WFP addresses food insecurity brought on by conflicts, droughts, floods, tightening food markets, and the global economic slowdown. To provide relief, it buys more than $1 billion worth of commodities every year, and it increasingly buys the commodities from farmers in the regions where the aid is needed.2 That’s a lot of purchasing power. Purchase for Progress is an innovative vehicle that leverages the WFP’s networks to create a stable and reliable market for smallholder farmers’ output. Instead of taking the money the developed world donates toward famine relief and other aid programs and then going back and buying crops and staples from the developed world and shipping it to these struggling regions, P4P cuts out two steps and uses the funds to purchase aid locally from farmers who are themselves struggling. That is not necessarily “easier,” but it is simpler and, I believe, a stronger model. It not only satisfies an immediate need, such as food for hungry schoolkids, but also the presence of a strong, stable buyer for local crops creates an incentive for smallholder farmers to learn to farm better and more efficiently.
David Stevenson is a former WFP executive who did important early work in the 1990s connecting smallholder farmers in Africa with WFP’s demand for food commodities. “The biggest market failure we have in the developing world for small-scale farmers is getting a buyer,” he points out. “Often you either have no buyer, or you have only one buyer who has his own costs to cover and wants low prices. Farmers need to be connected to markets.”
Earlier, I talked about the problem with monetization. Sometimes the aid available does not match the aid needed in a country. For example, the United States has corn available for shipping, yet the most pressing need in a region may be not corn but perhaps a different grain or other kinds of assistance—maybe even funding to pay rent and keep the NGO office open, or trucks, or even fuel. Beginning in the 1980s, NGOs that received in-kind aid from the United States were allowed to sell surplus commodity aid locally and use the money for other needs.
As we discussed, dumping surplus grain on a local market depresses the prices local farmers can receive. An NGO selling on the open market may be undermining the same people it is training to improve their grain yields. Also, why ship all that grain as aid when it is not going to end up helping hungry people? Given the high cost of shipping, why not just send the money, which would allow the NGO to buy what it needs locally, therefore supporting the smallholder farmers you are there to help?
In 2013 the World Food Programme will supply food relief to more than 90 million people in 75 countries, much of it through local purchase programs. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Europeans realized that monetization was a bad idea. (Are you listening, Washington?) Around the same time that monetization began, European aid programs started sending funds to countries where local farmers were producing surpluses for sale and authorizing the NGOs there to spend the funds locally for food to give hungry people.
By the mid-1990s, there were enough direct aid funds coming to WFP that the program dispatched David Stevenson, then a United Nations World Food Programme emergency officer, to Uganda to use local procurement of food aid to help with the Rwandan crisis triggered by the genocide. His job was to buy food from local farmers to help the displaced Rwandans, as well as refugees from South Sudan coming into Uganda. He grew frustrated, however, because of contract defaults. The local food traders in stressed conditions sometimes would agree to supply crops to the program, but then they would not deliver those crops. It might be because of weather or quality problems, but sometimes the problem was a basic issue: that the farmers did not understand or respect contracts. If market fluctuations offered them a better price—or something happened, and they needed the money sooner rather than when the WFP program would pay—they would “side-sell” the crop early; this meant there was a high risk that WFP would be left without food supplies to distribute to those in need. “I could see it was an admirable idea,” David says, but it was difficult to count on because of the way WFP was cobbling together the commitments. He set about trying to figure out how to make it work better.
David moved around working as a local procurement officer in African countries such as Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Ivory Coast. In 1998 he moved from Addis Ababa to Abidjan to set up WFP’s regional procurement operation for West Africa to help with Sierra Leone and Liberia humanitarian operations. He kept working on more reliable ways to procure the food locally, and gradually the amount of aid WFP distributed shifted more and more to local purchase. One of the key elements was encouraging local governments to link food procurement for school feeding to small-scale farmers, so there was more stability and infrastructure. In 2004 David took over responsibility for WFP operations in Zambia and began to further develop this approach. Experiences like those led by David, as well as many other WFP staff worldwide, laid the foundation for what later became one of WFP’s most innovative initiatives.
The watershed moment came three years later when Josette Sheeran, who previously was undersecretary for economic, business, and agricultural affairs in the US State Department, came to run WFP. I worked closely with Josette at WFP, where I am an ambassador against hunger. I found her to be a visionary leader. By 2007, WFP had increased its local purchase to several hundred million dollars, and Josette realized that the program could do more good with the same amount of money and create more sustainable markets for farmers in the process.
Several different connections came together. Coincidentally, I had met David in Zambia earlier in 2007. He was country director at the time, and he was a good sport holding on to a rope around my waist while I took photos leaning out of the Cessna we used to visit different development projects in the country. Zambia was struggling after drought and flood cycles and also issues with pest infestations and animal invasions of fields. David wanted to try to develop livelihoods around the perimeter of animal habitats to attack the poaching problem with a legal, productive alternative. WFP partnered on a program designed to ease conflict, in which poachers would hand in guns and snares, and then get paid in food and be trained in food production.
