The head of the United Nations World Food Program travelled to Ottawa last week to plead for more support from a Canadian government that has shown a declining interest in food aid.
Catherine Bertini, executive director of the Rome-based program, said Canada’s contributions have been falling and other countries have had to pick up the slack of paying for the estimated 831 million people in chronic hunger.
“Canada has always been one of the biggest donors to the WFP,” Bertini told a news conference June 18 after she met cabinet ministers and senior officials from the Canadian International Development Agency. “It has slipped sharply in recent years.”
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In 1999, Canada donated the equivalent of $139 million to the program. In 2000, it fell to less than $77 million.
“My message here has been that Canada has been a world leader in food aid and agriculture development and I hope it will return to that position,” said Bertini, a former senior American agriculture department official who is in the final year of a 10-year stint as head of the program.
“Canada is the only major donor that has indicated its contributions are going down.”
She said the United States has increased its funding for food aid from one-third of the budget to 48 percent.
But increasingly common natural and manmade disasters have meant that in recent years, much of the available money goes to food emergencies and less is available to invest in development, which can help food-deficit areas become self-sufficient.
“That is an unfortunate trend,” she said.
“Development is the long-term solution to world hunger but images of emergencies draw the attention and the funds.”
While Canadian officials gave her a hearing, they made no commitments.
In part, Canada’s declining support reflects a change in priority under CIDA minister Maria Minna. Instead of food aid and development, Canada increasingly is stressing women’s health and medicine in its foreign aid program.
Canadian Alliance international co-operation critic Deepak Obhrai said the government should change its tactic on the aid budget.
He said the Liberals cannot continue to blame earlier deficit-fighting budget cuts for the problem. Falling food aid support is a government choice.
“I think CIDA lacks a long-term plan and it needs one,” he said in a June 22 interview from Calgary.
“The minister has changed the focus. Without a five- or 10-year plan, each minister comes in with new priorities and things change. The result is patch-up programs.”
Obhrai said the government’s move away from food aid, which also has been criticized by some aid groups, is wrong-headed.
“The food aid part of our aid program is important,” he said. “It’s fine to emphasize health but a major aspect of a healthy person is a full belly.”
While Bertini travelled to Ottawa to ask for more Canadian commitment, she said the story in the battle against hunger is not all bad news.
The number of chronically hungry has fallen even though the world’s population is growing.
And while a hunger map shows many countries and large parts of the world are experiencing food deficits, 25 countries have moved off the list of countries with the most severe undernourishment problem.
Still, airlifts of food have kept millions of people alive in countries as diverse as drought-stricken North Korea, war-torn Afghanistan and perpetually malnourished and impoverished Ethiopia and Eritrea.
