Among President Clinton’s series of last-minute executive decisions and announcements was the promise of $300 million in grants for a pilot global school lunch program – a program also touted by US delegate to the United Nations George McGovern. Most of the money will be used to buy surplus U.S. soybeans, corn, wheat, rice and nonfat dry milk. The food will be distributed in schools in the developing world. Sounds good, right? What could be wrong with buying our surplus food to send to the poor?

Sadly, the program may do more harm than good. Will it help to reduce hunger? Our experience in the United States says not. After decades of federal programs to provide free lunches at school, the United States is home to 30 million people that live in hunger, 12 million of whom are children. Will providing free lunches encourage parents to send their children to school? Most children who are not in school in developing countries are at work. They are a source of income, however small, that poor families cannot forgo. Parents are often forced to make a cruel calculation, choosing one child for school, if that. The others are needed for unpaid domestic work, farm labor, or to earn an income running errands, cleaning tables, sewing clothes, or any one of the thousands of jobs that children around the world do.

Much as common sense might suggest a neat equation between disposing of surplus food and ending hunger, we know it does not work that way. We have decades of experience and mountains of literature on the subject. People lack access to food for many reasons. War is a major cause. Many of the world’s hungry are refugees, nowhere near shelter, let alone a school where they might be served lunch. Drought and environmental degradation is another cause – crops fail, leaving farmers without food to eat or sell.

When crops fail, reserves can make up the shortfall. Some of those reserves can be obtained internationally, through purchase or food aid donations. Food aid comes in different forms. Some donor countries give drought-afflicted countries money to buy the food of their choice rather than give food from their reserves. With money, Tanzania can buy corn from Zimbabwe, for example, effectively boosting the economy of a poor country (Zimbabwe) and ensuring the food supplied is culturally appropriate.

Unfortunately, the "Global Lunch Plan" has another motive – disposal of unsaleable U.S. supplies at a time when world prices are at record lows. Food aid is for the most part an ugly business, made uglier by its reliance on an image of charity. In sum, we (in food surplus countries) give food when our supplies are too great to sell and world prices are low. We cease to give when prices rise and our "generosity" is tested by the possibility of selling to a paying market elsewhere. Food aid levels can best be predicted by world market prices, not the degree of need.

Food aid donations crowd other food suppliers out of the market. Clinton stated that he hoped the pilot program "won’t disrupt farm economies." How can an injection of $300 million into the market not disrupt the market? We are not talking of crowding out ADM or Cargill here. The competition here is likely to be peasant farmers, who need their local market to survive. They sell their crop and thereby feed their family, or they starve. These farmers compose up to 80% of developing country populations. What will they have to say about the arrival of $300 million worth of competition?

And what are we so generously offering to feed these children? Crops grown for animal feed, much of it from genetically modified seed that our traditional buyers, Japan and Europe, are skittish about taking. The global lunch program creates an artificial demand for something we have too much of that no one with the money to choose for themselves wants to buy.

What might really help? In 1998, Congress passed the Africa: Seeds of Hope Act, which focuses on raising the productivity and incomes of African farmers. It refocuses U.S. aid on small-scale farmers and rural entrepreneurs. As Bread for the World, a faith-based charity, says, sustainable economic development in Africa must be rooted in a process that puts "more money in the pockets of rural women and small-scale farmers" - because that is overwhelmingly who provides food to the millions of hungry children in the world.

Would you rather have a free lunch or the self-respect that comes with being able to provide for your own family? Of course, we should provide food to the hungry – no one should die while we make the structural changes needed. But the real energy and money should go towards ending dependence, not prolonging it.