Ertharin Cousin - the status-quo Ambassador of USUN in Rome (witnessed scandals of FAO/IFAD and WFP and remained silence)

Under her leadership of USUN in Rome the scrutiny of UN's Agencies in Rome (WFP, FAO and IFAD) was at its lowest levels ever. The scandals of WFP in Somalia, Kenya, Pakistan and Indonesia, etc as well as the scandal of FAO and IFAD directors were made public but she remained silence in front of this corruption. Now she is being proposed as replacement to Josette Sheeran.

CAN SHE REFORM WFP?

Or will she be another status-quo like Josette Sheeran?

Ertharin Cousin

Ambassador

USUN ROME

Term of Appointment: 08/17/2009 to present

Ambassador Ertharin Cousin was nominated by President Barack Obama on June 19, 2009 to be U.S. Representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Ms. Cousin was confirmed by the Senate on August 7, 2009 and sworn in as Ambassador on August 17, 2009.

Ms. Cousin has more than twenty-five years of national and international corporate, non-profit, and government leadership experience, and immediately prior to this appointment was President of The Polk Street Group, a national public affairs firm located in Chicago, Illinois.

Ms. Cousin previously served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Feeding America (then known as America’s Second Harvest), the nation’s largest domestic hunger organization. Among her key achievements during this period was leading the organization’s response to Hurricane Katrina, an effort which resulted in the distribution of more than 62 million pounds of food to those in need across the Gulf Coast region of the United States.

Ms. Cousin also has significant background in the retail food sector, including as Senior Vice President of Albertsons Foods and Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs for Jewel Food stores. While working for Albertsons, she also served as President and Chair of the company’s corporate foundation, managing the organization’s philanthropic activities.

Ms. Cousin worked for the Clinton Administration for four years, including as Deputy Chief of Staff for the Democratic National Committee and White House Liaison at the State Department. In 1997 she received a White House appointment to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development.

Ms. Cousin is a native of Chicago and a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Georgia School of Law.

Click here for this CV on State.Gov

Ban Ki-moon looses faith on Obama's reelection - moves to appoint a different candidate to replace Josette Sheeran

U.S. pushing Cousin for U.N. food chief

Posted By Colum Lynch

Click here for this article on Turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com

The Obama administration has been pressing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to appointErtharin Cousin, the U.S. representative to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome, as the new head of the World Food Program (WFP), the premier international agency responsible for feeding the world's poor and distressed.

Cousin, formerly president of the Polk Street Group, a Chicago-based public relations firm, has served in various corporate and non-profit jobs, including a stint at Albertsons, the food giant, and served as chief operating officer for America's Second Harvest, a national anti-hunger organization.

The Obama administration wants her to replace Josette Sheeran, the Bush administration choice for the job, when her five-year term expires in April 2012.

Officials say the administration had expected a decision to have been made by now and have grown concerned that Ban may not select their favored candidate. Dan Glickman, a former Democratic lawmaker from Kansas and Secretary of Agricultural under former President Bill Clinton, is also said to be on the U.N.'s short list of candidates. Sheeran is said to be pursuing a second term.

The United States is the world's largest financial contributor to the World Food Program, providing more than $1.5 billion worth of assistance and food in 2010, which accounts for more than 36 percent of all international giving to the U.N. food agency. The World Food Program's executive director has always been an American, generally selected by the U.N. secretary general and the director general of the FAO, on the basis of a recommendation from the United States.

The Rome-based FAO is responsible for feeding more than 105 million people in 75 countries, and employs about 10,000 people.

The eventual winner of the WFP job, though, could potentially be forced to grapple with a Palestinian bid to join the organization's executive board, which is composed of 18 U.N. members and 18 members of FAO. The Palestinians can join FAO if they can get a two-third vote of the membership, which would allow them to mount a bid for membership on WFP's executive board.

