By Kwasi Kpodo ACCRA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - High fuel and food prices are threatening millions with poverty and the world needs to find more flexible and effective ways of delivering aid to fight this "double jeopardy", the World Bank president said on Thursday. Robert Zoellick told a conference that channelling aid through the national budgets of recipient nations, supporting their capacity to handle it and promoting a dynamic private sector were all ways of improving development assistance. "It's common sense that we have to make aid work better," Zoellick said, speaking at a High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness being held in Accra, Ghana, and attended by development experts, ministers and senior officials. The World Bank chief said sharp increases over the past year in global food and fuel prices had complicated international efforts to reduce poverty. "It is double jeopardy (that) fuel and food prices could push a 100 million people back to poverty, thereby reversing the efforts of we the people in this room," Zoellick said. "This problem of malnutrition, accentuated by high food prices, is not going to go away soon, so the (United Nations) World Food Programme and others are going to need more flexible and more predictable food assistance," he added. He called for the lifting of export bans on food imposed by some countries, saying this was hampering the WFP's ability to obtain food quickly to respond to humanitarian needs. Critics say the effectiveness of more than $100 billion of international aid that is channelled to the developing world each year is often undermined and obstructed by bureaucratic bottlenecks, delays, overlapping and political interests. Concerns about corruption and the squandering of aid, especially in weak states in Africa, have also triggered debate about how much donor governments should try to maintain control and oversight over their aid programmes. Recipient countries insist the aid must follow their own development strategies. Zoellick backed the idea of most development aid being channelled through national budgets of receiving countries. FLEXIBLE "Take Afghanistan, for example, two-thirds of Afghanistan's aid is outside the national budget. How can you build ownership, how can you build legitimacy if you don't have national budgets being responsible?" he asked. Expanding on the concept of "ownership" of aid, Zoellick said it was critical that governments receiving assistance took a "driving seat" in shaping and handling development projects. He added donors also needed to be more flexible in creating partnerships and bringing in new players to deliver and oversee the use of aid, including civil society groups. Creating a dynamic, efficient private sector was also key to achieving sustainable, inclusive development, Zoellick said. "Governments need to free markets to be able to work for the development of their people. They need to make it easier and safer to do business and by doing so they can foster the best results from aid," he told the conference. The conference was due to issue an Accra Agenda for Action spelling out ways in which delivery of international aid can be made more effective. This will relaunch principles agreed at a meeting held in Paris in 2005. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness called on aid recipient countries to lead their own foreign-supported development, while urging donors to tailor aid to the policies of receiving countries in a more harmonised way. (Writing by Pascal Fletcher)
Workers unload boxes with food aid at the airport in Nueva Gerona on the Isle of Youth September 2, 2008. Television reports showed widespread devastation on the island, which has about ...
