Through a Feed the Future project in Kenya, smallholder farmers, particularly women, are introduced to high-value crops such as orange flesh sweet potatoes that can both boost household food security and increase incomes. Credit: Fintrac Inc.

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 27 2013 (IPS)

In the face of global climate change and currency devaluation, improved strategies are being used to combat high international poverty and malnutrition rates, and to increase global food security. 

The  administrator of  the the U.S. Agency for International Development  (USAID), Dr. Rajiv Shah, this week announced two new innovation labs at Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative.

“The U.S. has a proud history of providing food and services to the most in need countries,” said Shah at a Feed the Future progress report on Capitol Hill Thursday.  “It will continue to be our goal to modernise and strengthen these programmes, to create a pathway from receiving food when you are hungry to living in a food secure society.”

One of the recently announced labs, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sorghum & Millet is a partnership between the organisation and Kansas State University.

The lab will attempt to find new technologies and techniques for smallholder farmers to use in order to ensure that their productivity of grasses raised for grain, including sorghum and millet, increases in times of climate change.

“The perspective from us is that we think the emphasis that has been given to agriculture is critical, not just for food security but for economic development and growth in developing countries overall,” senior policy advisor on agriculture and food security at the advocacy organisation Oxfam International, Eric Munoz, told IPS.

“We certainly have questions about USAID’s direction, but they are intended to strengthen their direction as opposed to redirect them.”

The second of the two new labs, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security, is a partnership with a number of universities including Michigan State University and the University of Pretoria.  The lab will attempt to improve food security policies and increase private sector investments to support smallholder farmers.

“The food security policy innovation lab is intended to increase the body of knowledge and understanding of the best way to go about influencing policy and what the best ones are to accelerate the impact that we are trying to achieve,” the food policy advisor for USAID’s Food Security Bureau, David Atwood, told IPS.

Both of these labs will focus on Senegal, Niger and Ethiopia.

“If you look at the big food crises, some 17 million people were affected in 2012, including people in those three countries,” Munoz told IPS.  “They have large populations of food insecure and hungry people.  Focusing on those countries makes a lot of sense.”

A gender lens

Launched in 2011, Feed the Future issues annual reports analysing progress during the fiscal year.  The reports outline overall goals for 2015 and yearly targets along the way.

“The programme is still just a couple years in so we are starting to see some nice results, especially on nutrition,” Katie Lee, advocacy and policy coordinator for international development at the alliance of nongovernmental organisations InterAction, told IPS.

“More gendered data were provided in this second progress report, but the data show that work needs to be done to make sure the programme is reaching more women.”

According to the report, Feed the Future has met the majority of the goals it set for fiscal year 2012 in terms of who is receiving aid and how it is benefitting them.  Leaders at the organisation say that they put more of an emphasis on providing food aid to women.

“Women tend to invest more in family and child education and health, so investing in women can really help take the whole development effort a long way,” Atwood told IPS.

According to Feed the Future, women make up 45 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, and if they were given the same access to land as men, their agricultural output could potentially reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 150 million.

In 2011, Feed the Future supported a group of 65 female farmers in Ghana for five months by training them in record keeping, planning and management.  The group was eventually able to buy new technologies to increase their rice production.

“The progress report is not just about technology, it’s an opportunity to understand where we can do better,” said Shah at the talk on Capitol Hill.  “We’ve gendered out data and learned that we have a great deal further to go to ensure that every dollar is preferentially benefitting women and girls.”

By fiscal year 2013, Feed the Future hopes to see over 15 million rural households directly benefit from U.S. government intervention, over eight million people apply for technologies or management as a result of intervention, and over 13 million children under the age of five have access to U.S.-supported nutrition programmes.

“We want to ensure that when American assistance touches the lives of the hungry, we help them immediately and help them stand on their own two feet in the future,” said Shah.

“When we lead with our values and we partner with our great academic and scientific institutions, our efforts are recognised an appreciated.”

Food aid from the United States often travels thousands of miles before reaching its final destination. Credit: Ephraim Nsingo/IPS

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

Lawmakers attempted Wednesday to push along an ongoing effort to modernise U.S. international food aid policy amid mounting bipartisan support for the use of more locally grown food products over the long-standing practise of shipping U.S.-grown commodities.