Four of the most notorious poachers of elephants and rhinos in Zambia handed in their guns and snares, accepting food for work and committing to learn conservation farming. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
I could see that David was both creative and practical. He kept track of the lessons he learned on the ground. He knew that WFP wanted to expand its local purchase program, but he worried that it might not find sustainable ways to do so. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was mulling over a proposal to link local purchase to school feeding programs in many countries to create an anchor market, but David felt WFP should think even more broadly and consider any and all food needs to give the program the greatest possible buying power.
It made sense to me, and our foundation wrote the first check to support P4P under the leadership of David. We eventually gave more than $12 million to establish a P4P office in Rome and launch an integrated program in seven countries. David became P4P coordinator and head of WFP’s policy and strategy branch.
After a meeting in Omaha with Bill Gates, Jeff Raikes, now the CEO of the Gates Foundation, Josette Sheeran, and me, the Gates Foundation committed $62 million to support P4P. About the same time, the government of Belgium also joined in. Our foundation helped P4P launch in the African Countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Sudan, as well as the Central American nations of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua; while the Gates and Belgian support allowed P4P to be implemented in a total of twenty-one countries.
MAKING PRODUCERS MORE STABLE
There was another wrinkle to how P4P developed that came from an experience I had in Mexico later that same year, 2007. Jerry Steiner, who is executive vice president of sustainability and corporate affairs at Monsanto, invited me to visit the Educampo Project in the Mexican states of Jalisco and Chiapas. Run by a foundation called Fundar, with help from Monsanto and other private companies, Educampo had taken 1,500
farmers, organized them into 131 farmer groups, and then conducted intensive training in both better farming techniques and what it called the “social aspects”: specifically, the business elements of farming, such as negotiation techniques, credit, and even purchasing crop insurance. The results were amazing: a 300 percent increase in productivity among the farmers involved in the Chiapas group the first year, a significant increase in their incomes, and the expectation that the farmers would help repay Fundar so that the program could expand. The success they were having even in poor areas impressed me. The farmers worked hard, and for the first time, some were hiring a half dozen workers, so the increased productivity helped the whole community. “Before this project, we did not exist as part of the economy,” one Chiapas farmer told me.
The original P4P design was mainly about purchasing production from farmers, but it didn’t address their farming techniques or how stable their production was likely to be going forward. We went to Josette and David to discuss what I considered a bottleneck in the original design: if P4P was going to work, we needed to help farmers develop skills and processes to meet the production criteria. As I observed in Mexico, training is a valuable investment.
Planning for sustainability is the essence of catalytic funding. If you distribute the seeds and fertilizers, what happens when you leave? They run out. It’s the sand castle and tide problem. However, if you make the market connections and teach the farmers to use credit, and to respect and carry out contracts, you have given them tools to buy their own inputs, manage their businesses effectively, and be active in the market in the future.
And so today in Honduras, you have farmers such as Lucrecia Santos Galindo, who is one of sixteen female smallholder farmers from the farmers’ group Light and Life Production Associative. According to a P4P report, once a week Lucrecia and neighbor farmers attend school in the field, where they learn new agricultural techniques, proper handling of supplies, and improved practices in the demonstration plots. “This project has changed our lives,” Lucrecia told the P4P team. “Before, we produced only eight to ten bags per hectare; now we produce thirty-five to forty bags per hectare. Thanks to all the support we have received in training, supplies, and equipment, we can now produce seeds with high quality. Now I set the prices! I know the quality of grain that I produce and know that they cannot cheat me.”3 In her region in northern Honduras, more than 2,500 small producers benefit from P4P.I
Today Josette Sheeran is president and CEO of the Asia Society, while David Stevenson is now director general of a branch of the Canadian International Development Agency. And yet P4P keeps growing. The new head of the WFP, Ertharin Cousin, recently told the UN Committee on World Food Security, “P4P improves the nutrition of rural families and reduces the cost of food assistance programs.”4 We are hopeful that it will be renewed in 2014, when its pilot phase is over, and we are constantly talking with WFP about new variations on this central, strong program design. P4P has helped a half million farmers in twenty-one countries and is bringing healthy, needed food to food-insecure people in distress. In Tanzania, the government signed a deal with WFP allowing the program to purchase up to two hundred thousand tons of maize from the National Food Reserve Agency, which buys from the nation’s own smallholder farmers. This program will help Tanzanian smallholder farmers secure a more dependable and fairer market for their crop, and WFP can use the food for assistance programs for people in crisis throughout the region, including those in Kenya, Somalia, and South Sudan.
Little is simple in the world of development. An old friend of mine from an NGO likes to remind me, “Actually, Howie, it is rocket science.” Some days I think it may be even harder than rocket science because some plans are doomed by factors that will never appear in an equation, from unruly elephants to staff members distracted by “postelection celebrations.” But P4P is a solid idea that is changing the face of aid in all the right ways, shaped by committed people. Governments are vital to making P4P work and several, including Honduras, have embraced it. It is becoming part of the fabric of meaningful investment in both agriculture and hungry children in places such as Honduras. It was not easy to launch, it is not easy to execute, but it is a robust, game-changing idea that doesn’t break just because of a flood or election celebrations or a manager getting reassigned. It’s a basic approach that smart people can adjust to a given culture, circumstance, resource base, and need.
