A/HRC/10/5 page 18 35. Third, and even more importantly, once food aid is defined as a means to implement the right to food, it implies that it should be delivered through criteria which are transparent and, in principle, set out in legislation. This should allow those who are unjustifiably denied food aid to have access to recourse mechanisms in order to seek a remedy from such exclusion - a potentially powerful guarantee against the risk of exclusion or against the discriminatory application of criteria for the allocation of aid.50 By restoring predictability for the recipients, food safety nets could function adequately as insurance mechanisms. Without such insurance, those who temporarily fall into poverty are obliged to sell their assets to meet their immediate needs and thereby fall into extreme poverty, and those who are chronically poor are stuck in poverty as a result of their inability to rebuild their asset stocks and thus escape their condition. IV. EVALUATION 36. The evaluation of development cooperation and food aid policies can serve to progressively improve their effectiveness. It also enhances the accountability of donor and partner States alike. By providing an objective and agreed upon analytical framework for such assessments,51 the reference to the human right to adequate food contributes to both objectives. A. Evaluating the effectiveness of development cooperation 37. Under the principle of mutual accountability agreed to in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, partner countries and donors should “enhance mutual accountability and transparency in the use of development resources”, a process which should help “strengthen public support for national policies and development assistance” (para. 47). The commitment of the partner countries is to involve more closely national parliaments and civil society in the design and implementation of national development strategies and/or budgets (para. 48). In turn, donors commit to “provide timely, transparent and comprehensive information on aid flows so as to enable partner authorities to present comprehensive budget reports to their legislatures and citizens” (para. 49). And both partner countries and donors commit to joint assessments of the effectiveness of aid (para. 50). 38. How success is to be measured remains unspecified under the Declaration. A reference to the normative components of the right to adequate food would be particularly useful to guide such assessments. Ideally, monitoring the effectiveness of aid should take the form of human rights impact assessments based on the normative components of human rights as recognized in international law; and it should be performed jointly by donors and partner countries, as well as 50 Such transparency requirements and recourse mechanisms should also be available to the beneficiaries of food aid channelled through non-governmental organizations. Certain such organizations have established help desks to provide information to those targeted by their programmes, as well as complaints handling mechanisms. 51 Human Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation - Towards a Common Understanding Among UN Agencies (2003).