So far, the Palestinians -- which have already been admitted as UNESCO members -- have said they are exploring membership bids in some 16 additional U.N. agencies, at some point in the future. They have not yet said, however, whether they would mount a campaign for membership in the U.N.'s food agencies at the next major membership meeting in June, 2013.

Follow me on Twitter @columlynch

With more than 182 MIllion in budget for Kenya how transparent is WFP in publishing where the money goes?

Zero Transparency

182,048,829

Click here to go to project resource page for WFP Kenya

Kenya PRRO 10258.3 “Food Assistance to Somali and Sudanese Refugees” (WFP/EB.A/2009/9-B)

Armed Militia Grab the Famine Business

click here to read this story on IPS

MOGADISHU, Sep 7, 2011 (IPS) - Armed groups are withholding aid and preventing Somali famine refugees from leaving camps to ensure the continued supply of food by aid agencies that they are presently selling on the open market.

Since Mohamed Elmi, 69, and his family arrived at a camp for famine refugees in Mogadishu they have barely had enough to eat. Armed gunmen running the camp steal their food and prevent them from leaving to search for aid elsewhere, he says.

Elmi told IPS that this happens because aid agencies deliver food to the people running the camp for distribution and not to the famine victims themselves. And they are prevented from leaving because aid will no longer be delivered to the camps if they do.

"I don’t know who is running this, but we have said time and again that we are never, never given anything by the foremen running (the camp). Let them kill me if they want… We cannot leave here to find a better place," an emancipated Elmi told IPS. He asked IPS not to publish the name of his camp as he fears for his safety.

Tens of thousands of desperately hungry Somalis displaced from the drought-stricken south are not receiving the food aid meant for them. Gunmen have set up unathourised refugee camps in Mogadishu just to steal the food delivered by humanitarian agencies. It is believed the food is being sold on the local markets.

There are dozens of camps with thousands of families in the bullet-scarred Somali capital of Mogadishu. Not all are official camps. These are often run by men from the local clan militias who divert famine victims entering the city to the ‘camps’ they have set up in deserted buildings in Mogadishu.

This is what happened to Mahad Iyo, 54, who arrived in Mogadishu in search of aid in August.

Iyo said that he and other displaced people walked for days to reach Mogadishu. At the city’s entrances they were greeted by armed gangs and were directed to a disused government building. The building was filled with refugees who had constructed makeshift tents using sticks and old ragged cloth. "They want to use us for their own benefit," Iyo now says of the men who so eagerly offered him help when he first arrived. "We are not registered for the aid and neither are we given regular help. Food and other essentials are brought to the camp by the agencies but they are quickly taken away by the foremen," said Iyo.

He said he would prefer to leave the camp and go back to his village in southern Somalia where he would be "better off dead".

Mohamed Nur, a former clan militia leader, runs one of the many camps in Mogadishu and he agreed to speak to IPS to "set the record straight."

Nur admitted that he has no experience in relief work and that he was not appointed to run the camp by either government or aid agencies. He said he took on the responsibility himself "after seeing the influx of desperate fellow Somalis."

"Who will do this work if we don’t stand up to do it? The government is corrupt and the aid agencies don’t know our people better than we do. So we have set up this camp of 20,000 people, but the aid agencies never bring in enough food for the people," Nur told IPS. He was flanked by Kalashnikov- branding gunmen outside the camp of barely 2,000 people.

Nur said he doesn’t keep a register of camp residents or of the food deliveries as he and his "co- volunteers" have no time for "useless paperwork". He added that neither government nor the aid agencies require him to fill in any documentation.

Nur denied that he or others steal aid. But many people at Nur’s camp complained to IPS about the lack of assistance and food.

The head of the government’s Disaster Management Agency Abdullahi Mohamed Shirwa, which coordinates aid efforts to assist famine victims in Mogadishu, said the agency was "doing everything to deal with the issue and we are taking it seriously." He added that there were only isolated incidents of theft of food aid.

"When disasters of this magnitude take place aid efforts are often haphazard and it takes time to deal with such problems, but my agency is working hard to do everything to deal with the issue and we are taking it seriously," Shirwa told IPS.

