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Reform Food Aid

Last updated on April 28, 2013

From an editorial in last Sunday’s New York Times:

Food aid is one of the most important tools of American foreign policy. Since the mid-1950s, the United States has spent nearly $2 billion annually to feed the world’s poor, saving millions of lives. But the process is so rigid and outdated that many more people who could be helped still go hungry. Reforms proposed by President Obama will go a long way toward fixing that problem and should be promptly enacted by Congress.

Under current law, a vast majority of international food aid must be purchased from American farmers through the Department of Agriculture and shipped overseas in American-flagged vessels. This has been a boon for domestic farmers and shippers, but more than 30 studies in the last decade have concluded that the system is inefficient, costly and even harmful to the very communities in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere that Washington purports to help.

I have often discussed the many problems with food aid on this blog, most recently here. Because the institutional structure surrounding US food aid is so screwed up, 65% of US spending on food aid goes to administrative and transportation costs.

It’s time for this to change, but given the political economy of food aid, I’m not sure Congress will allow things to change.

Update: Here is The Economist on the topic, and here is an excerpt of a longer post by Roger Thurow on the ONE campaign website, courtesy of my former student Elena Botella:

It was eminently clear to me, standing there with Jerman, that something was wrong with the US food aid system, which, since the 1940s, mandated that the US provide American-grown food on American-flagged ships.  No matter that it doubled the cost and the time of food delivery to the hungry.  There was no room, no flexibility, for American dollars to be spent buying up food that was grown locally, in the same country or the same region where hunger reigned.

It was hard to fathom.  Why not buy up the food here first?  It would be cheaper.  It was already here, so it didn’t need to sail on the high seas for months.  And it would be a great help to local farmers, who saw their own markets collapse from their surpluses.  Instead of solely shipping in surplus food from America, why not buy up local surpluses first?

It seemed like common sense.  But common sense had long ago left the US food aid system.  As the years went by, US business and political interests had come to wield ever more influence over food aid policy, keeping the focus on what was best for American agribusiness and for the politicians it supported rather than on what was best for the world’s hungry.  Even as American generosity grew – half of all international food aid has routinely been provided by the US – so did its self-interest.