DFID Review defies expert advice and fails to address food security crisis

Despite the looming world food crisis and the fact that one billion people are already undernourished world-wide, DFID’s new funding priorities completely exclude all mention of the need to improve food security or support smallholder agriculture. 

The recent expert report on Food and Farming has lamented DFID’s long neglect of smallholder farmers and urged greater priority be given to rural development and agriculture as a driver of broad-based income growth, and to provide more incentives to the agricultural sector to address malnutrition and gender inequalities.  Amongst their recommendations for low and middle income countries are the revitalisation of the extension services, the facilitation of market access and the strengthening of land rights.  

Last year, a report sponsored by the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture and Food for Development, also criticised DFID for its poor record of funding agriculture, particularly African agriculture, which is just 0.3% of the total DFID budget.  Twenty-nine local and international experts in agriculture and food security expressed concern that DFID is not taking advantage of the considerable agricultural expertise that is present in British institutions to seize upon the opportunity to take the lead in such a vital sector for rural development. 

In his preface to the report, FAO’s goodwill ambassador said that agriculture must be put back at the top of the international development agenda because of the crisis that is stalking the small-scale farms and rural areas of the world, where 70 percent of the world’s hungry live and work. 

In recent times UK’s pubic funds have been channelled through multilateral, mainly UN institutions, such as FAO and UN Habitat, which DFID has simultaneously sought to reform. 

One of DFID’s priorities has been to support UN Habitat’s work in improving the lives of slum-dwellers in an effort to reach the poverty reduction Millennium Goal.  The UK government considers that urbanisation is positive because ‘cities are the engines of economic growth’ in a globalised world.  

This policy is now in disarray following the Coalition Government’s recent review: 

DFID will soon cut the funding of UN Habitat because it has failed to prove that it was delivering significant change on the ground.  There are also threats to cut funds to the FAO, if its performance does not improve. 

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food said recently:

‘Only by supporting small producers can we help break the vicious cycle that leads from rural poverty to the expansion of urban slums, in which poverty breeds more poverty.’