Nine months after famine took hold of Niger, food aid is at last pouring into the world's second-poorest country. Once again, televised images of skeletal toddlers have pricked the global conscience -- spurring a tardy scramble to save the Central African nation's starving millions. That bumbling dance -- it's a stretch to call it a "strategy" -- is repeated every time a developing nation faces famine.
Yet even when the world's poorest nations aren't struggling with crop failure or drought, hunger remains a hovering presence. On a planet that produces more than enough food to feed all of its inhabitants, one in seven people are hungry -- and one in three children underweight.
Who's to blame? The answer depends on what onlookers expect of themselves and their governments. Most Americans have long felt obliged to feed the hungry -- and their leaders have long been doing a terrible job of it. So says a report entitled "U.S. Food Aid: Time to Get it Right," recently released by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The report finds plenty wrong with the way America doles out its food aid, condemning the approach as inefficient, inexpensive and slow.
The biggest problem with U.S. food aid? Its main beneficiaries aren't the world's hungry, but American agribusiness and shipping companies that sell and transport mountains of grain and other foodstuffs across oceans. Also cashing in are America's private voluntary organizations, many of which sell U.S. food in hunger-struck countries to make money for their other aid work.
It might not seem to matter how food reaches the hungry, so long as it arrives. But though the United States is the world's biggest food donor (funding 57 percent of global food aid last year), the way it gives actually hurts the people who most need help. The problem isn't just that donations are supervised by an uncoordinated snarl of government agencies. More critical is that the practice of shipping U.S. food to impoverished lands -- or selling it cheap, as many charitable groups do -- means the poor get less food for each dollar of aid and that crop-growers and traders in developing countries get undercut. Over the long haul, the approach dampens food production in the parts of the world that most need an agricultural boost.
The United States is virtually alone in hanging on to this counterproductive scheme of shipping commodities halfway around the world. Most other food donors have scrapped that tactic in favor of buying food in or near the country that needs it. That practice has several benefits: It assures speedy delivery of food to the hungry, saving lives that would otherwise be lost. It makes the aid go further. And it strengthens the food-production capacity of growing nations, promoting the developing world's ability to fight hunger close to home.
In other words, by sticking with its old system of sending home-grown food overseas, the United States is actually helping to sustain the long-term causes of hunger and food insecurity in famine-prone lands. It's virtually guaranteeing that the starving children in Niger who've been waiting for American food will suffer hunger -- and need U.S. food aid -- in the years to come.
This isn't an especially clever way to stop starvation -- and it's not exactly generous, either. As the Institute report concludes, "In the name of the poor overseas, very large sums of money are now paid to prop up U.S. shipping firms and to buy food at higher than market prices from U.S.-based food processors and other agribusinesses." In short, the report says, U.S. food aid is self-interested and politicized -- and pays little heed to the needs of the hungry.
Fixing these flaws will require considerable will and conscience -- but not much more than that. All the United States need do is dismantle its elaborate system of feeding the hungry in the most plodding, inefficient and self-enriching way. As most other food donors learned long ago, all it takes to do the trick is cash, spent the right way.Star and Tribune
