Food Aid as Part of a Coherent Strategy to Advance Food Security Objectives

Abstract

The one Millenium Development Goal (MDG) on which the world is backsliding, rather than making progress, is in cutting hunger in half by 2015. Undernutrition – insufficient nutrient intake, closely and causally associated with the experience of hunger – is growing, especially in the poorest countries, and above all in sub-Saharan Africa. This is worrisome for both instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Instrumentally, the World Health Organization (WHO 2002) reported that undernutrition is the single greatest threat to health worldwide. And since human health is a central determinant of adult earnings (Strauss and Thomas 1998), by extension, undernutrition is one of the greatest threats to income growth and poverty reduction. Failure to make progress on the hunger MDG is thus likely to retard progress in halving extreme poverty and other MDGs. Furthermore, there’s an intrinsic reason to worry about undernutrition. Severe undernutrition violates the internationally recognized human right to food and is thus an indicator of failure by sovereign states and by the international community to adhere to the most basic humanitarian principles that supposedly underpin development programming. When faced with undernutrition, food aid is an instinctive – and often an appropriate – policy response. But donor programming to combat food insecurity in low-income or disaster affected countries has too often been resource-driven, based on the availability of surplus food commodities for food aid programs, rather than needs- or rights-based. This must change if food aid is to become an effective tool for advancing MDGs. Poverty and hunger are mutually causal, each exacerbating the other. The humanitarian and development community must develop a coherent strategy for reducing acute food insecurity and poverty jointly, and then, based on that broader strategy, demonstrate when and where food aid is an appropriate tool with which to implement (part of) such a strategy, and when it is not. The natural objectives of such a strategy are to fulfill and protect basic human rights to life, health, and food and the reduction of chronic poverty and acute food insecurity. Food aid is only one resource, and not necessarily the primary one, to deploy in support of such a strategy. This background paper briefly outlines the circumstances and applications to which food aid is well suited to advancing a coherent strategy for reducing acute food insecurity and poverty, and those to which it is not.