ATLANTA (June 2, 2008) - As the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization convenes a summit on the global food crisis, it is critical that all actors look beyond this emergency to address the underlying causes of hunger.
"Food crises are not isolated events that happen unexpectedly" says Dr. Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE, the poverty-fighting organization. "People are plunged into crisis due to a number of interrelated factors, including poverty, poor access to markets, insufficient agricultural production, and social marginalization. A disaster only makes a systematic problem worse. Unless we address the reasons why people are vulnerable to hunger in the first place, we will not succeed in overcoming widespread food insecurity over the long term."
At the moment, donors and humanitarian agencies divide their resources between emergency response and long-term development work. Conquering hunger requires that all actors bridge this artificial divide. CARE urges summit participants to establish a global framework for understanding the multiple underlying causes of hunger and systematically addressing those causes as priorities.
One needs to be developed quickly because the current international aid system is not set up to address the new challenges facing us in an era of soaring food and fuel prices and climate change. As commodity prices have escalated, the purchasing power of poor people who must buy food to meet their basic needs has quickly plummeted. The problem has rapidly spread wherever the incomes of the poor have failed to keep pace with food prices. The scale of the problem is now enormous, spanning continents and affecting millions of people in addition to the 1.2 billion who are already surviving on $2 a day or less. Traditional humanitarian responses will not be able to keep up with the scope of the current problems.
Not only are more people hungry, but CARE and other aid agencies are seeing food security problems in groups not previously experiencing hunger. This is happening in urban as well as rural areas, and is beginning to occur in countries with middle levels of income and countries that have a food surplus. Most experts think that current increases in food prices are not cyclical and will continue. We will see hunger in many places we haven't focused on yet.
"There are better ways to address hunger than traditional distribution of aid," said Dr. Gayle. "Humanitarian organizations just need to have the flexibility in funding to carry them out."
Flexible funding allows aid agencies like CARE to buy food locally, use vouchers, much like food stamps, and invest in social safety nets that will keep people from losing their livelihoods and their assets over the long run. All of these measures provide vulnerable people with a cushion against the shock of the next disaster – whether that's a cyclone or a drought or the traditional "hungry season" between harvests.
In the medium term, it is important to invest in expanded social protection programs that can provide stable, predictable, and timely benefits for those who are not able to gain from development initiatives – children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups. We need to prioritize those situations where the risk of hunger is predictable. The international community should help national governments build effective social protection programs for their citizens.
We also need to re-examine the role of bio-fuels. We must to understand the impacts of the current commitments made on biofuels and revise these accordingly based on the consequences that we are now starting to see, such as: rising food prices; countries moving from being net food exporters to importers; displacement of people; and so-on. There also appears to be little evidence that biofuels contribute to slowing global warming, but rather add extra pressure on increasing food prices.
Longer-term, there must be a focus on supporting agricultural production and marketing, particularly for small farmers. This requires the removal of policy obstacles, as well as greater investment by developing country governments, major donors, and the private sector to increase the productivity of small-scale farming and their integration into markets, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Poor farmers need the ability, coupled with incentives, to increase production. For decades, lack of attention to and investment in small farmers has blocked their potential.
"We must be more efficient and effective than ever in our how we address chronic hunger and that means using aid and long-term strategies in the best possible way," said Dr. Gayle.
