By Matthew O. Berger and Peter Boaz
WASHINGTON, Oct 20 2010 (IPS)

Amidst fears of a recurring food crisis, the World Bank has reactivated its Global Food Crisis Response Programme (GFRP), dedicating up to 760 million dollars to countries at risk of food price volatility.

In announcing the programme’s extension, World Bank President Robert Zoellick cited “growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets”.

The programme, equipped with a wide array of options for food crisis response, is expected to enable the World Bank to respond more quickly if countries are facing dangerous prices spikes.

“World food price volatility remains significant and, in some countries, the volatility is adding to already higher local food prices due to other factors such as adverse weather,” Zoellick said.

The Bank’s decision follows a number of disquieting indicators that food prices could reach the dangerous levels of 2007 to 2008, when riots broke out in several hunger- stricken countries and the number of people suffering from hunger reached record highs.

“We do expect high volatility in food prices to continue until at least 2015, so reactivating the Bank’s food crisis fund means we’re ready to help countries calling for assistance,” said World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala.

The GFRP was originally launched in May 2008 and, to date, has conducted 1.2 billion dollars worth of assistance operations, reaching 35 countries, especially in the most affected regions in Africa and Asia, according to the Bank. It says that external donors have also funded an additional 200 million dollars of operations.

The ways in which countries may choose to deploy funds include support for local food production such as supplying seeds and fertiliser or improving irrigation, social safety net programmes, or budget support to offset tariff reductions.

The agricultural aspects of the programme have reached 5.9 million households while the social protection programmes have reached over 5.6 million people, said Mark Cackler, manager of the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department.

“In the last two years the GFRP has been effective at catalyzing and targeting funding for food security and agriculture at a critical time,” Cackler told IPS in an email, citing concern over food price volatility as the reason for extending the programme.

Not new money

The programme is not an extra fund that would provide funding on top of that to which countries are already entitled. Rather, the 760 million dollars will come from money already destined for countries through the Bank’s low- income country lending programme, the International Development Association (IDA), or its middle-income programme, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

It will, however, allow money needed for the immediate needs of the people most vulnerable to the effects of rapid food price rises to be made available much sooner than IDA or IBRD funds normally would be.

This authority to “fast-track” funds under the GFRP had expired on Jun. 30, but the vote by the Bank’s executive board to extend the programme, announced Monday, extends this authority to Jun. 30, 2011.

Ultimately, though, minimising the impacts of food price volatility on vulnerable populations will require increased investment in women and smallholder farmers, says Neil Watkins, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid.

“To the extent that countries are responding to a crisis that is largely external,” he says, “we don’t think loans are the appropriate tool.”

He says grants, especially for the poorest countries, would be better. It should be noted that while money coming through IBRD would be loans, that through IDA is usually termed “credits”, with no interest and long repayment periods.

Watkins sees the food price volatility acknowledged in the Bank’s GFRP announcement as a product of an international market that is increasingly affected by demand for biofuels such as corn-derived ethanol and subject to the whims of commodity traders.

“As more and more investors get involved in commodity markets, [food markets] are being pulled away from real purchasers and sellers and more into the financial world,” he says.

World Bank emerging as significant agricultural lender

But he thinks institutions are beginning to understand how they can help make communities less vulnerable to the whims of international markets: invest in smallholder farmers that produce food locally for their communities.

For its part, the World Bank seems to be playing a key role in these efforts. As the trustee of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP), launched in April, it facilitates a programme focused on long-term solutions to what are turning out to be recurring food crises. The money for GASFP comes from donor countries and the Gates Foundation and is in addition to any Bank loans or grants.

Watkins, who is on the steering committee of GAFSP as a civil society representative, says the programme “is one fund where you can tell the money that is being delivered is new money. One of the challenges of pledges in the past has been you can’t tell what pledges are new money and what is just being redirected from previous commitments.”

And ahead of the Millennium Development Goals summit at the United Nations in September the Bank announced it was increasing its agricultural lending to 8.3 billion dollars a year, 45 percent of which would be through IDA.