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I. Many analyses of the post–Hurricane Mitch damage in Central America showed that in locations where conservation agriculture techniques had used cover crops and no-till practices, there was far less damage, less soil erosion, and more topsoil. So the techniques that P4P is teaching stand to better protect these vulnerable farmers’ livelihoods from future storms as well.
Story 37
Hungry for Data
“If you eat food every day, you should care about the people who don’t.”
It’s a simple statement, but well put by my friend and fellow philanthropist Eva Longoria, the actress. Eva and I were introduced by a mutual friend who knew we were both interested in improving the livelihoods of food-insecure people in the United States. Eva has visited us in Decatur and taken her turn harvesting corn. (“This is more glamorous than the set of Desperate Housewives” she said in the combine.) However, we’ve talked about how easy it can be for Americans not to see the hunger that is all around us. “Out of sight, out of mind,” Eva puts it. Right now we’re working together on an exciting pilot project to try to illuminate and do something about food insecurity in Eva’s home state.
Eva grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. The youngest of four girls, she was well acquainted with having to stretch to make ends meet. To help put herself through college, she worked several jobs, from burger flipper at a fast-food chain to aerobics instructor. But she says she never thought much about hunger. The Longorias never worried about where their next meal would come from. Her mother was a special education teacher, and her father worked on the local army base, but it turns out that he grew a lot of the family’s food himself. “We were never allowed to eat fast food,” Eva explains. “We grew watermelons, squash, strawberries—all kinds of fresh food. I ended up hating squash because we ate so much of it, but we would pick carrots out of the ground, rinse them and dry them off on our jeans, and eat them.”
Approximately ninety-one thousand people are food insecure in the counties surrounding Corpus Christi in southeast Texas, and the Food Bank of Corpus Christi serves food to nineteen thousand people in any given week. Overall, Texas has one of the lowest average costs per meal of any state in the United States ($2.37). Nonetheless, it has 4.6 million food-insecure people, including 1.8 million children. That is 18.5 percent of the population, or almost one in five Texans. Like me, Eva says she did not appreciate the nature and extent of hunger in the United States until she had some unusual experiences that revealed how hidden hunger can be.
Several years ago, some friends and colleagues asked Eva to help produce a documentary about the lives of migrant agricultural worker families. Called The Harvest/La Cosecha: The Story of the Children Who Feed America, the 2010 film was shot in Texas, Michigan, and Florida, and it follows several migrant families during their travels picking hundreds of pounds of food per day yet often struggling to put food on their own tables. Eva explains: “We were shooting with a family of migrant workers, and we went with a mother to a supermarket, and she looked at the sign that said one tomato was $1.29. She had been paid $1 for picking an entire bucket of tomatoes the day before. She just could not understand how she could be paid so little for a product that was going to be sold for so much that she could not afford to buy it.” The same family that picked and boxed fresh, nutritious fruits and vegetables all day long had to rely on a less expensive, much less nutritious, high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. “Seeing that is a heartbreaking exposure to where food really comes from,” Eva adds. “Not from a pretty place in the store called the produce section, but
from the work of people who sometimes are going to bed without a meal.”
THE PICTURE CLEARS
Until recently, many national and local government officials—and even food banks themselves—have had a murky picture of hunger in their districts and communities. The only reason I know those statistics about Corpus Christi is because of a relatively new interactive online tool that our foundation helped fund, managed by the Feeding America organization. Introduced in 2011, it is called Map the Meal Gap, and it is one of those big, new, and simple ideas that I think will help a wide variety of organizations attack US food insecurity in creative and effective ways.
Right now, if you live in the United States, you can go to your computer, and in a matter of minutes, you can call up these same food-security statistics I rattled off above for Texas, or for any county in the entire country.I To help local leaders make sure that elected officials have a clear picture, the statistics also are viewable by congressional district. You can learn exactly how many people are food insecure in your community, the extent of child food insecurity, and the average cost of a meal in your state. You can learn what percentage of food-insecure children are income eligible for nutrition programs. (That means their families’ incomes put them at or below 185 percent of the poverty level.)
Why is this information a big deal? We all know there are poor people, homeless people, and distressed families living in shelters. But we tend to underestimate how many Americans miss meals a number of days each month. Many of us don’t realize, for example, that some food-insecure people actually own their own homes. There are elderly people who do not show outward signs of poverty or distress but who must make a choice between medicine and food each month. There are children changing schools two or three times a year because they are moving from a car parked in a driveway at one relative’s house to a couch at another relative’s house after a parent’s layoff or the foreclosure of their home. A hot lunch at school may be their only complete, nutritious meal of the day.
40 Chances Page 33