Yesterday was World Food Day, on which subject BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight programme did a piece asking whether the current steep falls in commodity prices meant we were out of the woods on the food price spike. By no means, I argue in this interview – a point I also argued at the World Food Programme’s global senior management meeting last week.
Spending 36 hours with WFP leaders and country directors was something of an eye-opener, incidentally. I had always regarded WFP as being as the humanitarian relief agency that wouldn’t bother to co-ordinate its action in the field with other emergency aid providers, not least because its sheer size allowed it to call the shots on its own terms. But I have to say: having listened to WFP-in-introspective-mode (probably not a mode they indulge in very often, one suspects), I’ve come away with a different impression.
One thing you realise, as you spend time with them in this kind of a setting, is that they are all genuinely, viscerally passionate about what they do. Josette Sheeran, their director, likes to say that ‘nothing gets between WFP staff and a hungry child’, and as you listen to them talk to each other, it transpires that this is actually not just a neat soundbite. These people are very focused on the people they’re there to feed.
And they are also – unusually, perhaps, for a UN agency – just not that interested in process for its own sake. You could see that in part just in the sheer efficiency with which the meeting was organised: everything worked flawlessly, with no fuss.
By comparison, another UN agency which shall remain nameless asked me to speak at an event in Geneva earlier this year, and it took them six months (and a veritable torrent of chasing emails from me) to reimburse the cost of a night’s hotel stay. The reply to my last email on the subject was apologetic, but explained that most of the agency’s finance people had been away all summer, and the expenses claim needed to be approved by five different departments.
Which made me think: I know which of the two agencies I’d want to be delivering my emergency assistance, if I were an internally displaced person in a disaster. And it also gave me a new sympathy on why WFP might think that time spent in co-ordination meetings with agencies that need sign-off from seventeen departments before they can visit the bathroom, might be time better spent delivering actual aid to actual people.
