Agriculture sits at the table of the major players
Closing press conference by the Director-General. High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, 3-5 June 2008.
© FAO/Giulio Napolitano
The much anticipated FAO Summit that brought together 180 nations in Rome in June – just several months after the first hunger riots – proved to be a disappointment. Its failure owed much to the assembled nations’ lack of a long-term vision on agricultural policy. More than that, the protection of short-term interests prevailed, even involving in some cases the withdrawal of subsidies and significant resistance over bio-fuels. However, a single meeting was never going to provide solutions to issues ignored for so long by most international financial institutions, and more encouragingly perhaps, everyone in Rome recognised that agriculture is too important an issue to be resolved simply by providing billions of euros in food aid.
“Emergency aid is necessary, but it must be a temporary measure”, declared Louis Michel, the European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid on 5 June at the Rome session. Michel was referring to the €3.2bn promised by various aid providers, including the World Bank, the US, the Islamic Development Bank and France, not forgetting the €550M already made available by the European Commission. Louis Michel continued, “I am convinced that this emergency aid must be a temporary measure, and that voluntary limits should be established to ensure a rapid transition towards structural food security mechanisms”.
Like the World Bank in April and the French Minister for Agriculture, Michel Barnier, the Commissioner for Development recognised that “after years of under-investment – or disinterest in the rural development sector – we are now helping to make agriculture a priority again”. All the same, the European Commission admits it has been caught on the hop in the current situation. “The food crisis has pushed documents that the European executive has been preparing for months right to the forefront of the political agenda”, explained Marc Debois, Head of Section at the European Commission’s Development DG responsible for natural resources. Of these documents, the most significant is one that tackles agriculture in Africa (see the following article).
European aid
More generally, there is also the European Union’s strategic programme for food security. This has been divided into two parts since 2007, with emergency humanitarian aid provided by the European Commission’s humanitarian aid department (ECHO) on the one side, and a programme that finances regional and global actions related to food security on the other. Each of these budgets receives around €250M a year and as Mr. Debois explained, “we finance the FAO’s early-warning programme through the second budget line.” He added, “the initiatives must also combine emergency and development aid, and are only financed if there is an operational strategy in place with the country concerned”.
The strategic programme was established for the period from 2007 to 2013. Within this framework, programming for the second budget line’s regional activities has already been carried out until 2010, receiving a total budget of €925M. “We will use this instrument to some extent to respond to the current food crisis”, pointed out Mr. Debois. However, the first budget line is still intended for emergency requirements and “some €230M has already been used since the beginning of 2008 for emergency food aid for all countries together”, explained Debois. He went on to add that “to meet the requirements, a supplement of €60M has already been requested, using the budgetary reserve”, emphasising that this aid “should be provided using local or regional production where possible”.
Targeting the countries most in need
The European Union has provided a special emergency aid envelope for the ACP countries within the framework of the European Development Fund (EDF) and some €200M has now been allocated for 2008. However, this aid is only provided if strict conditions are met. First, the country concerned must make an official aid request. Then, if possible, an accurate needs-assessment is carried out. The European Commission’s Debois explained that “the risk is that certain Member States give preference to particular countries, and so we have to ensure that measures are well targeted to avoid some countries finding themselves “orphaned” and others with too much aid”.
He went on to say “after a quick survey of Commission delegations in the recipient countries – that looked at the impact of the food crisis on prices; had they increased; had this really caused problems; what measures have been undertaken by the government; what are the risks of deterioration in food supply and the political situation ? – we have, for the moment, identified around 30 countries where we could give support”.
Priority for rural development
Already warned by a World Bank report in 2007 that emphasised the need to redirect funding towards agriculture, the European Commission has now decided to reinvigorate this sector in the longer-term. The plan is to “sustain a coherent agricultural policy and create distribution channels – all of which has been neglected for the past 20 years”, according to Marc Debois. He went on to point out that, in the past, aid granted by the EU made up 20 per cent of its total development aid budget, as opposed to just 3.4 per cent today. The last European Development Fund programme (the 10th) , for the period 2008-2013 remedies this shortcoming. “Rural development in its entirety is allocated double the amount totalling €1.2bn under the 10th EDF, as opposed to €650M under the previous one”, declared Louis Michel in Rome. He added that, “it has not always been easy, we have had to argue the case with our partners to convince them to show greater commitment to this sector”.
Regional integration and governance
The European Commissioner for Development also pointed out that a key issue in agriculture is creating and organising local and regional markets. At the Rome meeting he emphasised that “approximately a third of the world’s food shortages could be quickly relieved by improving distribution networks and helping to provide better access to markets for small farmers”. He also argued for regional integration that is vital in the fight against food insecurity.
Finally, the problem of improving the governance of the global food supply has to be addressed. On this, Louis Michel explained in Rome, “I am thinking of the FAO in particular which has to re-establish itself as a flagship organisation”. Not just that, better co-ordination is required between the funding providers. As Michel pointed out, “the Commission believes that the response of the Union has to be in line with wider initiatives such as the one launched by the Secretariat of the United Nations (the CFA – Comprehensive Framework for Action) and the FAO’s recent appeal for a global initiative concerning food prices (ISFP – Initiative for Soaring Food Prices)”.
