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LONDON (AlertNet) - Cash vouchers, nutritionally enriched food, a new focus on the under-twos, buying from local markets - these initiatives are all part of a "pretty dramatic" transformation in the way the World Food Programme (WFP) is tackling hunger, th
LONDON (AlertNet) - Cash vouchers, nutritionally enriched food, a new focus on the under-twos, buying from local markets - these initiatives are all part of a "pretty dramatic" transformation in the way the World Food Programme (WFP) is tackling hunger, the head of the U.N. agency said.
Take for example, a pilot programme in Syria where Iraqi refugees receive food vouchers by text message which can be exchanged for rice, cheese, eggs and canned fish among other items at government-run shops.
The technology means they are able to decide when they go shopping and what goes in their basket, rather than having to make their way to a distribution centre where they have little choice over what they are given.
"This type of more sophisticated response is quite revolutionary on the scale that we're doing it," WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran told The F-word: Hunger in the Media debate, organised by WFP and AlertNet last week.
Set up in 1962, the world's biggest humanitarian agency has faced criticism for accepting large amounts of in-kind commodities -- principally from the United States, Europe and other wealthy economies -- that are then shipped to poorer nations for distribution. Campaigners say this system undermines local farmers and local markets.
However Sheeran, a former U.S. State Department and trade official, told the audience of journalists and aid workers that these days the "vast majority" of WFP's donors were cash donors, and that 80 percent of the food WFP was buying was being sourced in the developing world.
POLITICS IN PLAY
WFP's reforms were welcome but have come very late, said fellow panellist Alex Renton, a journalist who writes on development and food policy.
"The Americans have been using food aid since the 1950s as a way firstly to support American agriculture, secondly to open up markets in the developing world to American produce," he reminded the audience.
"I would suggest for almost 50 years, WFP and the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) charged with solving the problem of world hunger failed to do so and they failed to do so for eminently political reasons. They were frightened of putting off or annoying the most generous donor of aid in the world, which has been, and presumably will always be the United States."
Renton also asked why WFP was not looking at some of the core problems around agriculture and food supply in Haiti.
He said the Caribbean nation, which was struck by a devastating earthquake in January, imports 80 percent of its rice from the United States. Yet 20 years ago it was self-sufficient in the commodity.
Renton blamed the U.S. government for "engineering" some of Haiti's food supply problems through its trade policies.
On a visit to Haiti in March, former U.S. President Bill Clinton acknowledged that the United States and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, albeit well-intentioned, had been wrong to push developing states into opening their markets to cheap subsidised imports.
He said legislation he signed during his 1993-2001 presidency that effectively increased U.S. rice imports to Haiti, decimating local rice production, was a mistake and part of a global trend that was "wrong-headed".
"If WFP is an advocate for the poor hungry it should be tackling directly that problem," Renton said.
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