The Conservative government has announced a significant change in its international aid policy, making food security in poor countries a main priority.
“Ready access to food is a fundamental need for all people,” international co-operation minister Bev Oda said in a recent speech announcing the change.
“Without adequate supplies of food, development is impossible and so CIDA is placing high priority on initiatives that increase access to healthy and nutritious food, whether it is rehabilitating degraded farmland, introducing agricultural techniques that are environmentally responsible or distributing micronutrients,” said the minister in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency.
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She said CIDA will also help foster sustainable economic growth and support the future of children and young people in developing countries.
While the announcement came with no detail on how the new priorities will be implemented, food aid and development groups applauded the hunger and food production focus at a time when the United Nations says the number of chronically underfed and starving people in the world has risen for the first time to more than one billion.
Less than a decade ago, world leaders vowed to reduce the number of hungry to little more than 400 million by 2015. Instead, the number of food-deficient people has risen almost 20 percent.
The Winnipeg-based Canadian Foodgrains Bank praised the move.
“The CFB has been encouraging CIDA to put greater emphasis on food for the past several years,” it said in a response posted on its website. “Escalating food prices and food riots around the world in 2008 made it clear that action was needed. Our constituents rallied around this theme, meeting with and writing to their MPs. Many other concerned citizens and groups voiced their support and now our advocacy efforts have paid off.”
At Oxfam Canada, executive director Robert Fox said if done properly, CIDA’s new food and agriculture emphasis could help feed the world’s billion hungry.
“Investing more wisely in agriculture, especially in women farmers, is a crucial part of the long-term solution.”
In a Toronto speech announcing the new policy focus, Oda said high food prices likely will remain a cause of poverty and hunger in many countries.
“What’s more, the structural causes of the crisis, including low investment in agricultural production and an emphasis on exports, have not gone away.”
And she made reference to an earlier Conservative government decision to end the requirement that at least half the food sent abroad as food aid had to be purchased in Canada.
Requiring food aid to be sourced in the donor country added as much as 35 percent to the cost of delivering it to a developing country, said Oda, citing an estimate by an international economic research organization.
Since last year, Canada has been giving its aid dollars to aid providers, including the United Nations World Food Program with instructions that it be used to purchase food wherever it is most efficiently and economically sourced.
