CIDA - From Food to Moral Famine

Climatologists can largely determine from where most environmental refugees will come and, to a lesser degree, where they might end up.  They can also provide something of a rough timeline for when these mass migrations, large and small, will happen.  But the world community, especially the developed nations who have the benefit of countless studies on the issue, remains woefully unprepared.More proof that a gathering storm is brewing came this week from a new study by the International Food Policy Research Institute.  The report concludes that food prices will rise significantly over the next decades, leaving poorer nations like those in Africa an Asia in more desperate condition than they are now.Key to their findings was the effect climate change is having on food yields – it’s wreaking havoc.    By the year 2050, the average African living in the sub-Sahara regions will face a 21% decline in their calorie intake each day.  Numbers like this are significant enough that the report is being included in two major pieces released by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.Because the IFPRI study is the first to combine a global agricultural model with detailed modeling of crop growth under climate change, it is a portent of what is about to take place.  Perhaps of all the sectors, agriculture and water are the most vulnerable to climate change, since both are highly dependent on consistent weather patterns to achieve sustained success.  That stability is now gone.With changing weather patterns comes increased food prices, as sure as night follows day.  The price of wheat will rise nearly 200% in coming years.  More troubling for Africans, the price of maize, a staple in the continent’s food supply, will soar by about 150% due to climate change.  The IFPRI study concludes that the world needs to spend more than $7 billion annually on improvements to necessities like new rural roads and better irrigation to offset the challenges that are now upon us.A new accountability report released by CIDA to Parliament yesterday virtually glosses over this impending storm, leaving many of us to wonder what kind of pivotal role, if any, Canada will play in the future.  We’ll speak more about this report next week, but for now it’s important to say that numerous workers inside the CIDA organization get this challenge and are pressing for more action.  Sadly, a political ideology that prompts us to walk away from Africa right at a time when our own carbon emissions have plagued the troubled continent for the foreseeable future has hamstrung CIDA workers and kept them from applying their own expertise to this vital issue.And just from a personal point of view, I sometimes despair that a foreign aid policy that isn’t based on our own culpability is neither moral nor effective.  Canada has undertaken international development for decades specifically because it was deemed an ethical enterprise for a nation as privileged and principled as ours to undertake.  Just providing aid for the sake of political preferences no longer cuts it, especially when the true moral failure in the entire scenario is increasingly turning out to be ours.  The talented people at CIDA grieve this reality, yet are kept in the barn and silenced by political masters.  To those political types I say: “Get out of the way.  Let CIDA live up to its birthright. Acknowledge our moral debt to Africa.  And work with all of us across the aisle to finally live up to our responsibilities.”