IPS has learnt that some famine victims are leaving the government-run Badbaado Camp, which is situated on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Ten people were killed at the camp on Aug. 5 after armed men, allegedly from government’s military forces, tried to loot the aid being distributed to the camp residents. One aid worker told IPS that the population of the camp was now "at half, or less than half" its initial number of 4,000 families.

"People are fleeing because they see that they are never going to get justice, or protection, or help from the government," the aid worker told IPS.

The government had condemned the killings at Badbaado camp and vowed to charge those involved, however, no one has been arrested as yet.

The United Nations estimates that almost 100,000 people arrived in Mogadishu this year after fleeing the devastating famine currently gripping southern Somalia. About 3.6 million people are in need of assistance in the war-ravaged country. The U.N. announced on Monday that the famine in Somalia has now spread to the Bay region of southern Somalia and 750,000 people face imminent starvation.

Charity president says aid groups are misleading the public on Somalia

• Tracy McVeigh
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 3 September 2011 22.42 BST
• Click here for this story on The Guardian

Médecins Sans Frontières executive says charities must admit that much of the country can't be helped

A man holds his three-year-old daughter at a camp for displaced persons in Mogadishu. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

The head of an international medical charity has called on aid agencies to stop presenting a misleading picture of the famine in Somalia and admit that helping the worst-affected people is almost impossible.

The international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Dr Unni Karunakara, returned from Somalia last week and said that, even though there was chronic malnutrition and drought across east Africa, hardly any agencies were able to work inside war-torn Somalia, where the picture was "profoundly distressing". He condemned other organisations and the media for "glossing over" the reality in order to convince people that simply giving money for food was the answer.

According to Karunakara, agencies have been able to provide medical and nutritional care for tens of thousands in camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, which have been receiving huge numbers of refugees from Somalia. But trying to access those in the "epicentre" of the disaster has been slow and difficult. "We may have to live with the reality that we may never be able to reach the communities most in need of help," he said.

Karunakara said that the use of phrases such as "famine in the Horn of Africa" or "worst drought in 60 years" obscured the "man-made" factors that had created the crisis and wrongly implied that the solution was simply to find the money to ship enough food to the region.

He described Mogadishu, the Somali capital, as dotted with plastic sheets supported by twigs, sheltering groups of weak and starving people who had walked in from the worst-affected areas in southern and central Somalia. "I met a woman who had left her home with her husband and seven children to walk to Mogadishu and had arrived after five days with only four children," he said.

"MSF is constantly being forced to make tough choices in deploying or expanding our activities, in sticking to our principles of neutrality with the daily realities of people going without healthcare, without food. Our staff face being shot. But glossing over the man-made causes of hunger and starvation in the region and the great difficulties in addressing them will not help resolve the crisis. Aid agencies are being impeded in the area.

"MSF has been working in Somalia for 20 years, and we know that if we are struggling then others will not be able to work at all. The reality on the ground is that there are serious difficulties that affect our abilities to respond to need."

He said charities needed to start treating the public "like adults". He went on: "There is a con, there is an unrealistic expectation being peddled that you give your £50 and suddenly those people are going to have food to eat. Well, no. We need that £50, yes; we will spend it with integrity. But people need to understand the reality of the challenges in delivering that aid. We don't have the right to hide it from people; we have a responsibility to engage the public with the truth."

Chronic malnutrition, said Karunakara, is not new in east Africa and needs long-term action. "The Somali people have been living in a country at war, with no government, for 20 years, with several long periods of hardship, of famine and drought. This harvest failure is just what has tipped them over the edge this time, a catastrophe made worse," he said.

A brutal war between the transitional government, which is backed by western nations and supported by African Union troops, and armed Islamist opposition groups, notably al-Shabaab, is ongoing in Somalia. Fierce clan loyalties keep independent international assistance away from many communities, meaning that Somalis are trapped between various forces, depriving them of food and healthcare for political reasons.

