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Who Does U.S. Food Aid Benefit?

Current policies favor giant shipping companies and agribusinesses over the starving populations they are supposed to serve

By Megan Tady

Last month, in a move that shocked observers, CARE, one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, rejected $45 million in U.S. food aid, shining a spotlight on a practice the group says may hurt starving populations more than help them. Complaining that U.S. food aid policy is inefficient, unsustainable and perhaps even detrimental to combating food insecurity, CARE belives “enough is… return to article

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    This is a tough one because pumping large amounts of any valuable resource into a local economy (including food) is sure to distort its market mechanisms, and yet so often in those localities war, corruption, or climate problems may already be distorting those mechanisms so badly that you can trace chronic hunger in large part directly to them.

    As for cash rather than in-kind donations, we’ve all heard many times that donated cash very often goes astray, much of it never actually helping the ones who need it. I’ve had direct experience working to raise donations for various charities, particularly to help orphans, local farmers whose crops have been laid waste by capricious tropical storms and typhoons, people made homeless by huge landslides, etc. Cash is always appreciated, but unfortunately it has happened many times that big chunks of money end up getting parted out into hundreds of little pieces that end up not doing much good at all except in a small-scale, very short term fashion. So for example half a million Philippine pesos, say, can end up becoming little more than 500 little chips of a thousand pesos each (about $20 equivalent), and whatever bigger problem the P500k might have helped solve can’t get addressed effectively. That kind of thing fosters donor fatigue as much as does continued requests for more money. This doesn’t alway happen, of course, but it does happen routinely enough that a lot of people I’ve solicited donations from say they’d rather donate in-kind.

    One other ugly thing is that it’s just that much more difficult to use in-kind donations to buy weapons or other mayhem products. In-kind items can be monetized, of course, but cash can be misused much more directly. It’s a damn sad fact that money intended for honorable purposes can end up funding some extremist’s attack, in addition to the other possibility that it may just be soaked up unethically or parted out into ineffectuality as I described above. This discourages generous folk from lending a hand next time around, and of course those without enough food get all that much less of the help they need.

    Philippines Posted by Kuya on Sep 13, 2007 at 8:07 AM

    Promoters of failed aid policies have neglected to look at the unintended consequences of their proposals.  Whether it is aid or warfare, policy makers need to look at the other side of the coin.  One might say that for every action there is an opposite reaction. Do the merits outweigh the demerits? 

    Would food aid to some countries just prolong the agony of starving children?  This may sound cruel, but there are plenty of ways to help the poor in underdeveloped countries.  Where do we get the most bang for the buck?  Maybe the policy with the best intended consequences and the least bad unintended consequences may be in the field of education in the more stable countries?  Maybe road building (for cars and trains) will be a better policy? 

    It seems to me that there have been plenty of studies on these topics.  Policies ought to be based on facts, not emotions.

    United States Posted by exsem on Sep 20, 2007 at 2:58 PM
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