When Susan George, formerly of the World Bank, wrote her revolutionary book How the Other Half Dies (Penguin, 1976), it pricked the conscience of those concerned with humanitarian issues globally. Others however, were keen to dismiss the work as an overstatement of the problem of world hunger and the global regime to combat this. The fact is that although global food production has increased manifold and at a faster rate than global population growth, the problem of hunger persists. Some of this hunger is caused by temporary factors - a particularly bad year of drought or caused by the failure of a leading crop. At other times, as in Somalia, Zimbabwe and North Korea, the difficulties of scarce resources are compounded by exploitative political regimes that remain unconcerned with the production and distribution of food. It is clear that in such circumstances the relatively wealthy benefit more than others with ethnic, linguistic and other minorities often stranded at the bottom of the appropriately christened, ‘pecking’ order.
The international community has been concerned with this situation for some time, with agencies such as the Food and Agricultural Agency (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), seeking out ways in which to relive such situations through a series of emergency measures, and better planning to avoid the descent into famine. Concomitant to these efforts, various governments have become involved in bilateral food aid. This aid is often directed at countries facing drought and famine with food packages providing inhabitants with the means for a basic survival that would be otherwise denied to them. By and large, this form of aid is motivated by humanitarian concerns and, has often significantly alleviated particularly acute shortages. Yet the issues are far more complicated than a simple and generous donation from those with plenty to those with little, as has begun to become starkly clear in Malawi.
Faced with famines in 2002, 2003 and 2005, the State was particularly grateful when the international community stepped into the breach to provide for the population. The assistance, led by the World Food Programme, was timely, focussed initially at the provision of meals at schools throughout the State, and had the added benefit of attracting children to schools in a country struggling to educate its population. The -result of what amounted to a well thought-out idea, was an increase in school enrolment and a near guarantee that every child in the State would be fed at least once a day: a luxury in some cases that was beyond the imagination of many. So successful was the model that it had begun to attract the attention of other States struggling with similar problems.
The United States of America, attracted by the efficiency of the programme, expressed a desire to join in, with a donation of $20 million over three years. Yet the fine print of the deal is crucial: access to the grant is conditional upon the food being bought off American farmers, and transported by American ships to Malawi. The result is a discrepancy whereby the cost per tonne of food will be $812 instead of $320 that is paid when sources locally. While the actual cost of the food is the same, the transportation and distribution costs add almost two-thirds to the American figure. Now the immediate crisis has passed and the State has begun to come to its feet, a new problem has surfaced: the ‘aid’ package has not stopped. Just last month the US announced that it would send another $20 million worth of corn and maize to Malawi. This corn and maize is sourced from Kansas and Iowa where farmers produce to vast excesses, with an additional subsidy estimated to be in the range of between $5-10 billion of American tax-payers’ money.
The food entering Malawi is causing a glut in a potentially good harvest year, and squeezing out local farmers, who cannot find any market for their produce. The result is that many are likely to see their produce destroyed without an opportunity to get a fair price for it. The medium term ramification is that the farmers are unlikely to earn the necessary cash to buy seeds to plant for next year’s crop and thus a gradual cycle of dependence is being formed.
The imposed compulsion to spend the attractive food aid packages on American produce is ensuring handsome rewards for farmers in Iowa and Wyoming with an additional boon for American shipping: it has begun to spell doom for indigenous African farmers. In addition there is evidence that some of the ‘in kind’ donation being sent to many African countries, is being delivered for sale at market prices to US based NGOs like Save the Children and World Vision, to generate cash to support the work of the organisations themselves.
Of course the notion of subsidizing farm produce is not exclusively an American preserve. Europe, with its Brussels funded programme of subsidies ensures adequate ‘protection’ for its farmers through a series of regulations and tariffs that keep cheaper African farm produce out of the European Union. Thus despite the constant rhetoric of the importance of free trade and the oft-heard criticism of other States’ (i.e. non US and EU) protectionist measures, in this, the fulfilling of the most basic of human needs, the powerful ensure that they and theirs come off best. Sometimes, as in the case of situations of particularly acute shortfalls this largesse is well received, but at other times, it feels very much as if the rest of the world is required to sit captive at the feet of the wealthy States, waiting to pounce on unwanted or carelessly thrown morsels that may fall to the ground.
The international regime for human rights has for long been overtly concerned with the plight of the individual and her/his civil and political rights. Yet as we have seen in the more than five decades that have passed since the passage of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights (1948) to be able to truly address the human rights of every global citizen, we have to see their rights as being both indivisible and collective. While the human rights regime has begun to become more active on economic and social rights, it is still to take on unequal world trade regimes with any sustained rigour. As this important example in Malawi demonstrates, this is a vital necessity to prevent the escalation of global inequality. As for Gift Horses and Mouths – well food aid risks being one gift where the pleasure and subsequent rewards are truly, all in the Giving.
1st June 2007
For a more detailed look at the situation in Malawi see the Guardian Newspapers Food Monthly Magazine or join in the debate entitled ‘Does Food Aid Do More Harm than Good? On www.observer.co.uk/blog.
Showing posts with label Food Aid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food Aid. Show all posts
Sunday, 3 June 2007
Sunday, 27 May 2007
Does food aid do more harm than good?
In 1987, I was working in Sudan for Unicef: one day in a market in Khartoum I watched sacks of food stencilled "A Gift From The American People" tumbling off the back of lorries into the arms of the traders.
They were slitting them open there and then to sell the wheat flour inside by the kilo to shoppers. "Stolen?" I asked a colleague "Probably, but does it matter? The market is a more efficient way of distributing the food than the NGOs will ever manage. Cheaper too."