"We face constant difficult challenges over simple things like a new nurse or getting a car," said Karunakara. "When we need to be saving lives with a fully fledged medical response, we constantly need to be communicating with both sides in a war, reminding them what humanitarian aid is. One needs only to look at how few charities are working in Somalia."

Ian Bray, a spokesman for Oxfam, said it was unhelpful for aid agencies to be seen to be arguing with each other.

"We're being honest with donors and we have always been honest," said Bray. "A drought is a natural occurrence; a famine is man-made. We don't go around to people saying we have a magic wand, give us £5 and we will make Africa feed itself. We do say give us £5 and we won't use it to give you a history of Somalia, but we will use our expertise to save lives. This is what the bargain is we make with our donors. If you support us, we will do our level best to alleviate the distress for those people in most dire need."

Same contractor who was under investigation 4 years ago for ties with al-shaabab is continuing to distribute Aid in Somalia on behalf of USAID and WFP

Somalia famine aid stolen, UN investigating

click here for story @ http://www.stuff.co.nz/

Sacks of grain, peanut butter snacks and other food staples meant for starving Somalis are being stolen and sold in markets, an investigation has found, raising concerns that thieving businessmen are undermining international famine relief efforts in this nearly lawless country.

The UN's World Food Program acknowledged for the first time that it has been investigating food theft in Somalia for two months. The WFP strongly condemned any diversion of "even the smallest amount of food from starving and vulnerable Somalis."

Underscoring the perilous security throughout the food distribution chain, donated food is not even safe once it has been given to the hungry in the makeshift camps popping up around the capital of Mogadishu. Families at the large, government-run Badbado camp, where several aid groups distribute food, said they were often forced to hand back aid after journalists had taken photos of them with it.

"They tell us they will keep it for us and force us to give them our food," said refugee Halima Sheikh Abdi. "We can't refuse to co-operate because if we do, they will force us out of the camp, and then you don't know what to do and eat. It's happened to many people already."

The UN says more than 3.2 million Somalis - nearly half the population - need food aid after a severe drought that has been complicated by Somalia's long-running war. More than 450,000 Somalis live in famine zones controlled by al Qaeda-linked militants, where aid is difficult to deliver. The US says 29,000 Somali children under age five already have died.

International officials have long expected some of the food aid pouring into Somalia to disappear. But the sheer scale of the theft calls into question the aid groups' ability to reach the starving. It also raises concerns about the ability of aid agencies and the Somali government to fight corruption, and whether diverted aid is fueling Somalia's 20-year civil war.

"While helping starving people, you are also feeding the power groups that make a business out of the disaster," said Joakim Gundel, who heads Katuni Consult, a Nairobi-based company often asked to evaluate international aid efforts in Somalia. "You're saving people's lives today so they can die tomorrow."

For the past two weeks, planeloads of aid from the UN, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait and other countries have been roaring into Mogadishu almost daily. Boatloads more are on the way. There is no doubt that much of it is saving lives: the AP saw hungry families lining up for hot meals at feeding centers, and famished children eating free food while crouched among makeshift homes of ragged scraps of plastic.

WFP Somalia country director Stefano Porretti said the agency's system of independent, third-party monitors uncovered allegations of possible food diversion. But he underscored how dangerous the work is: WFP has had 14 employees killed in Somalia since 2008.

"Monitoring food assistance in Somalia is a particularly dangerous process," Porretti said.

In Mogadishu markets, vast piles of food are for sale with stamps on them from the WFP, the US government aid arm USAID, the Japanese government and the Kuwaiti government. The AP found eight sites where thousands of sacks of food aid were being sold in bulk. Other food aid was also for sale in numerous smaller stores. Among the items being sold were Kuwaiti dates and biscuits, corn, grain, and Plumpy'nut - a fortified peanut butter designed for starving children.

