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Unfortunately, the giant food monopolies control more than just what
appears in global retail supermarkets. kwc African food for
Africa's starving is roadblocked in Congress
The new approach had an impeccable sponsor in
Republican-dominated Washington. The Bush administration, famous for its
go-it-alone style, was trying to move the United States - by far the world's
biggest food donor - into the international mainstream with a proposal to take
a step in just this direction. A lot of rich countries had already done so,
most recently Canada. So why is this seemingly sensible, cost-effective proposal
near death in Congress? Fundamentally, because the proposal challenges the political
bargain that has formed the basis for food aid over the past half century: that
American generosity must be good not just for the world's hungry but also for
American agriculture. That is why current law stipulates that all food aid provided by the
United States Agency for International Development be grown by American farmers
and mostly shipped on United States-flag vessels. More practically, however, it is because the
administration's proposal has run into opposition from three interests some
critics call the
Iron Triangle of food aid: agribusiness, the shipping industry and charitable
organizations.
Just
four companies and their subsidiaries, led by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sold more than
half the $700 million in food commodities provided through the United States
Agency for International Development's food aid program in 2004, government
records show. Just
five shipping companies
received over half the more than $300 million spent to ship that food, records
show. Members of Congress often applaud the benefits of food aid
for American farmers, but that is not really how it works, as Christopher B.
Barrett, a Cornell University economist and co-author of "Food Aid After
Fifty Years: Recasting its Role," noted. "It's the middlemen who
enjoy most of the gains," he said, "not the farmers." Mr. Barrett's research has established a third side to the
triangle of interests with a deep stake in the status quo: nonprofit aid
organizations. He and his co-author, Daniel Maxwell, a CARE official, found
that at least seven of them, including Catholic Relief Services and CARE
itself, depended on food aid for a quarter to half their budgets in 2001. Those
groups distribute food in poor countries. But what is less well known is that they have
also become grain traders, selling substantial amounts of the donated food on
local markets in poor countries to generate tens of millions of dollars for
their antipoverty programs.
Given that at least 50 cents of each dollar's worth of food aid is spent on
transport, storage and administrative costs, selling food to raise money in,
say, Africa, is an exceedingly inefficient way to finance long-term
development, Mr. Barrett said. Better to just give nonprofit groups the money
directly. Had the Agency for International Development had the
authority to buy food in Ethiopia in the mid-1980's, when a million perished,
or in 1999-2000 when 20,000 died, it could have saved many more lives, said its
administrator, Andrew S. Natsios, who added, "Speed is everything in a
famine response." He pushed
within the administration for a proposal that would allow up to a quarter of
his agency's food aid budget to be spent in developing countries. President Bush approved the idea, he said,
and it was included in the proposed 2006 budget introduced in February. Ed Fox, the agency's assistant administrator for legislative
and public affairs, said the issue was deliberately given a low profile. Little
was to be gained from putting members of Congress in the position of choosing
between agricultural constituencies and starving children, he said. But if the proposal was little noticed by the general
public, it did not escape the attention of groups representing the so-called
Iron Triangle, who argued that cash used to buy food was more likely to be
misused or stolen than were in-kind food donations. They maintained that the
administration's proposal should not come at the expense of a program
"upon which American producers, processors and shipping companies
rely," as a statement from an ad hoc coalition of 17 companies and
associations put it. The Coalition
for Food Aid,
which represents 16 nonprofit groups, also opposed it. While supporting the
idea of buying food in poor countries, said Ellen Levinson, the coalition's
lobbyist, its members favored a more limited pilot program paid for only with additional appropriations,
not money from the agency's core budget.
Ms. Levinson criticized the administration for failing to spell out how
its plan would work, and said a carefully monitored pilot was needed to ensure
that food bought in poor countries was safe and that the purchases did not
drive up food prices for the poor. She also cautioned that food bought near a
crisis would not necessarily be quicker to arrive, noting that the European
Union has been very slow to release cash for food in some cases. But Oxfam, which accepts no direct American food
aid and is not part of the coalition, has actively supported the
administration's proposal. In testimony submitted to Congress, it pointedly
noted that the current system offered too many opportunities "for a
variety of private interests to skim off benefits in the procurement,
packaging, transportation and distribution of commodities." And CARE, the second largest distributor of United States food aid and
a member of the coalition, had a change of heart. It has now given
unconditional support to food purchases in developing countries. The food aid debate will flare again later this year as
global trade talks approach, with the European Union proposing that rich
countries give a growing portion of their food aid as cash. But, for now, the
administration's proposal is going nowhere. Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio,
still hopes Congress will ultimately allow up to 10 percent of food aid to be
spent in poor countries. "It's a question of trying to save lives,"
he said. But opposition remains strong. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia
Republican who heads the House Agriculture Committee, said even Mr. DeWine's
modest compromise "would break a coalition that has resulted in one of the
most successful food aid programs in world history." In Canada this year, the politics of food aid has unfolded
in a starkly different way, with the leading nonprofit group, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the country's main umbrella
organization of farm groups, supporting a sharp reduction of the amount of food
bought in Canada. "Canadian farmers are not going to say you have to
source food in Canada regardless of whether starving people are waiting for
it," said the federation's president, Robert Friesen. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/12/international/africa/12memo.html |
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