Brussels, 03/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - Helping vulnerable communities through the world which have fallen victim to repeated food insecurity crises, strengthening their resilience to future crises and natural disasters will help the success of the humanitarian aid and development policies of the EU, says the European Commission. This belief is central to the initiative it took on Wednesday 3 October of listing, in a communication, measures which it recommends to put resilience - that ability of a physical person, household, community, country or region to resist, adapt to crises and disaster and to bounce back quickly after the impact of these - at the centre of the European policy to fight hunger and poverty.
Among the measures listed in this communication, entitled “The EU approach to resilience: learning from food crises” include improved access to food, early warning measures for governments allowing them to act as soon as a crisis hits, aid to the EU's partner countries faced with a crisis, guidelines aiming to guarantee that markets remain accessible to the poorest households and that natural resources such as water are protected; close cooperation between humanitarian workers and development experts.
The European Commission is undertaking to establish a link between its emergency aid programmes and its development programmes, and to combine short-term reactions with medium- and long-term reactions. Tackling emergency situations whilst investing in resilience requires coordinated assistance efforts - in coordination with the national authorities and regional organisations - in order to reduce the vulnerability of the poorest households to disasters and to tackle the underlying causes of food and nutritional insecurity, the Commission stresses, learning lessons from the reactions to recent food crises.
“Natural disasters, food crises or unexpected economic shock can seriously compromise the results of our work in the developing countries. We must focus our action on the underlying causes of recurrent crises instead of just dealing with the consequences”, commented Andris Piebalgs, European Development Commissioner. He argues that the approach recommended by the Commission is not only more effective but will save money. “In times of economic difficulties more than ever, we must ensure that every euro spent is spent more effectively than ever, both for the people we are helping on the ground and for the European taxpayers”, he added.
Kristalina Georgieva, his colleague with responsibility for international cooperation, humanitarian aid and crisis response, added the following: “if we want our aid to be effective, we must do more than plaster over the wounds - we must help to find a remedy. In order to do this, the humanitarian world and development actors need to have a common vision and commit to act together. Today, we are making a promise to this effect on behalf of Europe”.
Via its two programmes SHARE (Supporting Horn of Africa Resilience, with a total budget of €250 million for 2012-2013) and AGIR Sahel (Alliance globale pour l'initiative résilience), the EU has invested three million euros in HarvestPlus, which develops more nutritional crops for poor farmers in Africa. It is to resilience support measures that we owe the creation of early warning systems in Nepal during the floods of 2010, which made it possible to get people out of the danger areas alive. (AN/transl.fl)