Working Group on Food Security and the Rome-Based Agencies

The Rome-based agencies--the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)--play a central role addressing global hunger and food security. These agencies must deal with the problems of tight budgets, increasing politicization of hunger statistics, and worsening food insecurity in many parts of the world. The separation of donor monies into separate and seemingly immutable categories of emergency and development has only added to the problems caused by the agencies’ divergent histories and differences in leadership, funding, organization, and governance structures.

The Center for Global Development has launched a working group on Food Security and the Rome-based Agencies to explore how these agencies could work more effectively to improve food security. The group will also focus on how to make member states more accountable for their actions related to food and agriculture, especially when these actions have wide-ranging impacts regionally and globally.

The Working Group’s first meeting, held on March 21st in Washington DC, focused on measuring the contributions of national and international actors to food security and rural development, as well as understanding which agencies—often working as partners—should provide which services for which countries.

After the meeting, the project coordinators went to Rome to meet with national representatives and staff members at all three agencies. Of the three agencies, FAO is regarded as having at once the widest mandate, the farthest-reaching linkages to other organizations, and the greatest difficulties, so it has been our focus in 2012. We prepared a draft report for the Working Group, pulling together the findings of past evaluations, measuring the influence of FAO’s knowledge goods, and taking stock of an ongoing reform process in its final stages. We also produced pilot country-level scorecards for some representative countries, based on data from a variety of credible sources, and passed our efforts along to the Gates Foundation to catalyze further work.

The Working Group convened again on September 25th, and members provided extensive feedback on the draft report. The Group decided to produce a forward-looking vision of the draft—now to be known as the Background Report—with attention to specific substantive needs that must be met to feed the world in coming decades. A final report is expected to be endorsed by the Working Group by March 2013. After its release, we will continue to meet with staff of the agencies, media representatives, and government officials to disseminate our findings and support the efforts of the international community to improve the delivery of essential services and global public goods needed to ensure food security and rural development.

The project is coordinated by Vijaya Ramachandran, senior fellow at CGD. Please contact Julie Walz (jwalz@cgdev.org) for more information.

Working Group Members:

Click to see bios

Jenny Aker

Jock Anderson

Regina Birner

James Butler

Kimberly Elliott 

Alan Gelb 

Giorgia Giovannetti 

Jikun Huang

Marcos Jank

Calestous Juma

David Lambert 

Uma Lele 

Ben Leo

Ruth Oniang’o

Kei Otsuka 

Sushil Pandey 

Vijaya Ramachandran

Emmy Simmons 

Peter Timmer

Maximo Torero

Yan Wang

Haisen Zhang

View minutes from the March 21st working group meeting here.

View a summary of the discussion at the September 25th meeting here

The working group is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation