The Global Food Crisis Response Program: Review of Lessons Learned

 The spike in world food prices that dominated headlines in 2007-08 posed new intervention challenges for relief and development organizations like Mercy Corps.

The first challenge was that the onset of the “food crisis” initially looked like any other emergency, but was later found to have a gradual incubation period with increasingly urgent warning signs from the world’s poor. For three years prior, the price of basic commodities had crept up by 80%, which then hit full force with the doubling of the price of rice and wheat between March 2007-March 2008. During this time, poor and chronically food insecure households across the world began coping by eating less, borrowing, selling off assets, sending kids away to other family members to reduce burdens on households’ consumption, or migrating in search of work. By the time this trend made headlines, 37 countries were at imminent risk of malnourishment, starvation and civil unrest.

The second challenge was that this was not a finite emergency with a clear end in sight, but was instead symptomatic of a more complex and chronic problem of market failure and poverty. Without access to affordable quality seed, fertilizer, irrigation and credit, many smallholder farmers were already struggling to feed their own households with 1-2 acres, let alone harvest enough to sell. And, in places like the Central African Republic, where two-thirds of the population can only afford sub-standard meals in a normal year, the food crisis trapped families with no purchasing power further beneath the poverty line.

In August 2008, Mercy Corps and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Global Food Crisis Response (GFCR), a program aimed at providing immediate and longer-term assistance to households in five countries severely impacted by food shortages: the Central African Republic (CAR), Nepal, Niger, Somalia and Sri Lanka. The program used a hybrid of emergency and development approaches in an accelerated 18-month timeframe to enable more than 75,000 people to move from asset depletion towards asset generation.

Looking beyond immediate safety nets, the program aimed to permanently raise families’ income above the poverty line by facilitating changes in food production, micro-business management, market interaction, and access to financial services from the outset. GFCR also provided Mercy Corps with a learning platform to manage a truly global program that stretched across five countries in South Asia and Africa.

This paper takes a critical look at the GFCR program design and evaluates the efficacy of adopting an aggressive market-based approach to a crisis context in CAR, Nepal, Niger, Somalia and Sri Lanka.

Mercy Corps hopes these lessons inspire discussion among practitioners and donors, and the development of best practices for the food, agricultural, environmental and economic challenges that lie ahead.