The European Commission's €600M food crisis plan

The European Commission wants to target macroeconomic support, food production, and humanitarian relief under a €600 million ($640 million) response to the global food crisis, according to a document seen by Devex.

The so-called nonpaper, sent to European Union countries this week by the commission and the European External Action Service, envisages €100 million for macroeconomic and fiscal stability, €350 million for food production and resilient food systems, and €150 million for aid in selected African, Caribbean, and Pacific — or ACP — countries.

EU states must still approve the plan, which draws on unused funds from the European Development Fund. The EDF — worth €30.5 billion for 2014-2020 — was once a key pillar of the EU’s development strategy, with the money going to the ACP group of states, most of them in Africa. It was paid for by member states but was separate from the EU’s common budget. The EDF was rolled into the bloc’s 2021-2027 budget cycle, though unused commitments from previous years can still be reallocated.

Under the proposal, the macroeconomic component would contribute to the subsidy account of the International Monetary Fund’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust — designed to facilitate concessional lending to the world’s lowest-income nations. The food production and resilience aspect covers, among other things, investments in small-scale infrastructure such as storage facilities and irrigation. Meanwhile, humanitarian relief will combine urgent assistance for those suffering acute malnutrition with efforts to tackle the root causes of food insecurity.

The plan, which has been under preparation for weeks and was formally requested by EU national leaders at the end of May, would only be available to ACP countries. Of these, the document states that “support will be provided to selected countries that are negatively affected by the effects of the war in Ukraine, and hence are facing increasingly high food security challenges, as well as a difficult macro-economic position with limited or no buffers at all to withstand the current shock.”

The €600 million would underpin the “EU Global Food Security Response,'' designed to “operationalise the various strands of action” that are already underway. For now, France is championing the Food and Agriculture Resilience Mission initiative, and Germany launched the Alliance for Global Food Security of the G-7 group of nations in May, while the United Nations launched a Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance in March.

According to a timeline in the nonpaper, the commission plans to submit a formal proposal to member states by the end of June for their decision by the end of July.

EU states are also preparing a joint position on the bloc’s food security strategy, with the text discussed by development advisers Thursday in Brussels. A first draft, seen by Devex, mentions the need to “visibly communicate EU actions as a responsible and trustworthy global actor and to counter Russian information manipulation and interference, which falsely blames [EU] sanctions [against Russia] for the deteriorating global food security situation.” The draft underlines “the importance of EU solidarity towards the most affected partner countries.”

The commission has an eye on geopolitics too. “Partner countries worldwide are looking at the [Ukraine] conflict through the prism of rise in energy and food prices,” the commission nonpaper states. “They expect the EU to match its focus on Ukraine with global solidarity in addressing food security and economic consequences of the conflict.”

The EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, told Devex at a press conference on May 20 that the bloc may now adjust how it spends its development budgets in so-called third countries to prioritize “feeding people,” though the overall amounts programmed for each country would remain unchanged.

On May 31, Borrell and the two EU commissioners responsible for neighborhood and development policy wrote to the chairs of the relevant European Parliament committees to explain how they intended to strengthen support to Ukraine as their “main priority” while also covering other “urgent global needs.”

The letter, obtained by Devex, said that the €1.54 billion “emerging challenges and priorities cushion” in the commission’s 2022 budget would be exhausted to provide €501 million for Ukraine, as well as spending elsewhere.

The amounts for the rest of the world include €469 million for Syrian refugees in Turkey, €75 million to support vaccine rollouts, €100 million for human rights, €150 million for civil society, and €163 million “intended for the most politically important actions to be financed in 2022, such as our commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,” the letter reads.

“The EU has not turned its back on the rest of its partners,” a commission spokesperson told Devex on Thursday, citing recent pledges to address food security in Africa’s Sahel region, the Horn of Africa, and the EU’s southern neighborhood.

“On the contrary, the EU is quickly mobilising our support via [the development budget] but also humanitarian funds to help address the new hike in food prices and energy due to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, by shelling its grain warehouses and fields and blocking over 20 million tonnes of grain in the Black Sea, that are desperately needed in other parts of the world.”