More ways to help | The updated agreement allows organizations to provide cash or vouchers and offer a wider range of food
A new international treaty add-ressing global hunger policy has been met with approval from the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, al-though it has concerns about the country’s long-term commitments under the pact.
Negotiations for the Food Assistance Convention concluded in the spring and include a number of changes from the 1999 Food Aid Convention, which saw Canada provide 420,000 tonnes of annual emergency food aid.
That document had received a number of updates and renewals dating back to its inception in 1967.
The previous pact included multi-year commitments from its members, but that requirement has been dropped in the new agreement.
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Instead, member countries will make annual commitments determined by monetary value.
The Trans-Atlantic Food Assistance Dialogue, a coalition of food aid programming non-governmental organizations, says that could lead to a decline in predictability and support from member countries.
Stuart Clark, senior policy adviser at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, is calling on the Canadian government to continue to support aid at its current level, a commitment of more than $220 million per year.
“Before, all of the commitments were made in-kind. Thereby, if the price of food went up, you still were going to provide that amount of food,” he said.
“Now, if you make a commitment in cash, if the price of food goes up, you provide less food.”
Annual commitments will be calculated based on the calendar year rather than the crop year.
An official with the Canadian International Development Agency defended the new agreement.
“As parties have increasingly untied their food aid budgets and provided cash instead of commodities to food assistance partners like the United Nations World Food Programme, using tonnage measurement became ineffective and difficult to monitor,” the official wrote in an e-mail.
“Parties expressed an interest to move towards a new convention that would include a broader range of eligible interventions … and a more effective commitment structure that reflects these newer approaches. There was also a desire to see a greater emphasis on the quality and nutritional value of food.”
The foodgrains bank received $27.7 million from the Canadian International Development Agency in 2011-12, according to its annual report.
“We help Canada meet its commitment, so arguably if the Food Aid Convention had fallen into total disrepute, that might’ve raised very big questions about why the Canadian government would continue to provide funding to the foodgrains bank,” said Clark.
The updated treaty includes several positive changes, he added. Cash and vouchers, in addition to food and seeds, are included as short-term aid, as is an emphasis on food assistance grants rather than loans.
The foodgrains bank and other NGOs have been calling for an updated agreement for a number of years.
“The most noticeable positive change is the increased flexibility in terms of how we improve the quantity or quality of people’s food consumption in the short term,” said Clark.
“The fact that we can now use a much wider range of foods, that there’s no limitation on the amount of additional nutrition that we provide.”
Member countries have until November to ratify the agreement, which is expected to come into effect in January.
“There were a few of these things that it was very clear needed to be updated,” Clark said.
“Indeed, it seemed to me that if we didn’t push for these changes … it might just kind of drift right off the map as being kind of irrelevant.”
