Mali Eber-Rose, Shamba Centre for Food & Climate, Elsa Olivetti, FAO
This year’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 provides much needed guidance on how to define public and private financing for food security and nutrition. The integration of finance into a core and extended definition of food security and nutrition helps move towards a shared understanding of the scale of financial resources being spent. With this knowledge, a stronger case can be put forward to increase the quantity and quality of investment towards ending hunger and malnutrition.
However, despite this common definition on financing, and the use of a shared aid database, a common standard to track official development assistance (ODA) is lacking. This results in significantly different estimates on how much ODA is spent on food security and nutrition – from USD 5.9 to USD 63.8 billion.
This is a key finding from a new background note, Towards a common definition of aid for food security and nutrition, jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Shamba Centre for Food & Climate. This background paper is accompanied by two additional background notes, A review of existing food security and nutrition aid trackers, and The case for the food security and nutrition aid tracker.
A shared understanding of how much ODA is being spent on food security and nutrition, where it is being spent, and on what intervention areas is critical for several reasons. First, it allows donors to understand who is giving, compare how much they are giving, where they are giving, and specifically on what the ODA is spent on. Second, it allows researchers to measure the investment gap to achieve certain goals. Third, it allows civil society to track, monitor and hold governments to account for their commitments. And fourth, it allows donors to better leverage other sources of development finance so they can design better projects to achieve multiple sustainable development outcomes.
For this reason, a new tracker for ODA food security and nutrition is needed to enable better targeting and use of ODA resources. Better monitoring and tracking of resources in the system will ultimately enable better evidence-based decision-making and an improved allocation of scarce public financial resources.
Vastly different estimates on ODA spending
The background note, Towards a common definition of aid for food security and nutrition, reviews the current measures to define ODA for food security and nutrition, assesses the implications, and makes the case for a more coherent framework that would enable better targeting and use of ODA resources to achieve SDG 2, Zero Hunger, and agrifood systems transformation.
Currently, there are over ten operational definitions used to track ODA, all derived from the same database, the Organization of Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee’s (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS). This database classifies ODA records according to donor, recipient, the purpose of aid, flow type (commitment or disbursement), as well as other variables. However, each definition uses a different selection of aid purpose codes.
The G7 uses a classification based on 27 purpose codes to track spending based on the Elmau commitment to lift 500 million people in developing countries out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Another definition, which uses a different selection of 31 codes, tracks disbursements made under the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative which pledged USD 20 billion for food security in the three years following the 2009 food price crisis. A further one, used by the European Commission, is based on 75 codes and monitors expenditure on food security and nutrition.
Because each of these definitions includes different categories of spending, their estimates differ on how much is spent, where it is spent, the target of the spending, as well as the analysis of trends and outcomes towards achieving SDG 2: Zero hunger (see Figure 1).
The estimates of ODA spent on food security and nutrition between 2019 and 2021 ranges from USD 5.9 billion to USD 63.8 billion per year. Depending on the definition adopted, the trend in ODA between 2011 and 2021 can be regarded as varying between a decline of 10%, remaining stagnant, or increasing by 19%.
Figure 1. Comparisons of the volume of official development assistance (ODA) grants for food security and nutrition according to different definitions, 2007–2021
Source: Eber Rose, M., Laborde, D., Lefebvre, L., Olivetti, E. & Smaller, C. 2024. Towards a common definition of aid for food security and nutrition – Background note. Rome, FAO and Geneva, Switzerland, Shamba Centre for Food & Climate. https://doi.org/10.4060/cd1957en
The lack of consensus on what to include under measures of ODA for food security and nutrition creates confusion and impacts the perception of how much ODA a donor has given and how much a country has received.
Existing trackers lack sufficient analysis
Multiple trackers exist, each covering different parts of the data and uncovering different parts of the aid story. The second background note, A review of existing food security and nutrition aid trackers, maps and reviews 19 trackers – 16 ODA trackers and three non-ODA trackers – with the aim of identifying their strengths and gaps, as well as their features and tools, to determine the value added of a new aid tracker.
This review finds that existing trackers mainly rely on the OECD DAC or the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) databases. For the most part, existing trackers offer an insight from both the donor and recipient perspective, each considering a different selection of bilateral donors, multilateral donors, and private philanthropies.
All the trackers use US dollars as the main currency with some also reporting aid in national currencies or as a percentage of gross national income (GNI). With regards to the types of ODA flows, only six of the reviewed trackers include information on ODA loans and grants, and several of the trackers differentiate between multilateral and bilateral aid flows.
Existing aid trackers do not enable donors to comprehensively analyse their spending compared to other donors, nor to understand the extent to which their spending is aligned with the scientific evidence on the most effective ways to achieve food security and nutrition. They are also not designed to help donors identify where there is an overconcentration in spending or where there are gaps, neither at the country level nor by intervention area. This undermines efforts to coordinate and allocate resources more effectively, based on the countries with the highest priority needs and the most effective interventions areas in these countries.
Proposing a new Food Security and Nutrition Aid Tracker
To progress towards a more coherent framework, the FAO and the Shamba Centre, as part of the Hesat2030 project, outline the need for a new food security and nutrition aid tracker in the third background note, The case for the food security and nutrition aid tracker. This note is informed by extensive consultations with donors to discuss the current problems surrounding how ODA is recorded and gather their feedback on the proposed ODA tracker.
Donor stakeholders have indicated strong support for a food security and nutrition aid tracker that would enable them to better track, monitor, and analyse the quantity and quality of ODA to food security and nutrition.
This process resulted in the proposal for a new Food Security and Nutrition Aid Tracker that will:
Provide the evidence base for donors and recipients on current aid levels and trends, thus enabling donors to make evidence-based decisions and minimize the influence of politics on foreign aid. This will improve donor coordination and maximize the effectiveness of aid resources.
Link current spending levels to scientific evidence on how resources should be allocated, by country and intervention area, to help donors make forward-looking decisions based on strategic gaps or an over-concentration of donor projects.
Incorporate data on aid flows from non-traditional yet increasingly important donors for food security and nutrition, such as China, in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of aid for food security and nutrition.
Bring transparency to the various definitions of ODA for food security and nutrition, contributing to ongoing discussions on the need for convergence on how to measure ODA for food security and nutrition.
Use text-mining and tagging to identify resources not captured in definitions of ODA for food security and nutrition in order to ensure that estimated volumes of aid for food security and nutrition are not bound by binary administrative reporting approaches.
The Food Security and Nutrition Aid Tracker will offer a comprehensive and analytical overview of the ODA flows that have an impact on food security and nutrition. Ultimately, this analysis will help make the case for more and better ODA for food security and nutrition and thus contribute towards the achievement of SDG 2.
A first version is expected to be made available in early 2025.
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