[Analysis] The politics of food aid

from ISN

Underneath the high prices, there is the longer term failure of development policy as imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

for Diplomatic Courier

For years, even decades, they have been sounding the alarm on what the international community has only recently recognized as a food crisis. But the crisis, they say, is not new. In fact, it has been decades in the making. And they would know: they are farmers. Hailing from Iowan cornfields to the Niger delta, attuned to the earth's subtle signs and currents in the atmosphere, they have been urging us to listen too.

Now, as grain prices surge to unprecedented levels and food riots flash across the evening news broadcast, the world is starting to take notice. Dena Hoff, Vice President of the National Family Farm Coalition, speaking from her Montana farm, said,"It's not just an issue for farmers - it's an issue for everyone who eats."

But the farmers charge that the solutions offered up by the G8 and its partners in the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization fail to address the larger problems that brought about the food crisis in the first place. How, for instance, did once self-sufficient agricultural economies wind up hinged to the fluctuations of commodity screens halfway across the globe?

To unravel the forces that brought us to this point, you have to trace a staggering web of international policies back about a half-century. In documenting its history, scholar Raj Patel came to the conclusion that the food crisis is not so much about food as it is about gaping global inequities. "The reason people go hungry is not for a shortage of food," he said in an interview. "We have enough food to feed everyone. The reason people go hungry is that they are poor."

Patel has long been involved in the politics of food. A former employee of international institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, he now spends most of his time publicly criticizing their policies. His book Stuffed and Starved is based on what appears, at first glance, a rather simple observation: roughly the same number of people is hungry and malnourished as those who are, as he puts it, stuffed. In the past, obesity was associated with wealth, but it is ever more apparent that its modern reincarnation is, like hunger, a product of poverty.

Hunger is not new. While famines occasionally make front page news, the condition of chronic hunger kills an estimated 30 to 50 million a year - roughly three times the annual death toll incurred during World War II. About 6.5 million of the deaths are children—a child dies every five seconds. While G8 leaders and network talking heads have blamed recent food price spikes on everything from the Chinese appetite for meat to biofuels, few have inquired beyond what Patel sees as symptoms of a far deeper problem, one that links the fate of farmers in countries many Americans could not find on a map to technicalities of the US Farm Bill that glides through Congress every few years.

"Underneath the high prices, there is the longer term failure of development policy as imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund," Patel said.

You could say the story begins, ironically enough, with food aid. "It's important to understand how food aid came about," Patel said. "During the second world war, the US was exporting most of its surplus product to Europe. Europe was one big theater of war - there wasn't much farming going on. But after the war, the European nations wanted to be able to grow their own food. So the US found itself with a huge stockpile of food with no obvious market."

Around this time, Churchill was warning of the Iron Curtain descending over Europe, and the US was eager to counter Soviet influence. The US decided to tackle two problems at once: if there was no market for food surplus, the US would create one, and simultaneously, it would use food aid as a political tactic. "They figured that the best way to get rid of the food stock would be to send it to countries that were strategically important in the war on communism," Patel said.

In 1954, President Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Trade Development Assistance Act, or PL480, into law. The act, he said, would "lay the basis for a permanent expansion of our exports of agricultural products with lasting benefits to ourselves and peoples of other lands." From then on, the trajectory of food aid was much the same as that of US foreign policy. During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the bulk of the food aid went to East Asia, while in the 1970s, the focus shifted to the Middle East. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, former members of the USSR became prime recipients.

According to USAID, since 1954, the US has shipped 106 million metric tonnes of food to foreign countries. If the food were put into trucks each carrying 500 110-pound bags, the trucks would stretch around the equator.

This is not a story of scarcity, Patel insists. It is one of abundance.

"The net effect of shipping food halfway round the world is that farmers who are struggling to make ends meet in hunger-affected regions suddenly find themselves having to compete with food that is free," he said.

The politics of aid become particularly murky in cases of "tied aid" - aid that mandates where and how it can be used. While countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom have begun to shift away from tied aid, the US, France, Germany and Japan remain firmly committed to it. Tied aid manifests in development projects contingent on the purchase of John Deere tractors, in the billions of dollars to fight AIDS in Africa sent along with the condition that countries purchase US-manufactured antiretroviral drugs as opposed to their cheaper Brazilian, Indian, or South African counterparts.

Last Thursday, with the release of its annual report on the Least Developed Countries, the United Nations warned that mounting food prices could overturn the modest advances of the past few years, forcing hundreds of millions more into poverty. "The bigger food import bills will widen further the already high trade deficits of the Least Developed Countries. This will affect all food-importing Least Developed Countries, and the balance-of-payment impact will be accentuated as countries also have to deal with rising energy prices," the report said.

The solution, the report contends, lies in the autonomy of recipient countries to determine where foreign aid should go and how it can best be used. Conditions attached to the incoming money are currently so inflexible that, the report says, "Governments are hindered from tailoring development plans that meet local and national conditions."

Haiti is a particularly stark example of the lethal mix of foreign intervention and food politics. Twenty-five years back, Haiti’s abundant rice fields fed its people. Today, 75 percent of Haiti's rice is imported from the US. The small nation of less than 10 million people ranks as the world’s third largest importer of US rice. After a military coup toppled the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early 1990s, the US support of Aristide’s reinstating was contingent on his acceptance of a structural readjustment and loan repayment plan established by the World Bank. The plan essentially turned the one-time food-exporting nation into a food-importing one.

But farmers, failed by governments and foreign aid, are beginning to take matters into their own hands. Via Campesina is a worldwide network of small-scale farmers whose constituents number in the millions and are dispersed from South Korea to Mali. Three weeks ago, at an international conference in Jakarta, they urged world leaders to prioritize capacity-building for farmers above the demands of international agribusiness. "The solution to the global food crisis is to strengthen the domestic market and the capacity of family farmers to produce food for their own needs," Paul Nicholson of Via Campesina said at a press conference.

It is easy and readily accepted logic that if massive subsidies are not good for them, they must be good for us - necessary for the survival of American farmers. But Dena Hoff of the National Family Farm Coalition, the US chapter of Via Campesina, rebukes this line of thought, saying US trade policies are no more designed to help the small-scale farmers of this country than their counterparts overseas. "Corporate agribusiness is not doing anything for working farmers," she said. "We would love to get paid by the market as opposed to government subsidies, but when a few large agribusiness conglomerates can undercut family farms, that's impossible.

"The impact of policies here impact farmers across the world," she continued. “As long as the developed world continues to dump surplus food onto their markets, they have no chance of creating a sustainable system of their own.”

Marc Cohen, Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, echoes Hoff, saying the key lies in local agriculture, as 75 percent of food-insecure people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. He explained, "In low-income countries, governments currently devote an average of less than five percent of their budgets to agriculture, compared to 19 percent for the military. Official development assistance to agriculture from all donors stands at half the level of 25 years ago."

Cohen also insists on the importance of food aid, noting that "60 percent of all food aid is emergency aid."

Link to full article. May expire in future.