Buying food aid locally has benefits, but is complicated

The port city of Douala is still a major hub for international food aid heading to Chad and Central African Republic, but the World Food Programme (WFP) in Cameroon is buying an increasing amount of its requirements locally.

Of the 70,000 tonnes of food aid WFP’s regional office in Cameroon is forwarding to emergencies in neighbouring countries this year, about 26,000 tonnes have been produced in Cameroon. WFP said the percentage of food it purchases in West and Central Africa for distribution in the region grew from 13 percent in 2005, to over 30 percent for 2007 with Cameroon being the largest supplier, followed by Burkina Faso.

That means a dramatic reduction in transport times and costs. It has also created income for local suppliers and producers and that has trickled down into the communities. "It makes a lot of sense as countries like Cameroon often produce surpluses,” said WFP logistician Boubacar Diop.

But there are also risks, he said. “We’re encouraging farmers to grow more and more,” he said. If the emergencies in the region end, WFP will stop buying... farmers could get stuck with a lot of unwanted food. Even worse, if WFP were to buy up too much locally-produced food, prices for local consumers could rise... could lead to food insecurity for the poor. “The worst thing that could happen is that in trying to stop a famine in one place we create a famine in another,” Diop said.

The pros

“Everyone in our communities is benefiting,” said Ousmanou Ballo, who in April supplied WFP with 1500mt of sorghum and 744mt of beans. “Farmers... transporters. Even our animals get more to eat from the part of the food aid that is thrown away after processing.”

Another WFP supplier predicted that because of WFP’s purchases in 2007, local food production in their area will increase next season. He is not too worried if the humanitarian crises in nearby countries suddenly ends and WFP were to stop buying. “We have a culture of storing; we never throw away anything,” he said. “We have the ability to store food for two years at a time so if there is a surplus of one cereal then the following year the farmers will produce another cereal or they’ll produce cotton,” Fadil said.

And if, on the other hand, demand from WFP were to suddenly increase, he could quickly increase supply, he said. “Food aid will always be a small percentage of our business. Mostly we sell to commercial traders in the region,” Fadil said.

Indeed stocks of sorghum and maize in the central market in Douala dwarfed those in the WFP warehouses. The cereal sellers there said their clients mostly ship the cereal to ports along the central African coast as far as Angola. ... in cereal markets in the north the largest buyers are currently from Nigeria on Cameroon’s western border. But if the crises in countries east of Cameroon were to suddenly end, reducing demand for food aid, then normal trade would bounce back. “Traditionally we exported a lot of cereals to Chad and Sudan and we see no reason why we will not export there again once things return to normal,” he said.

The cons

WFP officials spoke more cautiously. “It is difficult for us to gauge how much cereal is really available and we know that we need to help suppliers and transporters build their capacities to deliver on time,” a WFP official said. “Up until now they have had trouble meeting our deadlines.”

The suppliers said their capacity to deliver would be adequate if only WFP gave them more lead time. “In April WFP gave us all just 30 days to fill their orders,” supplier Maliki Dahirou said. “All the suppliers were completing to buy the same sorghum from the same farmers.”

According to Fadil, who filled an order for WFP in April for 1,250mt of sorghum, “The farmers saw how desperate we were to buy from them so obviously they raised their prices. Then after WFP’s orders were filled, demand for sorghum dropped and the price crashed.” he said. He and the other suppliers said that WFP would have a less volatile effect on the local cereal market if it staggered orders and gave them more lead time.

But that’s not the way WFP works. “A purchase is usually directly related to a particular donation for a food crisis. Rarely can we purchase food with long lead times and certainly not before farmers start planting,” said the official.

International food aid to Douala on the other hand takes an average of three months from the time a donor agrees to give the aid to the time it arrives in the port in Douala. Then it takes another 45 days to travel by land to the beneficiaries. But the difference there is that donors give the food, and the cost of transporting it, for free.

Logistics

Food aid has many ironies: One is that the food that arrives in Douala by ship destined for emergency areas in Chad and Sudan is sent north almost 1,000 km by train to Ngoundere and arrives at what happens to be one of the main corn growing areas in Cameroon. The cost of trucking the local food from Ngoundere to the emergency areas nearby is negligible compared to the cost of getting the food all the way to Ngoundere from overseas.

Another irony is that the local cereals sell for below international prices, often more than 30 percent lower. Until recently the savings in cost and time have been irrelevant for many donors, particularly the US, the world’s largest supplier of food aid, which, critics claim, directly and indirectly subsidises its farmers to produce food surpluses.

The European Union has come to endorse a policy of local and regional procurement of food aid and Canada has a policy of producing no more than 50 percent of its total food aid domestically.

The Bush administration has proposed that $300 million of its $1.2 billion food aid budget be produced outside the US but the US congress has so far blocked the measure.

Yet another irony in northern Cameroon is that areas where there are often food surpluses border areas in the extreme north where there are frequent food shortages, “But that does not mean that we are making a mistake by exporting food from Cameroon to Chad and CAR,” Cebron, the WFP director in Cameroon, said.

“Look closely and you’ll you see that there are very poor transport links between those areas in the Cameroon and in fact the easiest market for people in the extreme north to access is in neighbouring Nigeria”.

His point is that buying food aid locally is complicated, “So you better know what you’re doing,” he said.

IRIN