Humanitarian aid needs an overhaul to address hunger crisis: Report

An overhaul of the humanitarian food aid system is urgently needed to prevent a reversal in progress on ending hunger amid a host of global challenges, according to a new report from the Rockefeller Foundation. The report, written by former UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy, focuses on how to improve the efficiency of food aid while also strengthening the food system’s resilience to prevent an endless cycle of emergency response. Among its recommendations are planning for disasters long before they hit and funneling more money to local organizations as first responders. There has been an 80% rise of acutely food insecure people globally since 2016, with an estimated 193 million people in 53 countries needing food aid. Conflict, COVID-19, and climate change have all contributed to skyrocketing rates. “It's pretty clear that there will be as many hungry people in 2030 as there were in 2015 when the world made a pledge to do away with hunger,” Bellamy told Devex. “This report in part is to say ‘Is there a way that we can utilize humanitarian funding with respect to food security to create a more stable food security system?’” Funding is nowhere near where it should be — and appeals for food aid are breaking records. The report found that while food security is the largest chunk of the 2021 global humanitarian aid budget at $6 billion, that is still only slightly more than half of the $11.1 billion funding that had been requested. Activities to build up an ability to withstand shocks were the least funded, getting just 17% of the $300 million requested. “When I was living in a refugee camp, policies, humanitarian aid — were simply imposed on people as though they have nothing to offer.” --— Joseph Kaifala, director, Jeneba Project Bellamy said the report is not “proposing a revolution.” It will be used to present policymakers and donors with concrete actions to improve the system. Former World Food Programme Executive Director Catherine Bertini, managing director of global food security at the Rockefeller Foundation, hopes the information can be used in a way similar to an influential report following the 2008 food crisis from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. its recommendations eventually became the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future Initiative, the U.S. government’s flagship food security initiative. But it can be difficult to get policymakers to understand the importance of acting before an all-out crisis, Bertini said. “There are no pictures of prevention. Even pictures of development are nice happy pictures of families being fed. It doesn’t look like a crisis,” Bertini said, noting that people are much likelier to prioritize crises that they can actually see. “We collectively have to spend time with policymakers about the importance of the prevention kind of needs.” The report’s first recommendation is for aid donors to increase investments for anticipatory action by 1% in their 2024 budgets, with a 1% increase each year for the next 10 years. Currently, less than 1% of humanitarian funding is for anticipatory action that would help avoid or mitigate crises. Bellamy said the current structure for humanitarian food security funding is very “top down.” “We’re proposing something that’s more horizontal that goes from anticipation to mitigation and then to response,” Bellamy said. “And if you begin to do that then you can start … to chip away at this wall between humanitarian and development. They barely talk to each other in many places.” The second recommendation is to increase funding for localization to 25% of spending over the next five years, similar to the goal USAID has set for itself. Localization is the term for shifting money and decision-making to organizations based on where aid work is being implemented. Greater involvement with local communities can help avert situations where food aid is not tailored to community needs, said Joseph Kaifala, director of the Jeneba Project, who served on the convening group that Bellamy consulted for the report. A Sierra Leonean who lived in a refugee camp in Guinea, Kaifala said that emergency food aid provided by humanitarian groups was not often part of the local diet, so people would not eat it. Just because people are hungry does not mean they shouldn’t have a say in what they are being fed, he said. “When I was living in a refugee camp, policies, humanitarian aid — were simply imposed on people as though they have nothing to offer,” Kaifala said. “The international community sometimes makes the mistake of seeing refugees merely as people in need of humanitarian aid.” Bertini remembers a time when WFP delivered whole maize kernels to refugees only to discover it takes three times as long to cook as ground maize. This meant a host of environmental, safety, and time challenges for people who were already struggling but now had to gather more wood and spend longer cooking. She called it a “disaster,” and said that humanitarian groups need to be better about asking people what they need. This can involve giving up some control, she said. “It could be scary to some people because it’s different,” Bertini said. “Thinking about that might be problematic all by itself, but once you actually start doing it you realize that it’s even more effective.” The third recommendation is to “crack” funding silos which prevent money from being used as efficiently as possible in contexts with both humanitarian and development needs. The fourth is to make an investment case for “under-utilized” but effective solutions for food security. While the report conveys the urgency of change, Bertini said the point was for the recommendations to be concrete and achievable. “These are actually manageable, operational things that can be done,” Bertini said. “They’re not issues about the organizations and the countries having to redo everything. It’s within the current system how can we make this more sustainable? How can we use these resources that we have not only for saving lives but for the longer term?”