Sharing the Load

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Aid groups are coming up with inventive alternatives to traditional aid delivery too. In March, the wfp took out an insurance policy against extreme drought during Ethiopia's agricultural season this year. The deal, which the agency says is the world's first humanitarian insurance policy, is based upon a calibrated index of rainfall gathered from 26 weather stations across Ethiopia. If rainfall is significantly below historic averages, French insurance giant AXA Re will pay out $7 million, money that the wfp will then use to help the farmers whose crops will inevitably fail. Richard Wilcox, the wfp's director of business planning, says that the organization is already a type of insurer itself, and that insuring against drought is simply passing on the risk. "Having funding ready to make payouts changes the agency-donor-beneficiary dynamic considerably," he says.

In another shift, there is growing interest in giving needy people cash or vouchers rather than food. Food crises often happen even when there is food available in the local markets — but no means to buy it. Subsistence farmers earn money by selling excess grain. If their crops fail they are left not only hungry but also broke. Foreign food aid feeds them but it hurts local traders, whose goods drop in value as the market is flooded with free food. Over the past five years, Oxfam has started to give small cash payments rather than food in countries such as Malawi and Zambia, where local markets have adequate supplies. It is a method the agency has expanded to places such as Niger where it uses a voucher-for-work scheme. That obviates the need for massive warehouses to store food, and enables the agency to give money to people before they go hungry. Such schemes are designed to save not just lives but livelihoods. "Ultimately, development is about people doing it for themselves," says Benn.

But there's a long way to go. Thanks to slower-than-expected donations, so far the new cerf has pledges and donations amounting to just over half the $500 million the U.N. wants. And the ideas are not always welcomed by jaded aid workers. When the wfp first suggested taking out an insurance policy, many of its own staff were against the idea, figuring that the money — around $1 million for this season's policy alone — would be better off being used to buy food. "For a financial person, the reason to take out a policy is clear," says Wilcox, who calls Africa's hungry wfp's "key shareholders." "But for a foreign-aid person it's quite a significant conceptual shift."

A year after Gleneagles, it is clear that more conceptual shifts are needed. Many G-8 leaders who signed on in Scotland have faced trouble getting parliamentary and popular backing at home. A White House proposal that the U.S., the biggest donor of emergency food aid, start buying food in Africa to feed starving Africans was killed by strong resistance from the U.S.'s farming and transportation lobbies. According to Oxfam's June report, no G-8 country has yet met its Gleneagles promise nor is poised to do so, and the much needed trade agreement that would open up rich world markets to developing-world farm products remains as elusive as ever.

On top of that, much of the rich world's aid is still "tied" to projects, companies and consultants from the donating country. While tied aid is not always bad, "the way aid is given is still all about vested interest," says a policy adviser for one aid group. "You can have their aid as long as you spend it on their food or their road-construction company."

In western Niger, Fati Abdou sits in an emergency-feeding center for small children administered by Islamic Relief, a British aid organization. The 37-year-old mother cradles her baby son, Awashodi, whose achingly thin body led her to walk several hours to the center. Food has become so expensive, she says, that she and other families cannot afford it. "If the parents don't have enough food they can't feed their children. That is why the children are suffering." Relieving that suffering for good, though, is much harder than just feeding the child for a few months.