Chris Delgado, a strategy and policy adviser in the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department who coordinates GFRP and is programme manager for GAFSP, told IPS following that announcement that he expected agriculture and rural lending to continue to increase in future years. In 1980, he said, it was 30 percent of total Bank lending, then dipped to seven percent around the start of this decade before rebounding to about 12 percent now.

Watkins says the Bank is “showing some promise” as a place where country-led proposals for smallholder farming can find a home.

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By Matthew O. Berger and Peter Boaz
WASHINGTON, Sep 28 2010 (IPS)

Although the world will miss the 2010 deadline for universal access to HIV treatment, some countries, notably in sub- Saharan Africa, have made real strides forward, three United Nations agencies reported Tuesday.

The goal was set in 2006, but, as the joint report lays out, only some countries will achieve universal access, defined as coverage of at least 80 percent of the population in need, by the end of this year.

As with many health goals, progress is marked by unevenness both between regions and between aspects of the treatment needed.

While prevention efforts to reach the most at-risk populations globally – sex workers, drug users and men who have sex with men – are still limited, for instance, the report points to steady progress in providing access to services meant to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Over half of all pregnant women with HIV in low- and middle- income countries received antiretroviral treatment to prevent transmission to their children, said the report, by UNICEF, UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation.

Within that number, there are sharp disparities between countries. “There are countries, especially in southern Africa, that have made really encouraging progress, and in fact four of them have reached the universal access targets,” Jimmy Kolker, chief of HIV and AIDS at UNICEF, told IPS Tuesday.

But, he said, the same is not true in places like Nigeria, home to almost a third of the women globally who should be but are not getting antiretrovirals to prevent trasmission to newborns.

Half of that global unmet need, in fact, is in just four countries – Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India and Uganda.

The report is based on 2009 numbers, so the final word on progress toward the universal access goal will come next year. New goals for how best to proceed in response to HIV/AIDS globally also will be set next year.

Within that discussion, Kolker said that there is now a sense that the 2015 goal should be elimination of mother-to- child transimission – a slight change in emphasis from the access-to-care goals of 2006 to 2010. “It would be measuring not input, which is giving drugs to the mother, but output, which is an AIDS-free kid,” he explained.

One obstacle toward both new and existing goals is the stagnation and even decline in donor funding over the past several years, largely attributed to the financial crisis. This is highlighted in the report, which said that the sustainability of many HIV programmes is being paradoxically put at risk due to lack of financial commitments at the same time that there is more evidence than ever before that such programmes are having a positive and growing impact.

How much is needed to keep these programmes afloat? Ten billion dollars, Bernhard Schwartlander, director of evidence, strategy and results at UNAIDS, told IPS.

Next week, donor countries are expected to reaffirm their commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at a meeting at the U.N. in New York.

But, going forward, the fight will take more than donor largesse, said Kolker.

“Because of the financial situation globally and the fact that the money is unlikely to get larger, national governments [in developing countries] themselves need to pick up the slack,” he said. “The good news is that more of the AIDS expenditure proportionally is coming from national governments. Decisions in countries like Kenya, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia to pay for the antiretrovirals themselves is a huge step forward, and that needs to be encouraged.”

“We are not going to be able to reverse the epidemic unless national partners and especially national governments see this as a good investment of their own resources,” he added.

That investment will also likely need to be used differently and put to better use. “The problem is we defintely need more money, but we also recognise we need to be more efficient in the way we are doing business,” said Schwartlander.

Part of that is integrating HIV work better with work in other, related health areas. Kolker mentioned how the Global Fund and the U.S. fund known as PEPFAR began as emergency responses, but as the worst of the HIV crisis is brought under control they will need to address related issues like those relating to maternal health.

“Services will need to be integrated and not provided at different locations as unlinked services. The direction we are going in clearly is in integration of services,” he said.

And progress against the worst of the crisis is being made.

