Food aid policy: management of EC food aid and special operations in support of food security in developing countries

The Committee on Development and Cooperation adopted the report by Mr Wilfried TELKÄMPER (V, D) calling for food strategies geared to alleviating poverty and making food aid superfluous. According to the Committee on Development and Cooperation, food aid actions should be designed to promote food security in favour of the peoples of developing regions, to raise the standard of nutrition of the recipient population and promote their access to balanced nutrition, to improve supplies of drinking water, to encourage them to be independent in food and to reduce their dependence on food imports. It called for food aid to be allocated on the basis of following criteria: fundamental food shortages, nutritional status measured against indicators of human and nutritional development (child death rate, average weight on birth, anaemia rates, life expectancy, percentage of population with access to clean water etc.). It asked for operations in support of food security to help finance the supply of seed, tools and other factors needed for the production of food crops, rural credit support schemes, with special emphasis on women, operations to supply drinking water, operations in support of those concerned with the marketing, transport, distribution or processing of agricultural and food products, projects to develop the environmentally acceptable production of food crops, technical assistance and field training operations, in particular for women and producer organizations, projects for producing fertilizers from raw materials and primary products in recipient countries, measures to support local food-aid structures, including on-the-spot training actions. The Committee on Development and Cooperation called for products to be mobilized in the first instance in the recipient country or in a developing country belonging to the same geographical region. If that were not possible, aid should be mobilized in another developing country or on the Community market.