Food Aid Increase Merely a Band-Aid Solution to Bigger Problems, Critics say

from Embassy Magazine

A CIDA plan to increase funding for agriculture development programs is collecting dust on a bookshelf, while the world faces starvation.

By Jeff Davis

Despite the government's decision last week to step up its spending on food aid in response to the burgeoning global food crisis, experts are hungry for a more meaty response to a shortage they saw coming long ago.

Opposition politicians are also calling on the government to more than double funding for agriculture projects in the developing world, something they say should have been done long ago.

Last week, CIDA Minister Bev Oda announced that "the government's response to the world food crisis" was the donation of an additional $50 million to this year's food aid budget. This, the minister said, represents an increase of Canadian food aid to a total of $230 million for this year from $180 million last year.

In addition, Ms. Oda announced the government was "untying" aid contributions, dispensing with the previous requirement that a certain portion of goods and services be purchased here in Canada. While welcoming the announcement of the desperately needed money, international food experts say more is needed than short-term solutions.

"When you've got a bleeding finger, a Band-Aid is a very good thing," said Stuart Clark, senior policy advisor at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. "But you have to find out why you got cut in the first place."


Agricultural Aid Went Out of Style

Experts from NGOs such as Oxfam and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank told Embassy last week that over the past few decades, support for agricultural capacity development has gone out of style among both international donors and the governments of least developed countries.

Behind this, said executive director of Oxfam Canada Robert Fox, was the belief radiating from international financial institutions that agriculture for export, not agriculture for subsistence, was what the world's poor needed.

"The world's attention shifted from support for agriculture to other areas, particularly trade facilitation," he said. "Global co-operation for agriculture and agricultural development has fallen significantly.

"There is a bias at the World Bank and at some of the major global actors, that trade at a global level is the principle avenue for economic growth," he added.

Under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, said Mr. Clark, developing countries were pressured to cut funding for agriculture to around four per cent of total government budgets.

When considering that agriculture is the mainstay of developing economies, Mr. Clark said, this is an "absurdly low level," especially when some of these same countries spend 20 per cent of public finances on weapons.

The faith in the free market caused support for agriculture among international donors to drop to historic lows around 2000.

By this time, Messrs. Fox and Clark said, the liberal economic orthodoxy of the international financial institutions had changed the face of agriculture in the developing world.

Mixed subsistence farming, based on local techniques, was swept away by large-scale monoculture of products meant for export, they said. This has led also, they said, to increased reliance on imported seeds and fertilizers, land exhaustion, and soil erosion.

The plight of the world's poor farmers, they said, has been further exacerbated by agricultural subsidies in the Western world.

Messrs. Fox and Clark said that, in recent years, there has been an increasing recognition that export-oriented agriculture policies were hurting the world's poor.

In 2001, the International Fund for Agricultural Development said in its annual Rural Poverty Report that in the 1990s, global support for "aid to agriculture, the main source of income [for the world's 1.2 billion extremely poor], has fallen by two-thirds."

The World Bank has also come around, pulling a u-turn away from its past policies. The Bank's 2008 World Development Report calls for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries and warns that the agricultural "sector must be placed at the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized."


CIDA Agricultural Policy Died Stillborn

When making her announcement last week, Ms. Oda mentioned that the government is "working with the international donor community to find a longer-term approach to food aid, including the question of food security."

However, it appears such a plan is currently collecting dust on CIDA's own bookshelves and websites.

Susan Whelan, a former Liberal MP under the government of Jean Chrétien, became CIDA minister in January 2002 and quickly determined Canada was not doing enough on the agricultural front.

During her initial briefings as minister, Ms. Whelan told Embassy, she repeatedly heard that 70 to 80 per cent of world poor live in rural areas and subsistence agriculture was main source of food.

Ms. Whelan then asked CIDA officials how much was being spent on agricultural development, and was met with "blank stares." She said the officials told her CIDA used to spend 15 per cent of their budget on agriculture, but that funding had been cut back to around six per cent.

Ms. Whelan, who grew up on a farm, decided it was time to launch a new policy for agriculture and rural development.

Elements of the policy, she said, included using Canada's world-leading agricultural expertise to develop co-operatives and marketing strategies. By stepping up support for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, she added, Canada would help ensure farmers on the parched soils of Sub-Saharan Africa have crops they can grow with less water.

The policy also came with a significant planned increase in funding. The plan was to see spending on agriculture ramped up to $500 million per year by 2007-2008.

Unfortunately, said Ms. Whelan, her plan for agriculture went off the rails after she left CIDA in 2003.

"Basically, after I left, CIDA decided to turn the clock back again," she said. "My understanding is that its not a focus anymore."

Ms. Whelan said she welcomes the recent food aid announcement, though she doubts $50 million is enough to alleviate hunger at a time when grain prices have tripled. More importantly, she says, it is not addressing the causes or poverty and hunger.

"We need long term development," she said. "If we don't have long-term agricultural development, than food aid is just Band-aid and that's not good enough.

"It's that old cliché," she said. "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."


Show Us the Money: NDP

And while the Liberal government of Paul Martin, as well as the current one, have ignored Ms. Whelan's target, it has not been altogether forgotten.

NDP International Development critic Alexa McDonough remembers the Liberal policy, and its $500 million target, and has been pushing the current government to re-instate it.

Ms. McDonough wrote a letter to Ms. Oda in December calling for action.

"In 2003, the government of Canada committed to increasing its annual financial commitment to agricultural development under the auspices of CIDA from an historic low of $80 million to $500 million by 2007-8," she wrote in the letter.

"Today, CIDA spends between $200 and $230 million on agricultural development projects. I call on you to urgently redress this significant financial shortfall, and ensure CIDA receives the required public funds to meet its financial obligations for 2007-8 and effectively support the vitally important development of the agricultural sector in the world's poorest communities."