Praise and censure by the FAO

International food aid has many shortcomings, but on the whole, it is better than its reputation. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) draws this conclusion in its recent annual report (State of Food and Agriculture 2006), which was published at the end of January. The report maintains there is hardly any empirical evidence of food aid making recipients dependent or weakening their ability to help themselves. On the other hand, the report claims that, in emergency situations, aid agencies frequently deliver food too hastily, without checking whether other forms of support might be more helpful.

According to the FAO, approximately 850 million people worldwide suffer from hunger today, just as many as in the early 1990s. In the same time, world population grew from 5.3 billion people to 6.5 billion. The number of acute food crises annually has doubled in the past twenty years from an average of 15 to over 30; and that increase is attributed exclusively to Africa, where annual emergencies have tripled since the 1980s. At the same time, food aid has lost considerably in significance as an instrument of crisis intervention. According to the FAO, food aid made up more than five percent of total supply in 38 countries in the early 1990s; ten years later, this was still the case in only 21 countries. The report establishes that current food aid corresponds to only two percent of the world grain trade and less than half a percent of global production.

The practice of international food aid has improved tremendously in recent years, determines the UN organisation based in Rome. Nevertheless, there are still many shortcomings owing to the fact that food aid is often not delivered very efficiently. For example, around 50 % of international food-aid still comes from donors’ surpluses and is tied to processing and shipment by companies from their own countries. Only 15 % of relief supplies were purchased locally in the crisis regions. Around a quarter of aid is not distributed directly to those in need, but is sold on the markets in the recipient countries (monetisation). The FAO is in favour of completely abolishing both monetisation and tying aid, arguing that doing so would reduce costs and increase the likelihood of aid reaching the intended target groups.

In most crisis situations, people do not suffer from hunger because there is no food, but because they have no access to it. They either do not have enough money or cannot get to markets, for instance. Rather than distribute food in such cases, it would make more sense to build roads or to distribute cash or vouchers. The report bemoans that many aid agencies regard food aid as the “default response” to crises, claiming that there is a general lack of analyses and knowledge about what causes hunger in international crisis management. Similarly, it is said that affected people’s most urgent needs are not well understood – nor are their own strategies for dealing with the shortage. In practice, there is a wide gap between emergency aid and development assistance geared towards the long-term, according to the FAO. However, aid agencies are increasingly trying to close this gap through approaches such as “development-oriented emergency aid” or “Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development” (LRRD). (ell)