Feed the Future and Country-led Development

A fertilizer subsidy program in Malawi helped the country to avert the harsher effects of the 2007–08 food-price surge suffered by its neighbors.

When President Obama stood with world leaders at the G-8 Summit in Italy to launch the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative, he emphasized that developing countries should have control over how the resources would be used. At a post-meeting press conference, he explained: “The purpose of aid must be…to help people become self-sufficient, provide for their families, and lift their standards of living. And that’s why I proposed a new approach to this issue—one endorsed by all the leaders here—a coordinated effort to support comprehensive plans created by the countries themselves, with help from multilateral institutions like the World Bank when appropriate.”¹

President Obama had begun to formulate a new U.S. global food security strategy months before the L’Aquila meeting. A greater emphasis on agriculture as a critical element and a requirement that recipient countries develop their own investment plans were keys to his approach. Since L’Aquila, the administration’s strategy has become much more concrete. In a process akin to what the United States now expects of developing country governments, the administration consulted with U.S. civil society groups, including Bread for the World, seeking feedback on what should be emphasized in a comprehensive food security strategy. Together, the administration and its partners in civil society came up with a set of principles based on best practices and lessons learned from decades of experience with efforts to reduce hunger in the developing world. See Chapter 1, Figure 1.4.

Feed the Future was officially launched in September 2009. Since then, 20 countries have been selected for new investments in agriculture: 14 in sub-Saharan Africa, three in South Asia, and the remaining three in Central America/Caribbean. The participating countries must develop investment plans that reflect broad agreement of multiple stakeholders in the country. In Africa, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) has guided the planning process (read more about CAADP in Box 2.2 on the next page); in the other regions, planning has been more heterogeneous but the PRSP process is serving as a guide.

The lingering question is how flexible the United States—or any other donor—will be in implementing its principles. “Policy differences between host governments and donors, including the United States, may complicate efforts to align donor interventions with host government strategies,” explains the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO report cites an example from Malawi: “Since 2005-2006, the government of Malawi has implemented a large-scale national program that distributes vouchers to about 50 percent of the country’s farmers so that they can purchase agricultural inputs at highly discounted prices. Although USAID has supported operations that use targeted vouchers to accelerate short-term relief operations following conflicts or disasters, the U.S. food security strategy in sub-Saharan Africa has focused on linking farmers to the market so that they can increase their incomes by relying on the market rather than by receiving subsidized agricultural inputs .… The provision of cheaper fertilizer and seeds does not address the fundamental problem—that poor farmers cannot afford fertilizer on their own.”²

Malawi decided on these subsidies against the advice of the World Bank and other donors.³ At the start of the program in 2005, the cost of the subsidies was 6 percent of the national budget; by 2009, this had risen to 14 percent.⁴ Since the introduction of the subsidies, Malawi has had bumper crops.⁵ Maize production, the country’s main staple, has tripled.⁶ When food prices spiked in 2007 and 2008, Malawi’s rural poor families fared much better than their counterparts in neighboring countries. Malawi’s example in this case shows why aid-recipient countries shouldn’t be bound by their donors’ instructions.

Issues