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	Worldwide food crisis highlights need for foreign aid overhaul by Oxfam / Center for Global Development USA   April 2008   U.S. Farm Bill puts vested interests first. (Center for Global Development)   Despite record high food prices, the 2008 U.S. Farm Bill, expected to pass Congress soon, would maintain a system that transfers billions of dollars annually to the largest farm operations.   Roughly 70 percent of subsidy payments go to just 10 percent of the largest recipients and one version of the farm bill would allow farmers with incomes as high as $1 million to continue receiving subsidies. And this is touted as a "reform" measure because it lowers the income cap from the current $2.4 million.   Ensuring that food supplies are adequate and that poor people around the world can meet their basic nutrition needs is a critical problem that governments and international organizations around the world clearly need to address -- in both the long-term as well immediately. Replicating the distorting U.S. and European policies that transfer billions in taxpayer and consumer dollars to a handful of farmers in hopes that a little bit will trickle down to hungry people is not the way to go.   April 2008   Worldwide food crisis highlights need for foreign aid overhaul, says Oxfam.   Today before the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, international agency Oxfam America said that while US foreign assistance has helped millions of people, it is still underperforming and often fails to reach the people who need it most.   Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, told the Committee during his testimony:   “Just look at the headlines—skyrocketing food prices are setting off riots in countries across the world where people were already living on a knife’s edge. We have a moral responsibility to reduce poverty—but if you look at the instability caused by the current food crisis, it’s clear that reducing global poverty is fundamental to our national security as well.   “Making aid work for the world’s poor and American taxpayers means the next President and Congress must seize this historic opportunity to make aid more effective by responding to the needs of recipients. Our current top-down approach isn’t going to cut it.”   “The national security establishment here in Washington has publicly acknowledged the threat of global poverty and this country’s limited ability to fight it with its current foreign aid system.”   According to Oxfam, designing a foreign aid strategy to reduce global poverty is itself a compelling American national interest. Foreign aid programs that are not designed with long-term poverty reduction as their clear purpose will not reduce poverty. Fighting poverty can deliver long-term security benefits, but only if the focus is first on poverty.   Testifying before the committee, Offenheiser, who has over 30 years of experience working on development and foreign assistance, made the case that the US has the greatest opportunity for foreign aid reform it has seen since the 1960’s, when the current aid system was implemented.   “The beginning of a new presidency is the best opportunity for real progress in foreign aid reform—there is both the need and opportunity to redefine America"s global role,” said Offenheiser. “It’s clear that Americans are ready to embrace change as well—our image abroad matters to them.”   In a poll conducted by the Aspen Institute and World Learning in February, 9 out of 10 people believe it is very important for other countries to have a favorable opinion of Americans.   Despite a commitment to substantially increase foreign aid to fight extreme poverty, US funding has dropped for the second year in a row. The US made the commitment to increase aid at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit.   US aid to the world"s poorest countries fell to $21.7 billion in 2007 from $23.5 billion in 2006. Although the US is still the world"s largest donor in terms of total aid dollars, it ranks near the bottom of the list when comparing development aid against gross national income (GNI).   In 2007, the US gave just 0.16 percent of its GNI to development aid, down from 0.18 percent in 2006.   The figures come from new data whichs show that the total overseas aid provided in 2007 was $104 billion, in real terms an 8.4 percent drop. US aid decreased by 9.9 percent in 2007.   Oxfam called on the US to meet its commitments, but also to ensure the aid it is currently delivering is effectively helping people lift themselves out of poverty.   "With increased food prices wreaking havoc on poor communities globally, the US must ensure that aid is as effective as possible," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America.   "The US must take steps to increase overseas assistance, but also to improve the quality of the aid. The long-term needs of the poor not politics should come first," said Offenheiser. "The next administration must refocus the foreign aid system so that it will help lift millions from poverty and re-establish US global standing."   Just this week, the BBC World Service released a poll showing that people around the world ranked the US below Russia when asked about a country"s positive influence in the world.   "For every dollar the US spends on aid on poverty-focused aid, it spends almost $33 on defense," said Offenheiser. "When aid is effective, it builds a safer world for everyone."   Rich countries promised to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010. They also committed to significantly improve the way it is given, directly allocating more resources to fighting poverty. They have done very little to meet these promises since then.   Oxfam calculates that on recent trends, rich countries will fall short of the target by as much as $30 billion – a difference that could cost millions of lives.   Without this vital aid, there is no chance of meeting the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, such as cutting maternal and child death and ensuring every child gets to go to school.   In 1970, rich countries promised to give 0.7 percent of their income as aid. Only Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden and Norway have met this promise.
