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?