My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for International Development (Douglas Alexander) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
Food prices have risen sharply around the world in recent months, causing serious social unrest and balance of payments problems for some countries and major funding gaps for humanitarian programmes. Most importantly, poor and vulnerable families across the world are struggling to buy enough food to meet the most basic needs.
The UK Government are calling for a co-ordinated international response to this crisis. It must deal with both immediate needs and underlying causes. Such a response has to address a range of issues including trade reform; more and better support for agricultural and rural development in poorer countries; review of the wider economic and environmental impacts of biofuel production; social protection programmes which take people out of long-term dependency on food aid; and reform of international institutions such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the World Food Programme, and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The UK is already doing much to tackle this agenda. We will advance the payment of budgetary support to countries badly affected by high food prices, where appropriate, and will consider the need for additional payments. We have made substantial new allocations of humanitarian assistance in recent months, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Today the UK is pledging an additional £30 million to support the World Food Programme’s work in some of the countries most affected by food price inflation, including Zimbabwe, Somalia and Kenya in response to recent appeals.
The UK is already spending some £50 million per year on social protection and safety net programmes in Africa alone. DfID is now willing to commit an additional £25 million to Ethiopia as part of our aid framework once the future structure of the programme is agreed. This will fund the national safety net programme which reaches 7.2 million of the most vulnerable people, providing a combination of cash and food transfers which provide food and livelihood security. Additionally, DfID is ring-fencing £4 million for nutritional monitoring across Africa to ensure early identification of problems, allowing prompt and effective response where need arises.
The announcement today of £1 billion of new funding for international research includes £400 million of new funds being made available over the next five years for agricultural research. This will help to make crops more climate-resilient; tackle the pests and diseases which blight tropical agriculture, forestry, fisheries and livestock production; and find ways of reducing the post-harvest losses which can destroy up to 40 per cent of a poor farmer’s produce.
Improving food security and livelihoods for the poorest people in the world is central to the achievement of the first millennium development goal. The UK calls on other donors to back a comprehensive international response to this challenge.