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December 09, 2005
Natsios Vows to Pursue Food Aid Reform
Posted by Lawrence MacDonald at 04:05 PM
Andrew Natsios vowed Friday to continue to push for reform of U.S. food aid after his departure as the head of USAID next month. In a keynote address to some 200 relief and development specialists at a CGD event (Can Food Aid Be a More Effective Development Tool?), he described reform of U.S. food aid as a "moral issue" that could save thousands of lives every year. "If people think this issue is going away they are wrong," he said.
Natsios’s proposal to make $300 million worth of U.S. food aid (about 25% of the budget) available as cash that could be used to buy food in developing countries met a firestorm of opposition (see Politics of Food Aid ). He said on Friday that influential senators initially told him they would support such a change, which would make U.S. aid more flexible and efficient, but that they backed down under pressure from groups that support the status quo, including NGOs.
The requirement that U.S. food aid be grown in the U.S. and shipped in U.S. vessels means it often arrives too late to be helpful, he said. And sometimes it works against development. In Afghanistan, he said, U.S. food shipments undercut the market for locally grown wheat on the eve of a bumper harvest that resulted from new seeds introduced with U.S. assistance. Wheat rotted in the fields and the next year farmers turned to opium poppies instead, he said.
Agricultural lobbies, the U.S. shipping industry, and some humanitarian NGOs have opposed reform. Other NGOs, including Oxfam, have supported it.
Natsios announced last week that he was retiring from USAID to become a professor of diplomacy and an advisor on international development at Georgetown University.
On Friday he said it was important for relief and development workers to have access to both cash for local food purchases and to food aid in kind, so that they could use the most appropriate tool depending upon the circumstances.
The agriculture bill that eventually passed included a line scolding the administration for suggesting reform: “The conferees further admonish the Executive Branch to refrain from proposals which place at risk a carefully balanced coalition of interests which have served the interests of international food assistance programs well for more than fifty years,” it said (hat tip to Gawain Kripke at Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair Campaign)
Natsios vowed Friday that the proposed reform nonetheless would be included in the 2007 budget. Stay tuned!
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Comments
The very intersting and useful discussion of food aid concentrated almost entirely on food aid policy, and very little on food aid implementation, whether is support of development, for relief in emergencies or both. I would very much like the opportunity to hear experts from the field talk about the issues in implementing food aid: delivery, distribution, allocation, relations with host governments, security concerns, use of monetization proceeds, etc.
Posted by: Max Goldensohn at December 10, 2005 12:00 PM
At the briefing, I found Patrick Webb's comments to be key points to remember as we go forward with ensuring that food aid is effective. He reminded the audience and the other panelists that, while the current system is not perfect, local procurement has its own set of challenges, including possible negative impacts on local economies, food safety, nutritional quality of foods, and internal transport, handling and storage, not to mention monopolistic pricing tendencies of local traders. The bottom line is that operational PVO's and WFP should be an integral part of any suggested changes in the current system, and the nutritional needs of the beneficiaries should come first. I found the session to be a useful first step in moving us forward but I think we need to hear more from the operational agencies about what works well in the current system. Let's separate the wheat from the chaff, not burn down the barn!
Posted by: Margaret Zeigler at December 12, 2005 12:04 PM
Materials from Friday's event including Peter Timmer's CGD Note Food Aid: Doing Well By Doing Good and PowerPoint presentations by John Hoddinott and Patrick Webb are now available on the events page Can Food Aid Be A More Effective Development Tool? The full event transcript and video will be added as they become available in the next few days.
Posted by: Sarah Dean at December 12, 2005 04:23 PM
U.S. food aid,, which represents 57 percent of world food aid deliveries, is particularly inefficient, most notably because government policy prioritizes shipping food from the U.S. at high expense rather than providing cash for purchase of food in the affected countries or their neighbors. The interruption of river traffic on the Mississippi, the export channel for most U.S. grain, has further highlighted the importance of having flexibility to resort to other sources.
Posted by: First aid nurse at April 21, 2006 07:20 AM