 In a recent letter to the weekly news magazine New Europe, the world-renowned economist and Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs, has appealed to Western aid donors to pool resources in order to combat the global food crisis. "Today's world hunger crisis is unprecedentedly severe and requires urgent measures. Nearly one billion people are trapped in chronic hunger - perhaps 100 million more than two years ago. Spain is taking global leadership in combating hunger by inviting world leaders to Madrid in late January to move beyond words to action," Sachs wrote. "Many individual donor countries have declared that they are now prepared to increase their financial support for smallholder agriculture, but are searching for the appropriate mechanisms to do so. The current aid structures are inadequate. The more than 20 bilateral and multilateral donor agencies for agriculture are highly fragmented and of insufficient scale individually and collectively. Despite the dedicated efforts of many professionals, the response to the hunger crisis remains utterly inadequate." "My colleagues and I, serving on an advisory committee for the Spanish initiative, have recommended that donors pool their funds into a single international account, which we call the Financial Coordination Mechanism (FCM). These pooled funds would enable farmers in poor countries to obtain the fertiliser, improved seed varieties, and small-scale irrigation equipment that they urgently need."
"Poor countries would receive prompt and predictable financing for agricultural inputs from a single account, rather than from dozens of distinct and fragmented donors. By pooling financial resources into a single-donor FCM, aid programs' administrative costs could be kept low, the availability of aid flows could be assured, and poor countries would not have to negotiate 25 times in order to receive help. The time for business as usual is over. The donors promised to double aid to Africa by 2010, but are still far off-track. Indeed, during the past 20 years, they actually cut aid for agriculture programmes, and only now are reversing course." Source:
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