The Food Aid Reform Act, introduced by House Foreign Affairs Chairman Representative Ed Royce and Africa Subcommittee Ranking Member Representative Karen Bass, would eliminate previous requirements that food assistance be grown in the United States and transported on U.S.-flagged ships. Advocates say the changes would deliver aid up to 14 weeks faster and reach an estimated two to four million more people.

“Increasing flexibility is extremely important in these programmes in order to reach more people and react to individual situations on the ground that require different solutions,” Katie Lee, advocacy and policy coordinator for international development at InterAction, a Washington-based network of U.S.-based NGOs, told IPS.

Implementing partners, too, have lined up behind the proposed changes.

In addition to such projections of increased efficiency, the proposed reforms would significantly decrease transportation costs for the United States. According to Royce, who spoke Wednesday in a conference of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 50 percent of the U.S. food aid budget is currently spent on shipping costs.

“You have to order the food in the Midwest, it gets put on a ship, it can go 7,000 miles to the other side of the world, put on to trucks, and then moved into the famine or emergency zone,” Andrew Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University, testified during Wednesday’s discussions. “If the food is bought locally, you can avoid the 7,000-mile food chain.”"Shipment devastated the Haitian rice farmers after the earthquake because we couldn't buy it locally."
-- Andrew Natsios

Throughout Wednesday’s Congressional discussions, experts highlighted the consequences of this food chain, particularly in war zones or emergency situations. According to Natsios, a regular strategy in a civil war is to starve the enemy by blowing up food trucks.

“The Syrian government is trying to starve the opposition into surrender,” he said. “The Sudanese government did the same thing in southern Sudan over the course of 22 years of civil war.”

Advocates add that the proposed reforms would have long-term benefits for both the U.S. and foreign economies.

“The future interest of U.S. agriculture is less in the provision of U.S. food aid and more in developing a thriving economy that can create new consumers for American productions,” said Dan Glickman, executive director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program, an educational initiative for members of Congress.

The changes would allot a larger percent of the food aid budget as cash spent in local markets, which economists say would significantly stimulate local economies.

“Shipment devastated the Haitian rice farmers after the earthquake because we couldn’t buy it locally,” said Natsios. “But we couldn’t not give them food either, because they needed it.”

U.S. branding

On Monday, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a massive, five-year bill that covers much of U.S. agriculture and food-related policy and known as the Farm Bill. The focus now shifts to the House of Representatives to fashion a similar bill, expected to be voted upon later this month.

For now, the Senate bill would reduce overall spending by about 24 billion dollars over 10 years. But that legislation will have to be reconciled with whatever comes out of the House, where the Farm Bill battles are expected to be far more bitter.

Currently, the Food Aid Reform Act is a separate bill, but many observers assume that it will probably be tied into the House Farm Bill eventually. At the moment, experts project it to have less than a seven percent chance of being enacted on its own.

“We don’t expect this to pass free-standing – it’d be great, but that is probably unlikely,” Blake Selzer, a senior policy advocate at CARE, a humanitarian organisation, told IPS.

Still, many U.S. lawmakers and aid experts are concerned as to how the United States would continue to receive public credit for locally procured assistance – an important consideration in any foreign assistance programme. During Wednesday’s discussion, several House representatives expressed such concerns.

“Nobody is talking about going to a cash-only system – not the White House, not the chairman,” Glickman said, emphasising that under the current proposal, only a portion of the aid budget would go to a cash system and the rest would be U.S. shipped commodities.

“I would not support going to a cash only system, I don’t care what country does it. That would be a mistake.”

Indeed, according to USAID, the U.S. government’s main foreign aid arm, such branding has been important, at least in certain situations. U.S. approval ratings in Indonesia, for instance, are said to have nearly doubled, from 37 to 66 percent, following a large delivery prominently branded as U.S. aid.

Natsios emphasised repeatedly that in emergency situations it is very clear where assistance is coming from. “No one would argue that we should only provide aid if we get credit for it,” he said.

A child is vaccinated for polio outside Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Katelyn Fossett
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2013 (IPS)

A U.S.-based civil society coalition is calling on Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration to keep spending on global health aid at current levels, warning that recent budget cuts risk a dangerous backslide in health and development gains achieved over the past three decades.

The new brief has been published by InterAction, a Washington-based umbrella of international NGOs, is supported by 37 organisations. It warns that any future cuts to these programmes would endanger important health milestones achieved in part due to U.S. assistance.We have a choice: we can invest now or pay forever.

These include the near-eradication of polio and the treatment of over five million people living with HIV/AIDS. In addition, the brief warns that austerity-related budget cuts that went into effect on Mar. 1 could lead to the re-emergence or worsening of critical global health threats, like those posed by the spread of malaria and tuberculosis.

“The U.S. is at a critical juncture in its global health efforts: budget pressures threaten the global health gains that have been made and jeopardize programming … Capitalizing on our successes and meeting emerging global health challenges will require increased and sustained commitments by all donors,” the brief says.

But the warning is competing with snowballing enthusiasm for budget-cutting that has seized Washington since the recent cuts, known here as the “sequester”, went into effect. Cutting roughly five percent of all federal budgets, analysts say the sequester would slice around 433 million dollars from U.S. global health aid for the remainder of this fiscal year alone.

The United States is the world’s largest individual donor to a spectrum of global health initiatives.

“We see the brief as a resource for members of Congress and their staff on U.S. investments in global health,” Danielle Heiberg, one of the authors of the brief, told IPS. “By highlighting how current and past U.S. investments have made significant progress in global health, we hope that Congress will understand the value and importance of maintaining appropriate funding for the global health accounts.”

“Sustained US investments in global health programs and health systems strengthening are crucial – health problems will only be more expensive and more difficult to resolve in the future, especially with the rise of non-communicable diseases (cancer, lung and heart-disease and diabetes) in all populations,” the brief says.

Sequester-related cuts have been forced to impact on nearly all federal programmes, with Congress purposefully designing them so that neither policymakers nor agency heads could target the reductions at waste or initiatives of low priority. Critics note that foreign aid generally only constitutes about one percent of the U.S.’s total budget – with just a tenth of that for global health.

Nonetheless, U.S. spending still has an outsized impact on global health projects. Indeed, the United States has taken on an even more expanded role since the 2008 financial crisis led other donor countries to cut their aid programmes.

Newly released data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a grouping of rich, industrialised countries, has revealed a 5.4-billion-dollar decline in general international aid flows worldwide in the past year.

Advocates have expressed particular concern about the future of U.S. health assistance because it does not have the deep political support that bolsters other kinds of foreign developmental assistance. Projects for which mutual economic opportunities for donor and recipient countries are far more visible – such as improving infrastructure or trade, for instance – tend to benefit from deeper political support than that for health aid.

“Domestic donor interests have much more influence in donor capitals where aid decisions are being made,” Gregory Adams, head of the aid effectiveness programme at Oxfam International, a humanitarian group, told IPS. “The more locally owned and demand-driven aid gets cut first.”

Adams listed the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, an international financing organisation, as one of the groups that is affected by this decision-making bias.

Indeed, on Monday the Global Fund announced a massive new 15-billion-dollar fundraising goal. If it attains this goal, the group says it will be able to prevent a million new HIV infections and save the lives of almost six million people with tuberculosis.

“We have a choice: we can invest now or pay forever,” Mark Dybul, executive director of the Global Fund, said Monday. “Innovations in science and implementation have given us a historic opportunity to completely control these diseases. If we do not, the long-term costs will be staggering.”

Double problem

Oxfam’s Adams further warns that there is a “double problem” with foreign aid.

“It’s not just that the [aid] is not getting to the people who need it, but you take these countries that trusted the United States and give them reason not to trust the U.S,” he said.

“We keep asking partner countries to show more leadership – to do a better job of leading and meeting their own countries’ needs, but sometimes the global donor country makes it very difficult for those countries to plan their leadership by changing the goal posts.”

In addition, failure to follow through on health assistance could introduce the additional obstacles of reduced immunity and new drug-resistant strains of a disease, particularly with malaria and tuberculosis.

“History shows that if we scale back funding, malaria will re-emerge worse than ever, especially since populations with reduced immunity will face an increase in morbidity,” the InterAction brief states.

