A/HRC/10/5 page 5 commitments by its States parties to provide certain quantities of food as food aid.11 The proportion of official development assistance (ODA) going to agriculture and the rural sector fell sharply between 1980 and 2007: there is now a consensus that this trend must be reversed, and the next few years will witness, one hopes, an important increase. The crisis also illustrated the continued importance of food aid in a context in which the dependency of countries on imports to feed their populations has grown significantly over the last two decades, at the same time as the prices of food commodities in international markets have become increasingly volatile. 5. The premise of this report is simple. By cooperating internationally, whether through their development cooperation policies or through the provision of food aid, donor States are not only meeting basic human needs. They are also contributing to realize the human right to adequate food. This has potentially three implications. First, there is the question of whether States are under an obligation to provide international assistance, including food aid, in certain circumstances, or at certain levels. Second, the way international assistance is delivered must take into account that it should contribute to implement the right to food: the principles of participation, transparency, accountability and non-discrimination, as well as access to remedies, must therefore be taken into account in the implementation of development cooperation policies and in the delivery of food aid. Third, the effectiveness of the aid provided should be regularly evaluated by measuring the contribution of the existing policies to the realization of the right to adequate food. II. THE OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE AID 6. Whether in the field of development cooperation or in the field of food aid, their contributions are argued by donor countries to be made on a purely voluntary basis. However, donors cannot ignore their obligations under human rights law in the implementation of their policies in these fields. There are also situations where they may be under a duty to help, particularly when they have made commitments to this effect, and where reneging on those commitments would violate the principle of predictability for the recipient State. A. Defining obligations to provide aid 7. Millennium Development Goal 8 is to develop a global partnership for development, a goal to which increased levels of donor country commitments to official development assistance can contribute. The levels of aid provided remain clearly insufficient to meet the targets set by the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the 2005 World Summit, which would require raising ODA by US$ 50 billion by 2010 compared with 2004 (at 2004 prices and exchange rates). Despite repeated commitments, again reaffirmed in the Millennium Declaration, in the Monterrey Consensus,12 in the Food and Agriculture 11 The parties to the Food Aid Convention are Argentina, Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States, as well as the European Community and its member States. The present version of the FAC entered into force on 1 July 1999. 12 Final Outcome of the International Conference on Financing for Development, adopted on 22 March 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico, A/CONF/198/3.