	Neglect of Farming led to Rice Crisis by Marwaan Macan-Markar Inter Press Service Thailand   Bangkok. April 2008   The headlines screaming about a global food shortage have not aroused surprise in a leading non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with farming communities across Asia. To its members, warnings of hunger on a biblical scale are hardly news.   After all, the Asia-Pacific arm of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), a global environmental lobby, has been raising the alarm about an impending rice shortage for years. Among its more recent campaigns was one launched to coincide with ‘’The International Year of Rice,” which was marked globally in 2004.   But the alarm bells rung by PAN were ignored by governments in the region, home to nine of the world’s top 10 producers of the grain. They are China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines and Japan. The only non-Asian in this rice league is Brazil.   ‘’Governments refused to listen to our concerns. In the last five years we have been saying that we are in rice crisis, that food security and food sovereignty were being undermined,” Clare Westwood, campaign coordinator for PAN’s ‘Save Our Rice Campaign, said during a telephone interview from Malaysia. ‘’It was only a matter of time before the warnings became real.”   PAN’s primary concern was the push towards rice cultivation on an industrial scale that promoted monoculture, where a few high-yield rice varieties that needed large doses of chemicals were held up as the answer to growing demand. Marginalised, consequently, were the small farmers, who came from rural communities that had used local knowledge over centuries to generate new varieties of paddy seeds that blended with the local environment.   ‘’The high-yielding seeds prompted in the monoculture style of farming are not as hardy as local varieties produced through the ecological style of farming,” adds Westwood. ‘’This hybrid rice can only perform well under certain circumstances and they need a lot of fertiliser and pesticides and they are water intensive. These are their inherent weaknesses.”   A recent report by a regional U.N. body lends weight to PAN’s view about the high cost Asian governments are currently paying for neglecting the agricultural sector, where a bulk of the poor in Asia and the Pacific — some 641 million people — live. ‘’The rural poor account for 70 percent of the poor in the Asia-Pacific region, and agriculture is their main livelihood,” states a survey published by the Bangkok-based Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).   ‘’The agriculture sector has been neglected for a long time, nearly four decades, and the Asia-Pacific regions would have run into a food shortage problem and rising food prices sooner or later,” says Shamika Sirimanne, chief of the socioeconomic section in the poverty and development division of ESCAP. ‘’Governments used to provide much more public services to the agriculture sector earlier.”   Assistance had ranged from public funds to help farmers improve their Yields, assistance with research and development and with marketing the grain. State funds had also been invested to improve roads and other infrastructure projects to improve the quality of life in rural areas.   ‘’This shift has become marked since the 1980s,” Sirimanne explained in an interview. ‘’Everybody began to think of economic growth in that decade and what could be achieved through manufacturing, industry and services. The idea of growth through agriculture was sidelined.”   World Bank figures help to explain why these new avenues for growth in the region were attractive. In China, the emerging Asian economic powerhouse, the gross domestic production (GDP) from agriculture during the 1981-1985 period was 28.7 percent, while industry accounted for 26 percent. But during the 2001-2006 period, agriculture’s contribution to China’s GDP had dropped to 8.7 percent, while industry rose to 49.1 percent.   In India, during the same period, agriculture went down from 18.4 percent of GDP to 6.2 percent, making way for industry and services. And in Indonesia, agriculture dropped from 18.4 percent of GDP to 11.8 percent, also making way for industry and services.   But what did not follow as a result of this shift away from agriculture was a drop in the number of poor in rural areas. ‘’Even today, 60 percent of the region’s labour force is in the agriculture sector, where a large number live in poverty,” says Sirimanne. ‘’The Asian agriculture sector is dominated by very poor people and it is the duty of governments to start re-investing in them to improve productivity.”   And now, even the authors of a major international study on the future of global agriculture have made a strong case to resurrect the role of the small, neglected rural farming communities to improve cereal production, including rice. The final report of the U.N-backed International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which was authored by 400 experts from across the world, was approved in mid-April at a meeting of governments and scientists in Johannesburg.   ‘’The report called for greater participation of small-scale farming and for governments to rethink their prevailing agriculture structures,” Lim Li Ching, the lead author for the Asia report to IAASTD, told IPS. ‘’This is because the traditional farming methods in this region were environmentally sustainable.”
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