Though there are still 33.4 million people living with HIV worldwide and 2.7 million diagnosed in 2008 alone, the number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy in low- and middle-income countries increased by 1.2 million in 2009, representing the largest single-year increase ever and bringing the number to 5.25 million, according to the Tuesday’s report, entitled “Towards Universal Access”.

Still, two-thirds of the population in need remains without access to antiretroviral therapy, an estimated 60 percent of developing-world patients do not know their HIV status, and many prevention efforts continue to lag.

The report warns that national strategies must include special efforts to reach the poorest of the poor and those who are socially excluded and that efforts to reach Millennium Development Goal six – to halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases by 2015 – has spurred changes in many national health systems.

As Kolker explained, HIV treatment was originally introduced at central hospitals with specialised care, but “the universal access principal meant that had to be brought to the lowest level of care. In the case of mother-to-child transmission that meant going into the maternity clinics, the antenatal clinics, the village health units and that has largely been done…The effort to make this universally available has succeeded largely in almost every country.”

But, he warns, “access to facilities is not the same as actual prevention of a new infection.”

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By Peter Boaz and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Sep 22 2010 (IPS)

Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

The study was carried out by Circle of Blue, a network of journalists and scientists dedicated to water sustainability, and could have implications not just for the relationship between energy demand and water scarcity in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, as well. “It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It’s also that it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy,” explained Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider, who presented the findings in Washington Wednesday.

“The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve,” he said. About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, climate change is leading to decreased snowmelt, rains and freshwater supplies, says Circle of Blue.

One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, the group contends.

The U.S. government has not been blind to the conflict between energy and water needs. The first part of a report commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 2005 laid out the consequences of not paying enough attention to water supply issues in increasing energy production. The second part, which would have laid out a research agenda and begun developing solutions, has yet to be made public, says Schneider.

He says the U.S. Department of Energy has declined repeated requests to explain why the report has not been published.

Energy demand in the U.S. is expected to increase by 40 percent as the U.S. population rises above 440 million by 2050. The water supply will not be able to support that growth, Schneider says.

Renewable sources of energy will certainly be a large part of trying to meet that energy demand, but these, too, come with a hidden water cost.

In 2009, the U.S. dedicated 23 million acres of public lands in six states for new solar electricity-generating plants as part of its economic stimulus package, which apportioned nearly 100 billion dollars for clean energy projects. Though the plan appeared promising, environmentalists soon began to point it could have damaging, unintended consequences. Schneider notes that criticism of the impact the water-cooled solar plants could have on water priorities in the U.S. Southwest even came from within the government.

“In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining,” wrote Jon Jarvis, then head of the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region, in a February 2009 internal memo. “Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much water as coal- fired power plants,” Schneider noted.

In other countries, the threat of water scarcity is even more pertinent.

Egypt, for example, has a population of approximately 82 million, but an annual water quota of about 86 billion cubic metres – and the population is expected to rise by more than 10 million people in the next decade.

Yet 30 European blue chip companies are set to invest 560 billion dollars over the next 40 years to build solar power plants in North Africa as part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have agreed to work with the initiative. Comparing this project with the U.S.’s, Schneider notes that in an environment that faces even greater water scarcity than the southwestern U.S., such projects could prove disastrous. Circle of Blue calls the intersection of a rising demand for energy and diminishing supply water a “choke point”, but energy development – whether of the fossil fuel or renewable variety – is just one aspect of the water scarcity crisis that is unfolding in various regions of the globe.

Yemen is widely seen as the place where this scarcity will hit first and hardest.

“Analysts are worried Yemen could be the first country in the world to effectively run out of water,” said Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she studies the intersection of natural resources and security issues. She spoke at a separate event Wednesday.

Yemen, which has no rivers and cannot afford desalination, is drawing water at around 400 times its replacement rate, she says, and this looming crisis is compounding other issues in the region, like the fact that Yemen has become a key recruiting spot for groups like al Qaeda.

“We are about to see water wars in the future,” said U.S. General Anthony Zinni. “We have seen fuel wars; we’re about to see water wars.”

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