Critics say neglect of agriculture has left poor with insufficient food
Washington Post, Straits Times 20 May 08;
UNITED NATIONS - BUFFETED by food riots at home, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade this month lashed out at a distant culprit: The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
He slammed it as a wasteful 'bottomless pit of money' that should be abolished for failing to help increase global food production.
Mr Wade's broadside was part of a general backlash against multilateral organisations created after World WarII - including the FAO, the World Bank and the World Food Programme (WFP) - that were tasked with weaving together a safety net for the world's poorest.
A recent spike in food prices has ripped a massive hole in that net, triggering riots around the world and threatening to plunge more than 100million people into extreme poverty.
Analysts say decades of neglect of agriculture by those agencies have left many countries with less food to feed their people.
'There has been a very deep institutional failure over how we deal with food problems,' said Stanford University scholar C. Peter Timmer, who studies food security.
'Everybody understands that 80per cent of the world's poor are in rural areas. But the World Bank, for 30 years, has basically said market signals do not support agriculture, so we cannot support agriculture.'
Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon convened a task force to try to stitch the safety net back together.
It intends to present a plan of action aimed at lowering trade barriers, boosting agricultural production and extending a lifeline to the poorest at a summit of world leaders at the FAO's headquarters in Rome from June3-5.
'I can understand and sympathise with the frustrations of many African leaders,' Mr Ban told reporters this month.
But he said: 'This crisis did not come out of the blue. It grew out of more than a decade of neglect and ineffective development policies.'
The FAO has become the target of increasing criticism.
An independent review of its policies last summer said the agency had lost the confidence of donors, who have steadily reduced funding over the past decade.
'FAO is today adrift,' according to a report last July by a team of outside experts.
FAO director-general Jacques Diouf has defended the agency's record. In a statement last Thursday, he blamed the food crisis on a host of external factors such as the neglect of agriculture by policymakers and population growth.
Last year, the World Bank commissioned an internal review of its agricultural programmes in Africa, and concluded that 'over time, the importance of agriculture in the bank's rural strategy has declined'.
The bank's Independent Evaluation Group noted that total international agricultural aid fell from US$1.9 billion (S$2.6 billion) in 1981 to less than US$1 billion by 2001.
World Bank president Robert Zoellick has vowed to reverse the slide, and has pressed the American, Japanese and European governments to end agricultural subsidies which make it difficult for poor farmers to compete in global markets.
He has also called for reducing the sort of food donations favoured by the US.
The WFP, which was established in the 1950s to distribute surplus US and European food stocks, concedes that shipping too much food aid to poor countries can hurt local farmers. But the US farmers and shipping companies that supply the programme have resisted the change.
Oxford University professor of economics Paul Collier said that multilateral organisations, despite their failings, will have to play a key role in fixing the problem.
'These are the organisations we have got,' he said. 'It took the Second World War to produce them, and we better try to make them work.'
