So we are beginning to see a more political approach to aid programs addressing hunger and poverty. That is a welcome. But if we want to succeed any time soon, we will need to take some costly steps and tackle some issues we might well want to avoid.
First, we must have stronger and more consistent funding for humanitarian aid. While WFP funding has risen, global food aid has not. In fact, during the last three years it has actually dropped by a third from 15 million to 10 million metric tons (1999-2002). Emergency food aid needs are up and food aid is down. More funds are essential. All the major donors need to make a political commitment to a food aid system that works and is not dangerously reliant on surpluses, last minute appeals or a single donor.
Second, countries must invest more in agriculture. With hunger far from solved in the developing world, more donor aid needs to be targeted on agriculture. Yet investments continue to drop. In 1988, Official Development Assistance for agriculture was roughly $14 billion, but it was barely $8 billion in 1999. That is hardly logical when the number of hungry is on the rise in so many countries. A bright point here is that some donors are beginning to turn that situation around -- the United Kingdom, for example, has boosted its aid for agriculture five-fold and USAID raised its aid by 38 percent last year.
Third, we must free up the private sector. What so many food insecure countries have in common are inappropriate restrictions on private enterprise in agriculture. They fail to acknowledge what the introduction of market measures has done for agriculture in other developing countries. According to my colleagues at UNDP, the largest mass movement of people out of poverty in history took place in China in the mid 1980s when the Government introduced a market system in the food sector. Roughly 125 million people rose from the ranks of the poor. Yet so many countries where WFP works still impose inflexible, state controlled economics on food production.
Fourth, we need to invest more in nutrition, educational and school feeding programs in the developing world, especially targeted on girls. Seven out of 10 of the hungry worldwide are female. In Africa, donors need to move in aggressively to support NEPAD -- a home grown effort targeted at, among other things, bringing 40 million African children into school using school feeding and other mechanisms that support education.
There is no point in investing in new ports, roads, and schools, if we are not investing in sound nutrition for the children who will one day use them. One hundred and twenty million children are already stunted from malnutrition. They cannot wait for good governance, sound investment and even the wisest of aid projects to reach their villages and towns. Their lives are not on hold. They are hungry now and that hunger is crippling them and robbing them of a future.
We look especially to the US here -- former Senators McGovern and Dole have been major advocates of school feeding and the Bush Administration has made the Global School Feeding legislation permanent. But the funding falls so incredibly far short of needs. US domestic nutrition programs are budgeted to receive $42 billion in funding in FY 2004 -- so far funding for Global School Feeding is set at $50 million. Is that in the long term interest of the United States? Are we not better off having well nourished children in schools learning in Afghanistan, Central America and Africa?
Finally, we need a new global trade environment. As the Secretary General has noted, we need a trading system that encourages African and other developing country farmers to produce and export. They simply cannot compete with developed country subsidies that now amount to nearly a $1 billion a day and allow food to flow into poorer countries making private investments in agriculture unprofitable. I am from the Midwest and am an ardent believer in support for America's farmers, but we must negotiate a system -- especially with Europe and Japan which have far higher farm ubsidies -- that will not stifle farmers in poor countries. Food aid is inherently a short-term solution: the people of the developing world must be given the conditions and tools they need to feed themselves.
Separating humanitarian aid from political decision-making has not worked in the past. It will not work in the future. People are hungry because governments have made the wrong political decisions. In the end, hunger is a political creation and we must use political means to end it.
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