An official in Mogadishu with extensive knowledge of the food trade said he believes a massive amount of aid is being stolen - perhaps up to half of recent aid deliveries. The percentage had been lower, he said, but in recent weeks the flood of aid into the capital with little or no controls has created a bonanza for businessmen.

The official, like the businessmen interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.

The AP could not verify the official's claims. WFP said that it rejected the scale of diversions alleged by the official.

At one of the sites for stolen food aid - the former water agency building at a location called "Kilometer Five" - about a dozen corrugated iron sheds are stacked with sacks of food aid. Outside, women sell food from open 50-kilogram sacks, and traders load the food onto carts or vehicles under the indifferent eyes of local officials.

Stolen food aid is the main reason the US military become involved in the country's 1992 famine, an intervention that ended shortly after the military battle known as Black Hawk Down. There are no indications the military plans to get involved in this year's famine relief efforts.

The WFP emphasized that it has "strong controls ... in place" in Somalia, where it cited risks in delivering food in a "dangerous, lawless, and conflict-ridden environment."

WFP said it was "confident the vast majority of humanitarian food is reaching starving people in Mogadishu," adding that AP reports of "thousands" of bags of stolen food would equal less than 1 percent of one month's distribution for Somalia.

Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman said the government does not believe food aid is being stolen on a large scale, but if such reports come to light, the government "will do everything in our power" to bring action in a military court.

The AP investigation also found evidence that WFP is relying on a contractor blamed for diverting large amounts of food aid in a 2010 UN report.

Eight Somali businessmen said they bought food from the contractor, Abdulqadir Mohamed Nur, who is known as Enow. His wife heads Saacid, a powerful Somali aid agency that WFP uses to distribute hot food. The official with extensive knowledge of the food trade said at some Saacid sites, it appeared that less than half the amount of food supplied was being prepared.

Attempts to reach Enow or his wife for comment were not successful.

Businessmen said Enow had several warehouses around the city where he sold food from, including a site behind the Nasa Hablod hotel at a roundabout called "Kilometer Four."

Three businessman described buying food directly from the port and one said he paid directly into Enow's Dahabshiel account, a money transfer system widely used in Somalia. WFP has no foreign staff at the port to check on stock levels or which trucks are picking it up; it relies on Somali staff and an unidentified independent monitor to check on sites.

The men said they would buy in bulk for US$20 (NZ$24) per sack and sell at between US$23 and US$25 - a week's salary for a Somali policeman or soldier.

Until last week, there were daily battles in the capital between Islamic insurgents and government forces supported by African Union peacekeepers. Suicide bombers and snipers prowled the city.

WFP does not serve and prepare the food itself. After the deaths of 14 employees, WFP rarely allows its staff outside the AU's heavily fortified main base at the airport. It relies on a network of Somali aid agencies to distribute its food.

Gundel, the consultant, said aid agencies hadn't learned many lessons from the 1992 famine, when hundreds of thousands died and aid shipments were systematically looted, leading to the U.S. military intervention.

"People need to know the history here," he said. "They have to make sure the right infrastructure is in place before they start giving out aid. If you are bringing food into Somalia it will always be a bone of contention."

In the short term, he said, aid agencies should diversify their distribution networks, conduct frequent random spot checks on partners, and organize in communities where they work - but before an emergency occurs. "It's going to be very, very hard to do now," he added.

At the Badbado camp, Ali Said Nur said he was also a victim of food thefts. He said he twice received two sacks of maize, but each time was forced to give one to the camp leader.

"You don't have a choice. You have to simply give without an argument to be able to stay here," he said.

- AP

Contractors Are Accused in Large-Scale Theft of Food Aid in Somalia

Story @NewYorkTimes

Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Abukar Ibrahim’s daughter Maryam, 5, sipped medicine at a hospital in Mogadishu on Tuesday.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: August 16, 2011

NAIROBI, Kenya — Beyond freelance gunmen, Islamist militants, cholera, malaria, measles and the staggering needs of hundreds of thousands of starving children, aid agencies scrambling to addressSomalia’s famine now may have another problem to reckon with: the wholesale theft of food aid.