I've been fascinated by the economics - and the politics - of food aid ever since.
The story in this month's Observer Food Monthly about American porridge being shipped, at vast expense, for schoolchildren in Malawi, where the same food could be bought locally at a third the price, is just one in a long list of lunacies that punctuate the 50-year history of sending the rich world's food and drink to help the hungry.
Everyone in the food aid business has a story. One from the 1985 famine in Sudan is of a ship stuck at one of the Red Sea ports laden with a quarter of a million half-litre bottles of Italian mineral water. It had been sent by an Italian charity who must have thought: those poor thirsty Sudanese, they've had a drought, they must need water.
But no money had been sent to deliver the acqua minerale (which was past its sell-by date before it left Italy), so there it stayed.
On the face of it, nothing could be simpler than the basic charitable act of giving food from those who have plenty to those who have too little. But simple it has never been.
American economist Christopher Barrett's chief concern is that American governmental food aid - which feeds 70 million people a year at a cost of up to $2 billion is slow, often ineffective and madly expensive - and it may do more harm than good in many of the countries it goes to.
US Food Aid policy, as Barrett, points out, has always had a cynical, subsidiary aim, stated in the 1954 Bill that started the programme - to "develop and expand export markets for United States agricultural commodities". Which it has indeed done.
There's an excellent Oxfam overview (pdf) of the damage food aid has done to local farmers and traders in the countries it's sent to - damage that can set in motion the wheels of the next famine.
There are wider issues though than the mere problem of the US using the developing world as a way of getting rid of its surplus maize, wheat and rice. Food aid addiction is a buzz word among some of the aid agencies - Ethiopia is the example most often used. There, like stitches left in a wound, the emergency treatment of food aid delivered in the Eighties has become key to the country's economic infrastructure.
There are developing world nutritionists who believe that food aid has no long-term effect on the feeding of the vulnerable - malnutrition rates in southern Sudan, where an entire generation has grown up on the hand-outs of the rich world, have not improved in 20 years.
The best debate comes from the Institute for Food and Development Policy - a lobby group that dares ask what most won't: does food aid do more harm than good?
"Feed the world," said Bob Geldof back in 1985. The rider now should be: "Feed it in a way that helps it feed itself." The rich world has spent some $100 billion doing it wrong over the last 20 years.
The best - and funniest - illustration of that I know of is Oren Ginzburg's brilliant cartoon book, The Hungry Man. Oren, himself a former Unicef worker, tells of what happens when well-intentioned, well-funded Westerners get together in the developing world to "teach a man to fish", as the saying has it.
They start by flying a team of experts to properly assess his needs. and then they draft a report, and then they conduct a workshop, then they mainstream the gender aspect of the programme.
Just give the hungry man the money - is that the answer?
They were slitting them open there and then to sell the wheat flour inside by the kilo to shoppers. "Stolen?" I asked a colleague "Probably, but does it matter? The market is a more efficient way of distributing the food than the NGOs will ever manage. Cheaper too."
I've been fascinated by the economics - and the politics - of food aid ever since.
The story in this month's Observer Food Monthly about American porridge being shipped, at vast expense, for schoolchildren in Malawi, where the same food could be bought locally at a third the price, is just one in a long list of lunacies that punctuate the 50-year history of sending the rich world's food and drink to help the hungry.
Everyone in the food aid business has a story. One from the 1985 famine in Sudan is of a ship stuck at one of the Red Sea ports laden with a quarter of a million half-litre bottles of Italian mineral water. It had been sent by an Italian charity who must have thought: those poor thirsty Sudanese, they've had a drought, they must need water.
But no money had been sent to deliver the acqua minerale (which was past its sell-by date before it left Italy), so there it stayed.
On the face of it, nothing could be simpler than the basic charitable act of giving food from those who have plenty to those who have too little. But simple it has never been.
American economist Christopher Barrett's chief concern is that American governmental food aid - which feeds 70 million people a year at a cost of up to $2 billion is slow, often ineffective and madly expensive - and it may do more harm than good in many of the countries it goes to.
US Food Aid policy, as Barrett, points out, has always had a cynical, subsidiary aim, stated in the 1954 Bill that started the programme - to "develop and expand export markets for United States agricultural commodities". Which it has indeed done.
There's an excellent Oxfam overview (pdf) of the damage food aid has done to local farmers and traders in the countries it's sent to - damage that can set in motion the wheels of the next famine.
There are wider issues though than the mere problem of the US using the developing world as a way of getting rid of its surplus maize, wheat and rice. Food aid addiction is a buzz word among some of the aid agencies - Ethiopia is the example most often used. There, like stitches left in a wound, the emergency treatment of food aid delivered in the Eighties has become key to the country's economic infrastructure.
There are developing world nutritionists who believe that food aid has no long-term effect on the feeding of the vulnerable - malnutrition rates in southern Sudan, where an entire generation has grown up on the hand-outs of the rich world, have not improved in 20 years.
The best debate comes from the Institute for Food and Development Policy - a lobby group that dares ask what most won't: does food aid do more harm than good?
"Feed the world," said Bob Geldof back in 1985. The rider now should be: "Feed it in a way that helps it feed itself." The rich world has spent some $100 billion doing it wrong over the last 20 years.
The best - and funniest - illustration of that I know of is Oren Ginzburg's brilliant cartoon book, The Hungry Man. Oren, himself a former Unicef worker, tells of what happens when well-intentioned, well-funded Westerners get together in the developing world to "teach a man to fish", as the saying has it.
They start by flying a team of experts to properly assess his needs. and then they draft a report, and then they conduct a workshop, then they mainstream the gender aspect of the programme.
Just give the hungry man the money - is that the answer?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
