World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told the U.S. Congress Wednesday that the world needs to “get money out the door as fast as we can” to “avoid absolutely catastrophic consequences” of the food crisis exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We need to move fast. We need to make certain that [the U.S. Agency for International Development] is encouraged to move the resources out as quickly as possible. We’ve got means and mechanisms to do that,” Beasley said, noting that the short-term crisis must be addressed while not losing sight of long-term resilience building.
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“But right now the house is burning down. We’ve got to make certain we put the fire out before the entire world is on fire.”
WFP is about $10 billion short of what it needs to meet current needs, Beasley told the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Multilateral International Development, Multilateral Institutions, and International Economic, Energy, and Environmental Policy, even as he called distributions from the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust a “godsend.” Beasley said “millions upon millions” of beneficiaries are being cut, in some places up to 50%. WFP costs have spiked by $71 million per month because of food and fuel increases, as well as shipping costs, he said.
Even before the war in Ukraine, 276 million people were hungry globally. The number will climb an additional 50 million, Beasley said.
The Senate is considering a $40 billion emergency supplemental bill, passed by the House Tuesday, to provide additional Ukraine aid. It also includes $5 billion for global food security, which Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said helps but “is not enough by itself.”
Graham said he would “rattle some cages” of other international donors, including in the oil-rich Gulf, to get other nations to provide more to meet the funding gap — and warned that failing to finance global food security needs would damage U.S. national security and lead to mass migration and increased terrorism. Beasley said that so far this year, Saudi Arabia has provided $6.6 million to WFP — compared to $1.6 billion from the U.S., which is the U.N. agency’s largest donor — while the United Arab Emirates has given nothing.
“That may change next week,” Graham said. “I want us to call in our allies and say, ‘you need to help, too.’”
Graham also proposed the establishment of a global fund for food security, similar to The Global fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria “to get a new line of revenue from the private sector.”
“We’ll put money in, but other countries have to match,” Graham said.
African Development Bank President and former Nigerian minister of agriculture Akinwumi Adesina told senators that less than three months into the war, the cost of bread is already out of reach for many Africans. He said the fertilizer price spike of 300% threatens food security on the continent.
“If we don’t mitigate this [fertilizer] shortage rapidly, food production will decline by at least 20% and we estimate in many places by more than 50% as well. This horrific perfect storm will see Africa lose more than $11 billion in the value of food production,” Adesina said. “Without urgent and immediate global action, we may witness social and political unrest as we have seen only too often in the past.”
He said AfDB was prepared to meet the challenge through its $1.5 billion Africa emergency food production plan, which will help support African countries in producing 38 million metric tons of food “rapidly.” Twenty million farmers, the majority of them women, will gain access to climate-resilient agricultural technologies through the plan, Adesina said. The bank will finance $1.3 billion of the plan, and he called for U.S. support in bridging the $200 million gap.
Opening ports in Ukraine so that the country’s available grain — which before the invasion fed 400 million people — can be exported is extremely important, Beasley said. Getting it out of the country via land costs about $120 more per metric ton, he said.
Beasley said that for the moment the world is experiencing a food price problem rather than an actual shortage, with enough food still being produced globally.
“But next year because of the fertilizer and the droughts, we could have a food availability problem,” he warned.
About the author
Teresa Welshtmawelsh
Teresa Welsh is a Senior Reporter at Devex. She has reported from more than 10 countries and is currently based in Washington, D.C. Her coverage focuses on Latin America; U.S. foreign assistance policy; fragile states; food systems and nutrition; and refugees and migration. Prior to joining Devex, Teresa worked at McClatchy's Washington Bureau and covered foreign affairs for U.S. News and World Report. She was a reporter in Colombia, where she previously lived teaching English. Teresa earned bachelor of arts degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Wisconsin.
