In advance of the Global Agriculture Development Initative's Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security, the Initiative solicited commentary by leading global food security and international development experts to provide analysis on what critical steps countries must take to help reduce global hunger and alleviate poverty worldwide.
By Sir Gordon Conway & Laura Kelly
Sir Gordon Conway is a professor of international development at Imperial College London. Dr. Conway, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, is a world renowned agricultural ecologist and is recognized as one of the first experts to define the concept of sustainable agriculture. As president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1998 to 2005, he worked to increase that organization’s attention to ecological and food security issues, particularly the promise and challenges presented by biotechnology in the context of world hunger.
Laura Kelly is director of policy for ONE Europe.
From Pledges to Progress: Measuring Agricultural Development Assistance
We need to better understand how and where agricultural assistance is spent in order to make real progress on tackling hunger argue Gordon Conway and Laura Kelly.
Holding global leaders to account has never been easy. But when they come together in the Muskoka region of Canada on June 25-26th, G8 leaders claim they will report on their own progress on tackling global hunger.
Now as then we welcome these commitments. And like many others we are keen to see what progress has been made. Nevertheless, while we look forward to G8 leaders’ own assessments on progress, we think it important that we, and other independent researchers, are given access to timely and detailed information to allow us to do our own analysis.
We believe that access to better aid data is vital on this issue. After 30 years of underinvestment in agricultural development, we now have the political and financial momentum to make real progress on tackling hunger. But if governments do not deliver these new investments in a strategic and coordinated way, we risk dissipating efforts and missing a unique opportunity to deliver impacts on the ground for the one billion undernourished people governments are seeking to help.
When engaging in the complex, interdisciplinary world of agricultural development, we need a better detailed understanding of what works. By investing time and money in better aid data now, governments will be able to work with their advisers, researchers and recipient country partners, to understand how their new investments correlate with progress on the ground. This will enable increasingly effective and coherent partnerships in the future.
Our own work with the OECD-DAC database has shown that at present measurement and analysis of agricultural development assistance is fraught with challenges. Different governments classify and measure their agricultural assistance in different ways. Some bilateral assistance is given through budget support, making it difficult to measure what if any support goes to agriculture. Support to multilateral agencies is also hard to attribute to specific sector activity. And OECD-DAC is very slow to release data - detailed data for 2008 was released in March 2010 - so timely independent analysis is very difficult.
The OECD-DAC database is an important resource, and we believe that it should remain the primary channel for governments to report their development assistance spending. But it needs to be further improved: non-OECD government actions should be included, as should several additional multilateral organisations. Furthermore, we are not always able to measure what we want e.g. amounts of assistance to smallholders, or large versus small irrigation investments.
We look forward to hearing how global leaders meeting in Muskoka have performed on tackling hunger over the last year. But if they want their agriculture investments to have a lasting impact, they should also commit to urgent action to get the data systems in place to measure and monitor how and where their agricultural development assistance has been spent.
Sir Gordon Conway is Professor of International Development at Imperial College London. For more information about his work please go to: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/africanagriculturaldevelopment
Laura Kelly is Director, Policy of ONE Europe: http://one.org/international/
On May 10th 2010, Imperial College and ONE hosted a joint workshop to discuss the challenges of measuring agricultural development assistance. For more information about this work please go to: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/africanagriculturaldevelopment/resources/monitoring
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