{"id":8761,"date":"2013-04-30T05:00:07","date_gmt":"2013-04-30T09:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=8761"},"modified":"2013-04-28T17:07:11","modified_gmt":"2013-04-28T21:07:11","slug":"reform-food-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/8761","title":{"rendered":"Reform Food Aid"},"content":{"rendered":"

From an editorial<\/a> in last Sunday’s New York Times:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 But the process is so rigid and outdated that many more people who could be helped still go hungry.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\u00a0proposed\u00a0by President Obama will go a long way toward fixing that problem and should be promptly enacted by Congress.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have often discussed the many problems with food aid on this blog, most recently here<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Update<\/span>: Here<\/a> is The Economist<\/em> on the topic, and here is an excerpt of a longer post<\/a> by Roger Thurow on the ONE campaign website, courtesy of my former student Elena Botella<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 No matter that it doubled the cost and the time of food delivery to the hungry.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It was hard to fathom.\u00a0 Why not buy up the food here first?\u00a0 It would be cheaper.\u00a0 It was already here, so it didn\u2019t need to sail on the high seas for months.\u00a0 And it would be a great help to local farmers, who saw their own markets collapse from their surpluses.\u00a0 Instead of solely shipping in surplus food from America, why not buy up local surpluses first?<\/p>\n

It seemed like common sense.\u00a0 But common sense had long ago left the US food aid system.\u00a0 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\u2019s hungry.\u00a0 Even as American generosity grew \u2013 half of all international food aid has routinely been provided by the US \u2013 so did its self-interest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,<\/p>\n

Continue readingReform Food Aid<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16,55,26,74,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-development","category-economics","category-food","category-foreign-policy","category-policy","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2hj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8761"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8811,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8761\/revisions\/8811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}