The International Monetary Fund will reportedly launch a food aid program that will provide emergency funding to emerging-market economies facing war-induced food price shocks, according to a Reuters report.
According to the report, the plan, which will be presented at an informal board session, would allow the Washington-based lender to provide assistance to Ukraine and other countries whose economies have been battered by Russia’s war in Ukraine without the strict conditions typically imposed in a regular fund program.
Before Russia attacked Ukraine, the two countries supplied a third of the world’s wheat exports, but since the war, prices have surged and supplies have dwindled. Today, the world’s most vulnerable, import-reliant nations are facing impending famine from a long list of war-induced shortages.
Details as to the size and scope of the plan remain unavailable, but according to the report, the emergency funding would also temporarily increase existing limits and let member countries borrow up to an additional 50% of their IMF quota under the lender’s Rapid Financing Instrument and the Rapid Credit Instrument for low-income countries.
The new, less rigid emergency funding, if approved, follows China’s emergence as a “competitor” to Western-led IMF. In recent years, the world’s second-largest economic power has been giving out tens of billions of dollars in what the Financial Times calls “secretive ‘emergency loans’” to countries facing financial crises, minus the strict conditions of structural reform that the IMF is known for.
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