In March, the World Health Organisation issued a statement on the increasing spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis, a growing public health crisis due in part to its history of incomplete treatments in developing countries. A study in August 2012 found that almost half of TB patients were not responsive to either first- or second-line treatments, suggesting the disease could become “virtually untreatable”.

For now, health and aid groups are expressing fear, uncertainty and a fair amount of outrage as they wait to feel the concrete effects of the March cuts.

“The sequester is going to have a significant and detrimental effect,” Oxfam’s Adams said. “[But] it’s a blunt instrument – it’s hard to predict how the axe is going to fall.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently with the broad federal spending cuts beginning Mar. 1, experts have warned that an austerity-minded political system could bring about dramatic changes in the U.S. foreign aid model.

A significant part of this conversation has focused on shifting away from a government-led approach and instead strengthening the role of the private sector in development assistance. But critics are focusing attention on the potential pitfalls of such a redesign.

“The idea that there is a lack of public resources, so we need to be leveraging private money, ignores some of the options to increase public funds,” Janet Redman, director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.The danger lies in pretending that gross domestic product and foreign direct investment is the same as making economies more sustainable.

She says there are numerous other public sector options available for a country in the United States’ position. These include, for instance, taxes on financial transactions and carbon, both approaches that have largely been left out of the political discussion here in Washington amidst a shift in focus onto the private sector.

In a report released this week, a think tank task force of development experts and business leaders here urged the U.S. government to increase its reliance on the private sector in foreign aid flows aimed at development.

Citing changes in technology and an increased willingness among developing countries to engage with U.S. companies, researchers with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) predict that the United States’ current model of development assistance could be obsolete within 25 years.

The CSIS report authors are calling for a shift from a government-based approach to a “blend of development, trade and investment”.

Such recommendations are based on global shifts in technology and business, especially the rapid outpacing of public sector development funds by the private sector. According to the report, the private sector currently spends over 87 percent of U.S. funds flowing to the developing world.

The share of public funding, meanwhile, has fallen from 71 percent in 1960 to just nine percent today.

Some also feel there is evidence that the private sector may be able to deepen the impact of foreign aid by equipping people in developing countries with new skill sets.

By equipping a person with a skill set instead of simply money, said Thomas J. Pritzker, executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, “You’ll also give him hope – and hope is a crucial aspect of social stability.” He called peace and prosperity “two sides of the same coin”.

Narrative problem

Still, the prospect of the private sector serving as a primary engine of growth for development indicators is, for some, a controversial premise. Janet Redman, for instance, notes that the report’s findings are predicated on a potentially dangerous “narrative problem”.

She also cautions against adopting a system in which development institutions are designed to function more like companies, at the expense of meeting the needs of people who stand to benefit the most from foreign assistance.

Ensuring access to, for instance, health care, water and education should not be profit-driven enterprises, she stressed, because doing so would set up a “dynamic where companies looking for an investment may need to see a particular rate of return for them to invest.”

Redman continued: “The danger lies in pretending that gross domestic product and foreign direct investment is the same as making economies more sustainable and enabling them to meet the needs of their citizens.”

Private sector funds often don’t trickle down to the poorest members of a host country, a finding supported by a 2011 report published by the Independent Evaluation Group, the internal watchdog for the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector arm.

“The link from growth to poverty reduction is not automatic,” that report found, “particularly in situations where market failures and other inefficiencies limit participation of the poor.”

According to the auditor’s findings, less than a quarter of the IFC projects that generated satisfactory returns also generated identifiable benefits to the poor.

U.S. weariness

Of course, there are major challenges to any such dramatic overhaul of the United States’ development assistance model.

Many, for instance, refer to an increasing gap between how companies, federal agencies and NGOs function and communicate with each other. Business and NGO leaders at the event also attested to notable deficiencies in trust between the public and private sectors.

“There is not a system in place that would allow for cooperation on this scale between the different actors,” Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based NGOs, told IPS. Developing such a system may be a task for the donor countries, he added.

Meanwhile, the challenge of U.S. public opinion looms large in any current discussion of foreign aid. As the Mar. 1 budget cuts are phased in, and as the United State withdraws from more than a decade of military involvement in the Middle East, many here are eying any kind of international engagement more warily than ever.

Experts on the issue are urging a shift in public opinion, warning against allowing war-weariness to translate into weariness with international engagement in general.