Food aid policy: management of EC food aid and special operations in support of food security in developing countries
1995/0160(SYN)
The Commission's amended proposal incorporated, in full or in part, 39 of the 46 amendments adopted by the European Parliament at second reading. The most important amendments retained in the Commission proposal sought to:
- implement food strategies designed to alleviate poverty and make food aid superfluous;
- provide humanitarian food aid under the regulation provided for the purpose, rather than under the present regulation;
- step up food aid to people in developing regions and improve the drinking water supplies;
- take account of the role of women and communities in food security efforts;
- allocate aid on the basis of specific criteria (mainly against objective indicators of human and nutritional such as infant mortality rate, average weight at birth etc.);
- finance rural credit support schemes targeted particularly at women, drinking water supplies, the marketing and processing of agricultural or food products, environmentally-friendly development projects etc.;
- strengthen the role of NGOs involved in aid programmes and the role of the beneficiary populations, which needed to prove that they had experience and were efficient in distributing aid.
However, the Commission rejected amendments which sought to:
- reduce the dependence of beneficiary countries on food imports;
- insist that the inability of beneficiaries to cope with food shortages themselves or the present of basic deficits would be the sole criterion for allocating aid;
- strengthen funding for "persons in charge" of the marketing, transportation and distribution of aid;
- mobilize products on the markets of developing countries (triangular procurement);
- improve the Commission's coordination of its various services;
- set the share of cereal aid between the Commission and the Member States;
- include national aid in the monitoring carried out by the Food Aid Committee;
- have the Commission draft an assessment report (to be sent to the European Parliament once a year) and evaluate the complementarity of food aid actions and other European Union policies.
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