Responding to Hunger Emergencies

In Haiti, we must think in years, not months, to measure the effectiveness of post-earthquake aid.

Almost immediately after an earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, it was clear this was a humanitarian disaster on a breathtaking scale. An estimated 230,000 people were killed and the capital city of Port-au-Prince, close to the epicenter, was almost completely destroyed. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies described the earthquake as “the biggest natural disaster in history.”¹

While the 7.0 magnitude earthquake was powerful, another factor—wide-scale poverty—was largely responsible for turning a natural disaster into a massive human tragedy. On February 27, just six weeks later, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Chile. The number of deaths was a fraction of those in Haiti, and the physical damage near the earthquake’s epicenter in Concepcion was negligible compared to what happened in Port-au-Prince. Why did a less powerful earthquake in Haiti cause so much more destruction than the one in Chile? The answer lies in Haiti’s condition before the earthquake struck.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Before the earthquake, 80 percent of the Haitian population was living in poverty. A third of all children were born underweight. The country had the highest mortality rates in the hemisphere for mothers, infants, and children under 5, and the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa.²

It will take years to rebuild the country. Fortunately, the international community of donor nations and multilateral institutions appears committed to the effort. No one opposes raising money for relief; the question is what should come next. The answer will have ramifications for countries other than Haiti. In any shattered country, relief is a precursor to development (or, optimally, the two are happening side by side). Restoring Haiti to its condition before the earthquake would merely put it right back on a precipice—another natural disaster would bring the same outcome.

Haiti brings the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative much closer to home. Not only are the two nations separated by just a few hundred miles of ocean, but more than half a million Haitian immigrants live in the United States—the largest share of Haitians living abroad.³ We are reminded daily of the bond between the two countries.

Aid Delivery

The disaster in Haiti reinforces what we know about making U.S. food aid more effective. For example, Haiti confirms earlier experiences with distribution: women should be at the front of the queue for food aid. The World Food Program is unambiguous on this point: in order to make sure food aid reaches children, it should be put directly into the hands of women. “Decades of experience in disasters and emergencies have shown that families are more likely to eat properly if women are involved in food aid distributions and if they receive the food entitlement in their own name.”⁴

In emergencies, such as after a natural disaster, a rapid response is required to protect children from experiencing effects of hunger they could carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Experience tells us that the priorities should be the same in the response to any emergency, whether an earthquake, tsunami, war, or drought. First things first: making sure children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers get food aid, water, and access to basic health care. Even under “normal” conditions, nearly one in five deaths of children under the age of five every year is due to a condition associated with diarrhea.⁵ Emergency situations are simply breeding grounds for infectious disease because of crowded conditions and inadequate sanitation.

The stakes couldn’t be higher than they are for children in the critical period of birth to age 2.⁶ Babies and toddlers cannot simply wait for help to arrive—even those who survive malnutrition and disease during an emergency may be left with permanent physical and mental disabilities. Health experts are in universal agreement about the consequences of malnutrition and hunger during these critical years of development.⁷

Targeting aid and getting the timing right are both crucial in emergencies. Speed means everything in the early days and weeks of an emergency. The human body keeps its own clock—so hunger and its consequences arrive well ahead of ships carrying bags of commodities. This is why humanitarian workers need the flexibility to obtain food aid close to the emergency site; cash assistance from donors is often preferable to commodities. But U.S. food aid policy doesn’t allow cash assistance except in a small percentage of cases. The 2008 farm bill authorized a pilot program for local and regional purchase of food aid,⁸ but too little money was appropriated to significantly change how U.S. food aid is delivered.

The United States is the world’s biggest food aid donor, supplying more than half of all aid.⁹ According to polling done regularly by the Alliance to End Hunger, the U.S. public supports government aid to mitigate the suffering of people in emergencies.¹⁰ But the politics of food aid lead to considerable waste and inefficiency. U.S. food aid takes longer to arrive where it is needed than aid from any other donor, because it must be delivered on U.S.-flagged vessels. A study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that food procured in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa could reach recipients at costs of 34 percent and 29 percent less respectively than U.S. commodities.¹¹

U.S. organizations that benefit financially from the provision, transportation, and distribution of food aid have fought to prevent more U.S. food aid from being delivered as cash rather than commodities. Some nonprofits that contract with the U.S. government to distribute food to people in emergencies argue that the status quo is necessary to ensure that money approved by Congress for food aid doesn’t evaporate under the pressure of the appropriations cycle.