As it scales up its operations in Somalia, the United Nations World Food Program is investigating allegations that thousands of sacks of grain and other supplies intended for famine victims have been stolen by unscrupulous businessmen and then sold on the open market for a profit.

“We’re looking into this,” Greg Barrow, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said Tuesday.

He said the World Food Program was first alerted several months ago to the possibility of stolen food aid in the capital, Mogadishu, but added that he did not want to provide specifics, in the event that the allegations were baseless.

Few experienced aid workers believe that all, or even close to all, of the emergency food in Somalia reaches the people it was intended for. Because much of Somalia has been mired in chaos and violence for the past 20 years, large aid organizations tend not to base their own staff members there and instead appoint local groups to monitor aid deliveries, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Last year, United Nations investigators said that a web of corrupt contractors and their cronies were skimming off as much as half of the food aid, though later internal United Nations investigations did not find evidence to support that. Back in 1991 and 1992, during Somalia’s last famine, warlords and their militias were notorious for commandeering food shipments.

“This is the price of doing business in Somalia,” said one aid official who worked in Somalia in the 1990s but was not authorized by his organization to speak publicly. “You’re always going to have seepage.”

He said that 15 to 20 percent of losses was what “everyone learned to live with in 1991 and 1992” and that aid workers even coined a term to euphemize the theft — “traditional distribution” — because even though the food was getting looted, it still ended up in local markets, having the ancillary effect of reducing overall food prices and making food more affordable for the poor.

One way the United Nations and its local partners are trying to combat the pilfering of food is by serving individual portions of porridge at special centers, as opposed to just handing out sacks of grain. The World Food Program, which has said that it will not cut back on aid deliveries because of the allegations of theft, is also asking contractors to pay them back for any food that was not delivered.

Mark Bowden, the head of United Nations humanitarian operations in Somalia, said the stealing of food aid was a longstanding — and deeply rooted — problem.

“I’m afraid it’s not new,” he said Tuesday. “The war economy means there is a very high dependence on the income that comes from humanitarian aid.”

What is especially troubling, other aid officials say, is that large-scale aid diversions may be happening in Mogadishu, the only part of Somalia that the transitional government controls, though loosely. The Shabab militant group abruptly withdrew from Mogadishu this month, saying it was shifting to guerrilla tactics, which essentially put the capital in government hands for the first time in years.

United Nations officials predict that the famine occurring in several areas of southern Somalia will soon spread, the consequence of one of the worst droughts in 60 years and relentless conflict. They say 3.2 million people need immediate, lifesaving assistance and tens of thousands have already died, most of them children.

Hundreds of thousands of Somalis have fled into Kenya, Ethiopia and to camps in Mogadishu, where cholera and measles are preying upon a malnourished and immune-suppressed population. Cases of malaria are also on the rise, as storms hit Mogadishu and the rains pound down.

The transitional government has promised to do whatever it can to help famine victims and denies that large amounts of aid have recently been diverted, as first reported by The Associated Press on Monday.

Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, Somalia’s new Harvard-educated prime minister, said in a recent interview that the government was doing “a great job.”

“Were we ready for a drought of this magnitude? No,” he said. “But we acted quickly.”

However, undisciplined — and heavily armed — government soldiers continue to be a problem. This month, government soldiers battled each other to steal emergency food, killing half a dozen people in the middle of a camp for displaced people. A few days later, government troops looted shops in the Bakara market during one of their first days back in the market, which used to be controlled by the Shabab.

Many Somali analysts describe both the government and the Shabab as spent forces, though the Shabab still control most of the lower third of Somalia. The Shabab have forced out many of the biggest Western aid agencies, including the World Food Program, from their territories and blocked starving people from escaping the drought areas.

Mr. Bowden said that donors like the United States had been generous in contributing money for emergency assistance but that there was still a shortfall of half a billion dollars.