PURPOSE: to propose an approach to resilience regarding food security in developing countries.
BACKGROUND: recent and recurrent food crises in the Sahel region and in the Horn of Africa, where more than 30 million people are suffering from hunger, have underscored the need to work on a long-term and systematic approach to building the resilience of vulnerable countries and populations.
To recall, resilience is the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, to adapt, and to quickly recover from stresses and shocks.
The effects of economic shocks, rising and fluctuating food prices, demographic pressure, climate change, desertification, environmental degradation, pressure on natural resources, inappropriate land tenure systems, insufficient investment in agriculture, have, in many parts of the world, resulted in greater exposure to risk, notably from natural hazards. The impact of these global trends is manifested in the increasing number and intensity of natural disasters and crises.
In the case of food insecurity, despite some progress, one billion people are still suffering from hunger and the issue is particularly acute in drought-prone areas where most of the population depends directly on agriculture and pastoralism.
The EU is one of the world's largest donors providing life-saving assistance to people affected by various crises. Such assistance is vital, but it is aimed mainly at coping with emergency situations and needs to be supplemented by support to populations at risk to withstand, cope with and adapt to repeated adverse events and long-term stress.
In response to the massive food crises in Africa, the Commission has recently taken two initiatives: Supporting Horn of African Resilience (SHARE) and l'"AllianceGlobale pour l'Initiative Résilience Sahel" (AGIR).These set out a new approach to building up the resilience of vulnerable populations.
The purpose of this Communication is to use the lessons from these experiences to improve the effectiveness of the EU's support to reducing vulnerability in developing countries and to contribute to the international debate on enhancing food security and resilience in a wider sense in the context of international fora.
CONTENT: the Commissions communication considers that it is necessary to adopt a multifaceted strategy and a broad systems perspective aimed at both reducing the multiple risks of a crisis and at the same time improving rapid coping and adaptation mechanisms at local, national and regional level. Enhancing resilience calls for a long-term approach, based on alleviating the underlying causes conducive to crises, and enhancing capacities to better manage future uncertainty and change.
Experience gained thanks to the SHARE and AGIR initiatives: the communication examines the SHARE and AGIR initiatives in this regad and notes that they represent an improvement in the way humanitarian and development assistance interact, boosting the levels of assistance in the short-term, facilitating the link between relief, rehabilitation and development (LRRD), as well as demonstrating the commitment of the EU to address the root causes of food insecurity in the longer-term.
These initiatives focus on food security in sub-Saharan Africa, but this approach can equally be applied to other regions and other types of vulnerability (for example, regions threatened by floods, cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, storm surges and tsunamis, climate change, or food price increase). There are three key components to this approach, which are further elaborated below:
(a) anticipating crises by assessing risks;
(b) focusing on prevention and preparedness; and
(c) enhancing crisis response.
10 steps to increase resilience: the communication proposes a general framework in the form of measures to strengthen resilience in food-insecure and disaster-prone countries. These measures may be summarised as follows:
In the first quarter of 2013, the Commission will prepare an Action Plan to set out the way forward on implementation of these principles.