The heads of three of the largest UN relief agencies on Thursday called on World Trade Organisation negotiators to ensure food aid is protected amid efforts to liberalise global farm commerce.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, plus the leaders of the World Food Programme (WFP) and children's fund UNICEF, said they are concerned because international food aid "is already under threat" after slipping last year to 7.5 million metric tonnes from 10.2 million metric tonnes in 2003.
"We strongly believe reform of international agricultural trade is vital and can help overcome poverty in the developing world. This may well include disciplines on some types of food aid," said high commissioner Antonio Guterres, WFP director James Morris and UNICEF head Ann Veneman in a joint statement.
"But reforms should be carefully designed to protect millions of the world's children, refugees and malnourished people who count on donations of food aid for their survival, nutrition and health."
Food aid donations have come under scrutiny at the Doha Round of negotiations among the 148 member states of the WTO.
The talks were launched in 2001 with the aim of tearing down barriers to global commerce and using trade to cut poverty.
Critics in particular have spotlighted the United States, saying that many of its food aid progammes are a disguised way of subsidising American farmers to offload their produce in poor countries, undercutting the agricultural sector in the developing world.
Clamping down on this would help cut reliance on handouts and help boost economic growth in poor countries by instead using financial aid to buy produce there, supporters of reform say.
Washington has resisted making concessions.
Among proposals up for discussion at a December 13-18 WTO conference in Hong Kong is a ban on donations of food in kind or a restriction of them to major emergencies, allowing donor governments only to give cash for the purchase of food aid, even through the UN.
However, said the UN agencies, more than 90 percent of deaths from hunger and malnutrition occur outside "classic emergencies" like Darfur or the Pakistan earthquake.
They noted that last year, three out of four tonnes of food donated worldwide were purchased in donor countries: gifts of wheat, maize, rice, beans, vegetable oil and other foods specially designed to meet the nutritional needs of malnourished populations.
It is likely to be much harder to get donors to come up with the equivalent levels of cash, the agencies said.
"The needs of hungry people already exceed donations available. Any decision that might reduce the food available to them through the United Nations would be very hard to understand," said Morris.Agence France Presse
