Taking the strain

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When Haiti’s prime minister resigned last month after a week of food riots, it seemed to confirm a warning that Bob Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, had given ten days before. He said 100m people were being pushed into hunger and malnutrition—and 30-odd countries faced social upheaval unless food policy improved and the rich world got its act together to help. A month on, policy has not improved, and the rich world’s response has mostly been muddled—yet surprisingly, poor countries have been able to contain the unrest, albeit at heavy cost.

Simon Maxwell, head of Britain’s Overseas Development Institute says one problem is that donors need a single, simple guide on how and where to help, not a clamour of competing United Nations bureaucracies with different plans. There are moves in this direction. The first priority has been to finance the World Food Programme (WFP), the world’s largest distributor of food aid, which has been as hard hit by food inflation as any slum-dweller. The WFP asked for $750m this year and has so far got about two-thirds of that.

The UN is also trying to make the international response more coherent. Ban Ki-moon, its secretary-general, has set up a task-force to co-ordinate what the UN agencies are doing and has called a food summit in early June to work out a plan. So far, so good. One unfortunate signal has been sent: the task-force is being run by Sir John Holmes, a British diplomat who is the UN’s co-ordinator for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief. This makes the food crisis look like a short-term, emergency problem, which it isn’t—or at any rate, it’s not only that.

More worryingly, the crisis has set off a round of bickering over the UN’s standing food bureaucracy. Criticism has long been swirling round the largest agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a body that provides information and technical expertise. On May 4th Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, brought this into the open by calling the FAO a “bottomless pit of money largely spent on its own functioning”. He proposed scrapping it, and incorporating it into another Rome-based UN agency, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which would be moved to Africa.