When Bill Gates announced a donation of $30 million towards ending world hunger last week, he said he's giving it to a trust fund overseen by the World Bank. GAFSP, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, is that fund. So far the U.S., Canada, and Spain are expected to be major donors. In the words of the World Bank:
GAFSP is Financial Intermediary Fund set up at the World Bank to respond to a request from the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009 to establish a financial coordination mechanism to operationalize the commitments to agriculture and food security in poor countries made by the G8+ at L'Aquila in July 2009. The vehicle is a multilateral trust fund under external governance, designed to scale-up agricultural assistance targeted to the food security of low income countries.
And here it is in the words of Bill Gates and Tim Geithner in their Wall Street Journal op ed:
Today, the United States, Canada, Spain, South Korea and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are making a commitment to fight the threat of global food insecurity. Together we are launching the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a new fund to help the world's poorest farmers grow more food and earn more than they do now so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.
As you can see, this is a relatively new fund. They are still fleshing out its details. More below. |
So far, GAFSP has laid out six objectives:
1. Country-led solutions to promoting agriculture and food security in poor countries
2. Pooling of resources to overcome some of the rigidities in bilateral assistance to improve the predictability of aid
3. Filling gaps left by existing institutional instruments of aid to food and agriculture in developing counties
4. A broad-based multilateral coalition to mobilize capacity to do the job
5. Matching efforts in promoting governance and transparency to the scale of allocations being made
6. Finding the right framework to permit an evolutionary approach essential to getting trade-offs right between building trust on all sides while preserving sufficient flexibility to act promptly and effectively.
It's that first one that seems to be really flipping out the U.S. Senate. "Country-led" was the word of the day at last week's Senate hearing on this. The U.S. seems to have determined that "country-led" will mean that if a country wants to do things our way, we'll play ball. After all, they conclude, we aren't going to write checks and let other countries do whatever they want with the money. We're in this to serve U.S. interests. And in one sense, this is OK. If you don't want to prioritize the rights of women farmers, for example, you don't get money. If your male-dominated society doesn't want to expand the rights of women, then don't come to us with your hand out. But I think that this also means that if your country doesn't want genetically engineered seeds and industrial ag, the U.S. isn't interested in helping you. There's nothing like bribery to help make people see things our way, huh?
Interestingly, the Gates/Geithner op ed boasts about Rwanda:
Some poor countries are already taking steps to increase agriculture productivity. Rwanda, for example, has increased its investment in agriculture 30% from 2007 to 2009 and recently reported that its agricultural production was up 15% over that period.
Rwanda was also a theme in the Senate hearing. This is because Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Agnes Kalibata, is signed onto the idea of a second Green Revolution and the ideas of the Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). It seems that the Green Revolutionaries have found one country that is interested in doing things their way and they are therefore touting it as a great success every chance they get.
Going back to GAFSP, here's a little more specific detail on what GAFSP is intended to do:
The content of GAFSP also involved widespread consultation that produced consensus on the main elements for responding to the third question posed at the outset: what should be done? The focus of GAFSP is on the longer-term agenda on food security by providing grants, loans, and equity investments in developing countries through a multilateral approach targeted simultaneously to the greatest needs and the best capacities to use such funding.
1. Scale-up efforts to spur agricultural productivity: including support to increased adoption of improved technology (e.g., seed varieties, livestock breeds), improved agricultural water management, tenure security and land markets, and strengthened agricultural innovation systems.
2. Better link farmers to markets and strengthen value chains: including continued support for the Doha round, investments in transport infrastructure, strengthened producer organizations, improved market information, and access to finance.
3. Reducing risk and vulnerability: continued support for social safety nets is essential both for its own sake and to encourage a shift from subsistence into increasingly volatile food markets, for better managing national food imports, innovative insurance products, protection against catastrophic loss, and reduced risk of major livestock disease outbreaks..
4. Facilitate agriculture entry and exit, and rural non-farm income: including improved rural investment climates, and upgraded skills.
5. Enhance environmental services and sustainability: including better managed livestock intensification, improved rangeland, watershed, forestry and fisheries management, and support to link improved agricultural practices to carbon markets (e.g., through soil carbon sequestration). [emphasis mine]
As you can see, there are a lot of good goals here. But I bolded what I think is a key phrase. Notice the lack of the word "agroecology" anywhere in here. Sadly, I believe the U.S. definition of sustainability is genetically engineered seeds (and perhaps someday animals) that biotech companies claim are drought resistant, improve yield, or decrease pesticide use (despite studies and hard evidence that prove they do not do this at all).
Right now they are in the process of selecting their steering committee. So far they have decided that only donor and recipient countries will have voting rights on the steering committee, but civil society will have 3 non-voting representatives (1 from the global North, and 2 from the global South). I don't know how the Gates Foundation fits into this structure, although the WSJ op ed I quoted above makes it sound as if the Gates Foundation is its own country on par with Canada, Spain, and South Korea. |
