the recommendations as a “road map” for addressing both the short- and longer-term aspects of the crisis, noting, in particular, that local purchases of food aid by her agency and other emergency providers, were a “powerful long-term solution to hunger.”

Ret. Amb. Thomas Pickering, who was also on hand for the report’s release, said the opening of the U.N. General Assembly in September offered a key opportunity to set a global food summit that would urgently address specific aspects of the crisis.

In particular, he suggested that Sheeran lead efforts to devise an agenda for dealing with emergency food needs over the next several years when prices are expected to remain high; that former U.N. Development Programme chief Mark Malloch Brown play a similar role with respect to accelerating agricultural productivity in poor countries; and that the World Bank and CGIAR tackle the challenge of harnessing scientific and technical expertise, including possible use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to improve productivity in the longer term.

“I hope the world leadership will take this challenge…to catalyse this process,” said Pickering, a former U.N. ambassador who is widely considered Washington’s most accomplished living diplomat. “Without it, it will not move ahead with the speed and seriousness that is needed.”