Historically, humanitarian motives have played a small part in the politics of U.S. aid. Geopolitics (supporting cold war clients) and pork barrel politics (making sure the aid is spent on American companies) have been more powerful forces. This is one reason the U.S. gives little aid for its size, heavily “ties” the aid, including food aid, to spending on American companies (which, and has recently favored countries such as Iraq and Pakistan.
Precisely for this reason, the success of the debt cancellation movement, led by the likes of Jubilee 2000 and Bono’s DATA and bolstered by support from the rank and file of churches and other religious organizations, has been so striking. The movement changed the politics of aid, as far as debt relief goes, united Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson and bringing humanitarian motives the fore in politicians’ decisions about how to write bills and how to vote.
The question on my mind is whether such NGOs can do the same for food aid. Perhaps I should call them “independent NGOs” to distinguish them from the ones who get so much of their budgets from U.S. aid programs. One of the latter, Catholic Relief Services, may have a good point that rationalizing the food aid program could cause political support from the industry lobbies to evaporate, thus ultimately meaning less food for the starving. But the situation documented in the Times and Journal is outrageous. According to figures in the Journal, the U.S. brought corn to people in northern Uganda at $447/ton when it could have had it from farmers in the south for $180. I applaud Natsios for taking on the food-industrial complex.
If politics are the problem, then can they be changed? It would seem that the independent NGOs have the best shot at it. The issue is in many ways well-suited to their skills. It provides gripping and terrible images and is patently absurd. I place my hopes in them. That said, it must be acknowledged that debt was an easier target than food aid. Most of the debt being cancelled never would have been paid anyway, so debt relief was more about accepting financial reality than committing real resources. There were no obvious losers. One reason Nigeria just got debt relief is that the country offered to pay right now about as much cash as the creditors could have realistically hoped to ever get back from Nigeria anyway. Jubilee 2000 made accurate accounting (wiping bad debts off the books) look not responsible not just in the mundane public finance sort of way but in the sense of a biblical imperative.
But reforming food aid will create real losers–American farmers, food processors, and shippers. And they are powerful. For now, the director of one of these groups tells me, they are “working behind the scenes.” They know their business better than I; but this is an intriguing statement from a group whose power comes from its ability to catch the public eye.
I am not sanguine about whether the independent NGOs can best the entrenched interests, but I think they should try. It is a test of whether the political movement they represent will ever lead to a more permanent change in how the U.S. government devises policy with respect to developing countries or is merely a historical phenomenon that has already traced its arc.

The economic argument on food aid is pretty clear and easy to understand. Divide the world into food aid recipients, food aid delivery agents (mostly NGOs), and food aid donors. The most efficient form of donor contribution to delivery agents is always cash. The worst these agents might do is to buy the food in the US, have it processed there and shipped on US bottoms. But cash extends their purchase options all the way to buying in local markets for local delivery. This latter option, of course, maximizes the potential development impact of a given dollar of donor assistance. Forcing the “all-US option” on delivery agents and recipients minimizes this impact.
Owen asks whether this is “just” inefficient, or whether it actually does harm. Procuring supplies from thousands of miles away, to arrive well after the disaster has been stabilized and local markets are functioning again, risks doing serious harm to the local economy. I think this potential short-run harm is quite real and we have seen it repeatedly. My Indonesian experience convinces me that this potential harm goes beyond the short-run market effects. More importantly, I am convinced that the ready availability of food aid, from whatever source, undermines the political commitment to domestic agriculture. And that hurts both economic growth and poverty reduction in the long run.

While I fully accept the cogent economic arguments made by Peter, Owen and others–along the lines that one could purchase 2.5 times more food locally rather than deliver food from the US–I’d like to qualify the discussion a little. Local purchases have a lot going for them, but they are not quite as simple as they sound. Indeed, it does not always make economic (rather than political) sense to purchase locally. There are many challenges facing organizations that seek to purchase large volumes of food within a developing country, particularly if at short notice, particularly if the goal is to respond to malnutrition-mediated excess mortality. I’m not making an argument against the use of cash (the theory is largely correct), but I think we need to go in that direction with eyes wide open.
For example, ‘food aid’ is primarily used for emergencies these days, rather than for development or market interventions. In emergencies increased successes in saving lives have resulted in large part from greater attention to the nature and quality of foods delivered in tandem with non-food resources. The idea that ANY food will do is wrong. The treatment of severe malnutrition requires tailored (high cost) therapeutic foods, almost none of which are produced in developing countries. Supplementary foods aimed at preventing widespread nutritional deterioration and/or recuperation among children, pregnant women and other at-risk demographics, are also value-added blended, vitamin and mineral fortified foods (up-dated variants of the ‘corn-soya blend’ so widely used in Title II programming). Again, these are costly, and while there is some local production, there is not nearly enough to meet global, let alone local, demand these days. Add to those vitamin A fortified vegetable oil, iodized salt, sugar, lentils, etc which are common ingredients of a balanced food basket used with the staple grains (be they maize, sorghum, wheat or rice), and you realise that these are not foods found on every market in the dusty streets of towns in Darfur or Afghanistan. A rapidly growing share of the cash budgeted to emergency response is dedicated to these kinds of foods–which are today’s cutting edge food aid commodities….
But there are also issues to be faced when thinking only about the bulkier, traditional staples that will always be needed for crises like droughts across southern Africa (12 to 15 million beneficiaries), tsunami shocks (3 million beneficiaries), North Korea (6.5 million beneficiares). The key to most targeted, primarily emergency responses is optimizing the humanitarian response from the beneficiary’s perspective (rather than the US or EU perspective). As a result there are many challenges with the intent of buying local foods. These include a) food safety (aflatoxins are a serious problem across much of Africa), b) moisture content (making storage and local trasportation losses potentially huge if not controlled), c) the difficulty of actually finding apparent ‘surpluses’ that show up on the books in countries where average consumption is already sub-optimal (as happened in the case of the ‘miraculously disappearing surplus’ in Mali in the mid-1990s), d) additional costs of local micronutrient fortification where needed (wheat flour from the US comes already iron fortified, and agencies like WFP have in the past chosen to call for that commodity specfically to address anemia issues in a country like Armenia), e) additional cost of local transportation insurance (in places like Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan etc, including ‘hazard pay’ for truck drivers and other local staff who would now need to be on the roads and rivers not only for delivery but also for procurement), f) difficulties of multi-stop trans-shipment (needing to warehouse appropriately to ensure that minimum stocks are built up and bagged, since you won’t find 500,000 tons in one location of one province), g) the obvious dangers of carrying cash for local purchase in conflict zones, and even in non-conflict zones, since most countries most needing food aid do not have functional banking systems, h) management of transparency (i.e. dealing with monopolistic private sector companies, i) interpreting dysfunctional markets that do not send clear price signals, j) the importance of a funcitioning local judiciary that can enforce contracts (local purchases would have to be based on large contractual agreements that need legal backing and recourse for them to work); j) the fact that in many recent emergencies buying food locally on the scale required would simply not be possible (North Korea, Darfur, Eritrea, Somalia), etc.
Most of these can be overcome sooner or later (probably later, and not without major investments that should be factored into economic calculations of cost differenticals). But, the underlying point is that few PVOs or other agencies have the needed skills is any one of these domains so we need to be thinking ahead both on the research side and the practical side about what is needed to make a ‘cash option’ a viable one. Right now the debate is dominated by political and theoretical concerns. It will soon have to shift to a ‘demand-driven’ agenda where we have to ask what works best for the at-risk, malnourished beneficiary–and local purchases will not always be the quickest, least costly or most nutritionally appropriate answer.