Annual Action Programme Part 2: Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture

In August 2016, the Annual Action Programme 2016, Part 2: Food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture has been approved under the Global Public Goods and Challenges thematic programme. It consists of the Pro-Resilience action, namely PRO-ACT 2016, which aims at building resilience of vulnerable communities by better targeting the root causes of food insecurity. It will operate in Bolivia, Central America, Horn of Africa, Sahel and Lake Chad, Central African Republic, DPR Korea, Yemen and Syria through various modalities: budget support, grants, EU trust funds and indirect management. The global objective of the AAP is to structurally and sustainably reduce food and nutrition insecurity by tackling the root and underlying causes of vulnerability and reducing the negative impacts of stresses and shocks. There will be a specific focus on targeting rural women and girls who are most vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity in the context of conflicts, extreme weather events and climate change. The value represents EUR 71 million. 

One of the key criteria of the PRO-ACT methodology is the research of complementarity between different financial instruments of the EU including its Member States, as well as other national and international partners. The Global Network for Food Insecurity Risk Reduction and Food Crises Response goes in this direction. 

The Commission has demonstrated its ability to respond to food crisis with different EU financial instruments (geographical and thematic). However, focusing on causes turns more efficient than responding to them after their occurrence. This year, one of the most important lessons learned is that coordinating different financial instruments to respond to crises situation with a long-term vision using a mix of available instruments offers the opportunity to achieve scale to respond to global challenges such as the El Niño weather phenomenon in 2015-2016. The second lesson learned is that joint analysis of food insecurity and food crises is a first fundamental step to pave the way towards improved joint planning. The third lesson learned, deriving from the previous two is that building resilience should be achieved by: i) enhancing coordination between stakeholders around a common objective, ii) recognising local and national authorities as the main actors of the development process, iii) integrating multi-sector and multi-partner interventions and iv) committing for long term. The fourth lesson learned concern the use of EU Trust Fund for the implementation of operations in fragile and disaster prone, insecure areas. The adoption of this innovative financial instrument provides flexibility to field operations, speeding up decision and implementation processes.

Annual Action Programmes (AAP) are financing decisions adopted by the European Commission, to reserve funds for regional and country-based external cooperation programmes and for the implementation of thematic programmes. AAPs specify the objectives pursued, the fields of intervention, the expected results, the management procedures and total amount of financing planned. In addition, AAPs contain a description of the operations to be financed, an indication of the amounts allocated for each operation and an indicative implementation timetable.