Australia partners with WFP to boost food aid
Updated
Australia has just made its largest commitment to help alleviate global hunger which now affects more than a billion people.
It's signed a new, four-year strategic partnership accord with the World Food Program to help ensure long term funding to the United Nations humanitarian agency. The value of the new agreement is being put at 180 million Australian dollars and is the first such pact with any donor.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers:Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the UN World Food Program
- Listen:
- Windows Media
SHEERAN: Well this agreement really is a paradigm of good humanitarian donorship because what it provides for is predictability of funding. This is so critical in our work where we're reaching over 100-million people in the world who are cut off from food and could die if we don't reach them quickly. And so when you see the floods in the Philippines or the earthquake in Indonesia, if we don't have food ready and pre-positioned it's impossible to act quickly enough. So this will save lives and it will save money by cutting down on rushed transportation every time a disaster hits.
LAM: And Josette can you give us some key factors of this funding, how the money will be used?
SHEERAN: Well traditionally Australia is a great partner in the fight against hunger in both the emergency response and in finding long term solutions. So we have been partnering with the people of Australia for many decades, and typically 70 per cent of that funding goes to the neighbourhood that Australia is in in this region. So already Australia is doing great work with us in partnership in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Timor, in the Pacific islands when emergencies hit, in the Philippines over the long term and when emergencies hit like the one that has happened now. Also the people of Australia have stood by the people in Dafur, all the women and children trapped there, threatened with starvation if the world didn't come together to stand with them. And so even in places of Africa and elsewhere we've seen Australian aid help. We don't expect that pattern to change but we expect it to be used more strategically, effectively and efficiently to buy for example the food from local farmers, poor farmers who otherwise would be cut off from markets, and in Afghanistan to help feed the school children there.
LAM: Do you hope that other countries might be inspired by this new pact that you've signed with Australia?
SHEERAN: Well we're hoping so, that predictability of funding I don't know for our programs how much funds we'll have even in 12 weeks. But this type of guarantee of a baseline of funding again can inspire others I think to help give us predictability and help us reach the hungry more effectively and with solutions.
LAM: Josette the WFP, the World Food Programme of course has been very involved in the latest spate of disasters in the Asia Pacific over the past couple of months. How do you assess the global response to the crisis?
SHEERAN: Well we have seen impressively the world standing for example behind the people of the Philippines, it is an epic level humanitarian disaster there. These storms that hit were worse than any in living memory. I was just there in one of the storm affected villages, that village was under eight feet of water a month after the storm, and I talked to an elderly lady trapped in her home still and she said in her entire lifetime she's never seen anything like this. So we've seen contributions, Australia gave us one of the first and the quickest as far away as Brazil and Ecuador and Turkey, so that's very inspiring in addition to the traditional donors of Australia, Japan, the United States, the European Union, Canada and others. So it's good to see the whole world coming together when people need a helping hand.
LAM: Well one of the observations made, particularly with regards to the Philippines, is that countries like the Philippines are simply not prepared enough, they need to do far more in prevention and mitigation work and spend a lot more money on that. Is that a view that you support?
SHEERAN: Well it's true but just to be fair it can be quite overwhelming for countries the challenges they face from severe weather. Look at the United States during Katrina, when one of these storms hits, when you have an earthquake or a tsunami of epic proportions, I think it's hard for any nation to be fully prepared to deal with that level of disaster. So the whole world has to get a lot better at dealing with severe weather, and we are seeing nations like Indonesia who during this earthquake needed less help and they needed it they were able to support their own relief efforts far longer even though again these situations can be quite overwhelming as we've seen even for the very wealthiest nations and most powerful when they're hit with the droughts or the floods or the severe weather.