The amount of earthquake aid that poured into Haiti from around the world was unprecedented, with most aid passing through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rather than going to the Haitian government. The U.S. policy of putting aid directly in the hands of trusted NGOs rather than a national government is designed to ensure accountability and transparency, and the Haitian government is indeed notoriously corrupt.¹² But in the initial phases of relief operations, it was clear that coordination of aid operations was a problem, and Haitian people in need of the aid suffered as a result.¹³ The lack of faith in the Haitian government is clearly a problem. But donors are not helpless in affecting changes in the government’s behavior, a subject given greater attention in Chapter 2.

Relief to Development

Haiti is a special case among the Feed the Future countries. No other country in the initiative has been shattered as Haiti has. In terms of economic development, one could reasonably describe Haiti as starting from scratch—and that is where there is an opportunity to do things differently.

The mistakes made by donors in Haiti are legion. As relief work begins to ebb and a transition to development efforts become more focused, development resources need to be directed in ways that harvest the willingness of Haiti’s people to take the lead in rebuilding their country—something largely absent in past development assistance programs. What remains as solid as ever in Haiti is the will of its people to persevere in spite of the difficulties they’ve endured.

For generations, Haitians have suffered at the hands of autocratic rulers heading kleptocratic governments. But the country’s agricultural sector was ruined by donors. In 1988, domestic rice production supplied 47 percent of what the country consumed, but 20 years later, domestic production was down to 15 percent,¹⁴ the result of loan conditions that required the country to reduce tariffs on imports.¹⁵ Predictably, the Haitian domestic market flooded with cheaper subsidized rice from abroad, mostly the United States.¹⁶ Billions of dollars in subsidies to U.S. rice producers make it impossible for Haitian farmers, especially small farmers, to compete.

One way to help Haitians and speed the country’s development is to support the rehabilitation of the country’s agricultural sector. Haiti will need to rely on food aid for years to come. As the U.S. government ramps up investments in Haiti’s agricultural sector as part of Feed the Future, it makes sense to shift the source of food aid from U.S. rice producers to Haitians. In 2008, 13 percent of food aid was purchased locally from Haitian producers,¹⁷ so there is precedent for sourcing food aid locally.

Haitian rice is more expensive than U.S. rice, but that is because U.S. producers are subsidized. More than 50 percent of U.S. food aid dollars are consumed by shipping costs.¹⁸ The savings in transportation fees alone of purchasing rice from Haitian farmers would make up a significant share of the difference in production cost. A more flexible and constructive approach to U.S. food aid, like purchasing food aid locally for ongoing relief, can help Haitian farmers play a key role in the recovery and set the stage for a focus on the neglected rural sector.

Haitians building USAID funded irrigation canal. Rice field at right.

A million people were left homeless after the earthquake,¹⁹ and it’s estimated that about half of them abandoned Port-au-Prince for rural areas of the country, where many had lived before their urban migration. Of those who fled Port-au-Prince, though, many soon returned as the relief efforts ignored them and concentrated on the capital city. Ultimately, investing in rural areas has to be part of the country’s reconstruction. Overcrowding in Port-au-Prince is a direct result of livelihoods being stripped away in rural areas. The influx of people from the countryside picked up dramatically when they could no longer make a living in agriculture. Urban migration is not the inevitable outcome of development; however, it is an outcome of a lack of rural development.

The international community is quick to respond in emergencies but has not had as good a track record on helping countries make the transition from relief to development. Rwanda is a good example that a country can move beyond crisis and make strides towards reducing hunger and poverty. With Feed the Future’s help and the help of other donors, Haiti could see a very different future.

Issues