The international organisation of food security is in disarray. How has this happened? New research on food aid by the Overseas Development Institute, ODI, makes clear the seriousness of the issue. Tackling hunger is crucial to the international targets for reducing poverty. The report shows that the poorest 1.5 billion people in the world live on less than $US1 a day and typically spend 80 percent of their income on food.

The study suggests that the chaos arises from a loss of confidence in all forms of food aid except for emergency relief. Furthermore, although there are many ways in which donors can help overcome hunger apart from food aid, internationally negotiated commitments on food security are not adapted to include these. Institutional arrangements exacerbate the problem, notably regarding the role of the World Food Programme (WFP), the USA and the EU.

The report indicates that there is widespread recognition of the need to change. The question is: how do you reach a consensus on how to do it? From this perspective, the food aid case is interesting not just because of the importance of hunger, but also as a case study in the pitfalls of reshaping global governance. The study looks at food aid in the wider context of poverty reduction and makes the following key findings:

• Relief food aid plays a clear and crucial role in saving lives and providing nutrition in acute crises caused by conflict or natural disaster. However, problems include: a lack of evidence of its positive impact, evidence of ineffectiveness and late-arriving, inflexible relief hampering the recovery of local economies.
• Developmental food aid has been relatively unsuccessful in combating poverty and improving the nutritional and health status of vulnerable people in the 1990s.
• Programme food aid, which is provided to governments for sale, is a particularly blunt instrument.
• There is a lack of evidence on the impacts of project food aid, which provides food directly, because of inadequate performance monitoring.
• Financial aid is generally a more efficient way of funding activities such as school meals or food-for-work, or providing balance-of-payments or budgetary support for general development or food security.
• As a result there has been a massive fall in programme food aid and a slow decline in WFP development activities.

Some general conclusions can be drawn:

• Success in limiting the effects of natural disasters and conflicts indicates that food aid still has a role in emergency relief and post-crisis rehabilitation, though with considerable scope for improved performance.
• Food aid can also be useful as targeted assistance to highly food-insecure people in situations of poorly functioning fragile markets and serious institutional weakness. However, it has not proved an effective or efficient instrument for supporting poverty reduction strategies more generally.
• Hunger remains an important problem. It needs a comprehensive package of food assistance measures, which should be devised and implemented nationally, with international support.
• Food aid has a positive but limited role to play in this task, especially in emergencies, but it needs to be planned and managed in the wider, food assistance context.
• Unfortunately, current rules and institutional arrangements continue to treat food aid as a special case.

Source(s):
‘Reforming food aid: time to grasp the nettle?’, ODI Briefing Paper #1, ODI: London by Edward Clay, 2000 Full document.
‘Food and human security: retrospective’, Chapter 16 in Food Aid and Human Security, edited by Edward Clay and Olav Stokke, EADI Book Series 24, Frank Cass: London, 2000 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 11 March 2002

Further Information:
Edward Clay
Overseas Development Institute
111 Westminster Bridge Road
London SE1 7JD
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7922 0300
Fax: +44 (0)20 7922 0399
Contact the contributor: e.clay@odi.org.uk

Overseas Development Institute, UK

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