As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs. (The FT just doesn’t seem to tire of running this story: it first appeared on July 16 last year, and made the front page then as well.)
While no-one’s disputing the figure at this stage, it’s interesting that various voices in the aid system are wondering just where the $500 million figure comes from, and how it breaks down. How much of this would be spent on direct food aid, how much on the food vouchers that WFP says it wants to move to, and how much on cash transfers to poor people? And in which countries? (Apparently WFP will be setting out a fuller breakdown in April.)
WFP haven’t always taken care to make many friends in the aid system. Being the big boy on the block (and the US’s favourite humanitarian agency), they’ve always been at liberty to tell other agencies where to shove it when the delicate question of harmonised approaches to humanitarian aid arise. This was especially true during the process of the UN High Level Panel on System-wide Coherence, when WFP ruthlessly opposed calls for a greater leadership role for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance at global level, more co-ordination by Humanitarian Co-ordinators at country level, and more pooled funding through instruments like the CERF.
Now, though, there’s a window of opportunity for WFP’s funders to extract more cooperation from the agency – not least as the relatively importance of US funding to WFP looks set to decline. Clearly it’s essential that people receiving WFP food aid shouldn’t lose out because of rising costs, and WFP’s funders will need to move quickly to make sure that this doesn’t happen. But it might also be a good moment to renew the push for a more co-ordinated approach to UN humanitarian relief…
