Last updated on March 1, 2011
From an article in The Globe and Mail earlier this week:
“For the first time in more than a decade, an elite compact of the world’s richest nations will begin redrawing the historic international agreement that governs food-aid commitments to hungry countries.
Canada, as chair of the talks, is uniquely poised to shape the secretive negotiations, which are held behind closed doors in London at quite a distance from the Rome-based nerve center of global food politics.
The treaty, called the Food Aid Convention, is so political that its signatories – including the United States, the European Union and Japan – have been unable to agree on updated terms since 1999. Their unwillingness to modernize the agreement has caused what could be one of the most important tools in the battle against global hunger to become ineffective and nearly invisible; it has also stalled several new countries from writing their food-aid commitments into the pledge.
The timing couldn’t be worse: The food-aid sector is suffering from chronic fragmentation – the responsibility for feeding the world’s hungry is shared by a handful of overlapping humanitarian organizations with varying degrees of effectiveness – and panic is escalating over how to feed the one-billion-plus people in need of more food; unrelenting volatility has seized commodity markets; and food security is looming ever-larger on the global agenda, including that of the G20, as its connection to climate change, development and political instability grows clearer.”
Even as a food policy economist, I learned quite a bit from the article.
(HT: Chad Shipmaker.)