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Nairobi — One billion people live in chronic hunger and I'm mad as hell," is the slogan that the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) uses to get people to sign a petition to governments to end hunger in the world.
But D.T. Krueger, a former employee of the UN organisation, is not just mad as hell about hunger, but about the FAO's inability to end it. Krueger has written a book called U.N. a Cosa Nostra that places the blame squarely on the mafia-like management culture at the FAO, which he says is corrupt and inefficient.
I wouldn't say it is among the best books I have read on the workings of the UN (the writing style is not very engaging and there are obvious editorial mistakes in many sections), but it definitely provides a unique insider's perspective on the inner workings of UN organisations and how money that they receive from governments is used.
According to Krueger, three-quarters of the funding received by FAO is spent on administration, staff, travel and accommodation costs, and that the little that reaches the beneficiaries is either too little or too late.
The organisation is also top-heavy: FAO apparently has 142 directors overseeing 1,100 professionals.
The author goes into painstaking detail on how money is (mis)spent at the FAO through the recruitment of incompetent or unqualified "political appointees" or politically-connected individuals (often wives, boyfriends, or mistresses of powerful people within the organisation), wasteful spending on unnecessary travel, hiring of unqualified consultants, and even outright theft.
Recruitment procedures are routinely ignored and the best candidates often do not get the job. Transparency, accountability, and efficiency are also compromised by shady recruitment processes.
For instance, says Krueger, there have been several cases of conflict of interest, such as when the spouses of auditors are employed within the same organisation.
He further claims that countries that have not benefited from FAO assistance, such as Malawi and Senegal, seem to be doing better than those who do.
"It is not unreasonable to think that FAO has in many cases actually damaged the countries it was meant to help," he writes.
He cites a case of a project in a West African country where two FAO professionals were recruited to assist 2,000 farmers.
The cost of the professionals and the consultants they hired to do their work for them was not proportionate to the task.
What is worse, the rice seeds that were purchased from a "friendly" company known to the professionals had a germination rate of below 20 per cent, as opposed to the FAO recommended standard of above 95 per cent.
This led to a very low yield of below 800 kilogrammes per hectare.
The obvious shortcoming in Krueger's book is that he fails to examine the policies and practices employed by the FAO that have increased, rather than decreased, food insecurity in poor countries.
For example, it would have been useful to know whether the FAO's advocacy and project-based work has had a positive or negative impact on agricultural policies and practices in developing countries.
He also fails to link these policies to external pressures and realities, such as WTO agreements and agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe.
By focusing exclusively on the corrupt and inefficient work culture of the FAO, the author gives the impression that if the UN organisation was more transparent and efficient, it may actually have an impact on hunger levels.
Krueger's book could have also benefited from a deeper analysis of the aid business in general. He could have, for example, looked at how food aid has created a dis-incentive among farmers to produce their own food.
He could have also done additional research on FAO's projects to give the reader a sense of what the organisation actually does on the ground.
By the end of the book, the reader gets an idea of the work culture of the FAO, but not what FAO actually does.
Nor does the author address the bigger question of why poor countries never seem to get out of the never-ending cycle of poverty, hunger and disease.
Or why organisations such as FAO continue getting funding despite not delivering what they promise. The lack of this type of analysis weakens the book somewhat and takes some of the wind out of this whistle blower's sails.
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