AMERICAN GIVING | Strengthening communities through generosity
17 April 2008
High Food Prices, Urban Migration Make It Hard to Help the Poor
U.S. officials talk of difficulty of feeding 35 million of the world’s poor
Kansas City, Missouri -- Food aid providers and recipients face a “new and troubled landscape” that changes the dynamics of assistance, says Henrietta Fore, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The combination of high food and energy costs, climate extremes affecting production and a weakening U.S. dollar “is unlike crises we have faced before,” Fore says. Earlier crises were caused mostly by geography-specific factors -- drought, flood or war -- and affected a relatively homogeneous group of people, she says.
Fore, who is also director of U.S. foreign assistance, spoke April 16 at the 10th annual International Food Aid Conference in Kansas City, Missouri. The conference was sponsored by USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
At the conference, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said the growing demand for crops to produce biofuels is only one reason, and not a major reason, for high food costs.
Schafer said, “Higher energy prices are the biggest factor in pushing up food prices.” He said failed crops in many countries also contribute to the food crisis, which some have called a “perfect storm.”
Fore said USAID currently is facing $265 million in unanticipated food aid costs, approximately $200 million attributed to higher commodity prices.
Schafer said that on April 14 he was authorized by President Bush to draw down an estimated $200 million from the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust for emergency food aid.
URBAN MIGRATION
Fore said a shift in the world’s poor population from primarily rural areas to urban areas poses new challenges for food aid providers.
During the next 30 years, the world’s population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion people, with 2 billion of those being born in cities, she said.
She said there could be “an increase in the number of people suffering from extreme hunger” in towns and cities. “If urban hunger continues to grow, the most visible and worrisome threat will be mass and civil disruption, as we are already seeing,” Fore said.
In recent weeks, food riots have occurred in Haiti, Egypt, West Africa, Bangladesh and other areas because of the increasing price of food.
One of the challenges aid providers face is identifying and assessing the needs of urban poor, “household by household and neighborhood by neighborhood,” an assessment model that is “very different from what we are undertaking in rural areas,” Fore said.
Another challenge is to help the new city residents learn how to grow food in urban settings, such as in gardens.
SOLUTIONS
While Fore said that she did not expect to see a decline in food prices “anytime soon,” she did offer hope for the longer term. At a press conference, Fore said public-private partnerships that develop countries’ production and market-access systems, provide training and exchange research ideas “will solve the problems of the future.”
She said the partnerships help developing countries raise their production levels, which have been falling as many farmers have become unable to afford increasingly expensive inputs -- seeds, fertilizer and fuel. While in the 1970s and 1980s, production growth rates averaged 3 percent annually, in recent years growth rates have declined to 1 percent.
Fore said USAID wants to help improve the trade systems in developing countries and encourage governments to support entrepreneurs. “The ultimate anti-hunger tool is a favorable business climate,” she said.
She said USAID has begun to analyze 15 transportation corridors for development in Africa. Those would link production centers with consumption centers and “could substantially reduce the price of food staples,” she said.
Schafer said American researchers are collaborating with their counterparts in other countries to develop a new variety of wheat that would resist a devastating rust disease that affects crops in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Africa.
Already, U.S. wheat stocks are at a 60-year low. But, while 75 percent of current U.S. wheat strains are susceptible to this rust disease, the disease is not yet present in America. If its spores travel to the Western Hemisphere on air currents and if a resistant wheat variety is not discovered, food supplies could be diminished severely, Schafer said. In 2007, America helped feed 35 million people in more than 70 countries.
