D. John Shaw

The UN World Food Programme and the development of food aid

List of Tables List of Figures Foreword Sir Hans Singer Preface Acknowledgements Notes on the Text List of Abbreviations Key Events Introduction The Birth of WFP: One Mans Inspiration Antecedents: A Tale of Three Cities The Experimental Years: 1963-65 Food for Development Emergency and Relief Operations Managing Food Aid Resources Constitutional Change: The Byzantine Vortex Reform and Renewal: Future Directions Endnotes Bibliography Dramatis Personae Index

World Food Summit, 1996

Two decades after the 1974 World Food Conference, the election of a new director-general of FAO resulted in a call for another world meeting on food security. In his first policy statement to the FAO Council in May 1994, following his election in November 1993, Jacques Diouf from Senegal, the first African director-general of FAO, proposed that a World Food Summit (WFS) be held in 1996 in the context of the changes relating to the programmes, structures and policies of FAO that the FAO Conference had empowered him to make (FAO, 1994a). In making his proposal, he said The challenges facing this Organization are the challenges of Member Nations. It is Member Nations and their people who cannot accept the human tragedy of 800 million people without adequate food, be they those condemned to abject poverty and misery, be they the 192 million children whose hunger today points to deprivation of opportunities tomorrow. It is Member Nations who face the challenge of feeding 9,000 million people by the year 2030. Accordingly, it is Member Nations who rightly insist that their Organization for food and agriculture effectively help them in dealing with these challenges.

Global Information and Early Warning System

Experience has repeatedly showed that accurate, timely and commonly available information of an impending disaster, coupled with a sound and speedy response, are key factors in mitigating the effects of emergencies. The returns from national and donor investment in early warning and response systems could therefore be considerable. Human and economic suffering and damage could be saved or mitigated, and enormous costs and diversion of resources in protracted relief programmes could be avoided. An international aid programme combining financial aid and technology with skills transfer deserves the highest priority. It is recognized that the first step is to improve national reporting services in collecting and analysing a range of factors affecting national food security. Only to the extent of the availability of reliable data at the national level can an international system function effectively.

World Food Crisis

Hunger, and humankind’s concern about it, goes back to biblical times, to the story of Joseph and the seven fat and lean years. In more recent times, since the eighteenth century, a number of ‘waves’ of food-population pessimism have been detected.1 One was stimulated by Thomas Malthus and his dire predictions in An Essay on Population in 1789, another by the writings of Sir William Crookes and others in the later 1890s. A third wave followed the devastation of the First World War, and a fourth with the Second World War. Then, beginning in 1965, southern Asia experienced two successive years of monsoon failure, requiring massive aid shipments and triggering new fears of impending world famine. By the end of the 1960s, the Green Revolution and its promise of improved wheat and rice yields, began to level off. At the same time, expectations were rising in the developing countries as they became independent. And booming economies and rising incomes in the more developed countries were bringing a demand for more and better food. Populations continued to expand, along with concern about the carrying capacity of planet earth. The stage was set for a sixth wave of world pessimism at the beginning of the 1970s. There was a certain irony in the fact that this new wave of crisis thinking came at a time when the world food situation had actually been improving over the previous two decades: world food production increased by more than half and production per capita had gone up by 22 per cent.

Freedom from Hunger Campaign

The 1960s began with an entirely new approach in the quest for world food security on the initiative of a new FAO director-general, the first, and so far the only one, from the Asia region. Binay Ranjan Sen, popularly known as B. R. Sen, had been India’s Director-General of Food during wartime (1943–46), his primary task being to ensure equitable distribution of scarce food supplies for one-sixth of the world’s population. He wrote: ‘All my life I had been in the midst of hunger and poverty in all its stark reality’ (Sen, 1982, p. 137). He had followed closely the discussions at the Hot Springs, Quebec and Copenhagen conferences and had seen that while they had opened a new chapter in international solidarity, they had also shown that the major powers were not prepared to establish some form of world food security arrangement under the control of a multilateral organization. A different strategy was therefore required that would be more acceptable to them but would also keep the goal of eliminating hunger alive.

UN Conference on Environment and Development, 1992

The UN Conference on Environment and Development, commonly known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 3 and 14 June 1992, was regarded as an historic turning point for humanity in reaching agreement on the principles and actions necessary to achieve environmentally sustainable development, an essential requirement for reaching world food security (UN, 1993a).

Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995

The Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China, from 4 to 15 September 1995 marked the end of two decades of intense international debate on the empowerment of women and their role in the development process. The first world conference on women had been held in Mexico City in 1975, after which the following ten years (1976–85) had been declared the United Nations Decade for Women. A second world conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1980 and a third in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. Increasing research and practical experience over this period had shown that women played pivotal roles in the social and economic development of their families, communities and nations. But this was often done in the face of formidable political, cultural, social and economic constraints.

Food Aid and Food Security

Of all the many issues and concerns that Singer has addressed in his long career, one of his greatest contributions has been to the international debate on food aid.12 There are few aspects of the subject that he has not touched on at one time or another. The epistemic community of food aid specialists has recognized that no other person has had such a dominant impact on the subject (Hopkins, 1992). As we saw earlier, he played a strategic role in the creation of the World Food Programme, the food aid organization of the United Nations system (Shaw, 1998a; Shaw, 2001a). And his consultant services have regularly been sought by bilateral and non-governmental food aid programmes as well as by WFP itself. For his role and services, he was given the WFP Food for Life Award in 2001.

World Summit for Children, 1990

On 29-30 September 1990, the largest gathering of world leaders in history assembled at the United Nations in New York to attend the World Summit for Children (WSC).3 It was fitting that first among of the series of international conferences held in the 1990s was that concerned with the well-being of children. It was recognized that children were the most vulnerable segment of society, and had suffered particularly during the 1980s, as two seminal studies by UNICEF revealed. The first had shown the full and staggering effects of the world recession of the 1980s on children in many parts of the developing world (UNICEF, 1984). The study also helped to change the perspective on development. It concluded with the view that: ‘the world needed to be confronted with the consequences of the current economic policies and the possibilities of clear alternatives. We were used to describing the flows of money and wealth, with their effects on human life seen as incidental consequences. If we instead started with the focus on people, the same international links could be traced in a wholly new light. The human consequences would be brought to the fore, with economic numbers becoming background. When this glimpse of another reality became an accepted and legitimate preoccupation of national and international policy, more hope could be taken for the welfare and future of the world’s children, the next generation’.

World Bank Perspective

Inevitably, the World Bank joined the chorus in addressing the issues and options for ensuring food security in the developing countries in a seminal study that appeared first as an internal report in 1985 (World Bank, 1985) and then as a Bank publication in 1986 (World Bank, 1986).47 The study noted that the world had ‘ample food’. Food production had grown faster than the unprecedented growth of population. World cereal prices had been falling. And there was enough food available worldwide so that countries that did not produce all the food they needed could import it, if they could afford to do so. Yet famines still occurred as part of the problem of widespread hunger and malnutrition. A ‘continuing tragedy’ was that over one-third of the population of the developing world, about 730 million people, did not have enough food, and some 340 million of them were acutely undernourished. But what were the causes of hunger? No doubt inspired by the work of Amartya Sen, the study emphasized that inadequate food supply was no longer the source of the problem. Food security, defined as ‘dependable access to enough food for an active, healthy life’, was the ‘most fundamental need’. But many countries did not have strategies for helping most of their people achieve food security. And of those which did, some had strategies that were ineffective or self-defeating in the long run.