[AODA members] [Fwd: [hen-l] NY Times Article: Bush Administration Gains Support for New Approach on Food Aid]

Sun Aug 19 21:31:53 PDT 2007

This was posted to HEN in April but is of significance to the CARE 
discussion -
Stacia

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[hen-l] NY Times Article: Bush Administration Gains Support 
for New Approach on Food Aid
Date: 	Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:29:54 -0400
From: 	Dyer, Christina <Cdyer at uwnyc.org>
Reply-To: 	ADA Dietetic Practice Group <hen-l at list.cornell.edu>
To: 	Hen-L (E-mail) <hen-l at cornell.edu>, GNYHEN at yahoogroups. com 
(E-mail) <GNYHEN at yahoogroups.com>

Article of interest regarding global food aid policies in this Sunday NY 
Times.

Christina L. Dyer, MS, RD
Assistant Director
Hunger Prevention & Nutrition Assistance Program
United Way of NYC
212-251-4117
cdyer at uwnyc.org

****************************************************************************************** 

April 22, 2007
*Bush Administration Gains Support for New Approach on Food Aid *
By_ __CELIA W. DUGGER 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/celia_w_dugger/index.html?inline=nyt-per>_ 

KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 19 --- Waiters in white aprons maneuvered 
through a noisy cocktail party here Tuesday evening, offering heaping 
platters of jumbo shrimp, lamb chops and crab-stuffed mushrooms to a 
crowd of people in town for an annual food aid conference dedicated to 
ending world hunger.

As shipping and agribusiness executives, charitable workers, lobbyists 
and federal employees mingled at Morton's steakhouse, Charles Worledge, 
who works for the Long Island-based Sealift Inc., a major shipper of 
American food to the hungry, offered an insight essential to 
understanding the politics of food aid.

"I thought this was a charity," he explained during the party, for which 
another shipping company played host. "It's not. It's a business."

It was here in Kansas City, at the 2005 food aid conference, that the 
Bush administration pushed for a fundamental change in food aid that 
would have diminished profits to domestic agribusiness and shipping 
companies. It proposed allowing a quarter of the Food for Peace budget 
to be used to buy food in poor countries near hunger crises, rather than 
buying only American-grown food that had to be shipped across oceans.

And Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns spoke at the conference on 
Wednesday to again make the administration's case for the same idea, 
contending that such a policy would speed delivery, improve efficiency 
and save many lives.

Congress in each of the past two years killed the proposal, which was 
opposed by agribusiness and shipping interests who stood to lose 
business, even as it won support from liberal Democrats like 
Representatives_ Barney Frank 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/barney_frank/index.html?inline=nyt-per>_ 
of Massachusetts and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon --- generally not a 
subset of lawmakers found in the president's corner.

But there are signs that the frozen politics of the issue are beginning 
to thaw, especially as evidence of flaws in the current aid system mounts.

A_ Government Accountability Office 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/government_accountability_office/index.html?inline=nyt-org>_ 
report released on the eve of this conference described in stark detail 
a system rife with inefficiencies: the amount of food shipped over the 
past five years has fallen by half as shipping and other logistical 
costs have soared. Only a little more than a third of federal food aid 
spending actually buys food. The United States feeds about 70 million 
people a year now instead of the more than 100 million it fed five years 
ago.

And experts worry that the food aid budget will feed even fewer of the 
world's 850 million hungry people as soaring demand for corn to make 
ethanol drives up the cost of that staple, a mainstay of food aid programs.

This year, some farm state lawmakers are for the first time considering 
backing a pilot program to test buying food overseas. Representative Jo 
Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican on the Agricultural Subcommittee of 
the House Appropriations Committee, opposes major changes in food aid, 
but, she said, "doing a small demonstration is fine with me."

"If it turns out to work better in some places than others," she said, 
"I don't have a big problem with that."
And some influential supporters of the administration's more ambitious 
proposal, contained in the farm bill, are speaking out. Former 
President_ Bill Clinton 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per>_ 
recently said at a fund-raiser for Bread for the World, a Christian 
group that lobbies on hunger issues, that it was to Mr. Bush's 
"everlasting credit" that he had proposed buying food aid in poor 
countries. Such a policy had never crossed his mind when he was 
president, Mr. Clinton said, but he thought it was a great way to help 
farmers in Africa and buy food more efficiently.

And while an alliance of 15 nonprofit groups involved in food aid has 
endorsed only a pilot program for local purchase, Catholic Relief 
Services, which has a million donors and links with 13,000 parishes, has 
embraced the administration's proposal. Addressing hundreds of people 
assembled at the conference, Ken Hackett, president of the agency, which 
is a major player in food aid, declared, "C.R.S. supports the 
administration's request for greater flexibility through local purchase."

At perhaps no time since the government's food aid program was created 
during the Eisenhower administration over a half century ago has there 
been more ferment about its future among scholars, politicians and 
advocates for the poor.

The curious mix of altruistic and self-interested motivations that 
animate American food aid spring from its origins. Early in the 1950s, 
the government was the farmer's buyer of last resort when commodity 
prices fell, and as a result it sat on mountains of grain. Public Law 
480 and the Food for Peace program, adopted in 1954, provided a way to 
dispose of the surplus grain, which was costly to store, and at the same 
time feed the world's hungry people. The law mandated that food for the 
program be grown domestically.

Over the years, the farm programs evolved, and the government shifted to 
buying virtually all food on the open market, but the requirement that 
it be grown in the United States never changed. In recent years, the 
United States has bought more than half the food for its aid programs 
from just four agribusinesses and their subsidiaries: Archer Daniels 
Midland, Cargill, Bunge and Cal Western Packaging, according to the 
Agriculture Department.

Some researchers and advocates say it is time to rethink the American 
approach to fighting world hunger.
"Are we committed to eradicating hunger because it's feasible, not 
terribly expensive and our moral obligation as the richest society in 
human history?" asked Christopher B. Barrett, a_ Cornell University 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cornell_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>_ 
economist and the co-author of "Food Aid After Fifty Years." "Or are we 
just trying to placate a few agribusiness, shipping and NGO 
constituencies with a handout?" referring to nongovernmental organizations.

But some in Congress, as well as lobbyists for interest groups that 
benefit from food aid, warn that untying aid from requirements that the 
food be grown in America and mostly shipped on American-flagged vessels 
would shatter the political coalition that has sustained the program for 
decades and made the United States the world's largest food aid donor. 
They also warn that cash sent to poor countries can be misused or 
stolen, and that a mismanaged program to buy food in poor countries 
could drive up food prices.

Still, even here at the food aid conference organized by the Department 
of Agriculture and the_ Agency for International Development 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/agency_for_international_development/index.html?inline=nyt-org>_, 
some participants were talking up approaches that would sound heretical 
to old-line champions of food aid.

Marv Baldwin, president of the Foods Resource Bank, a Christian 
nonprofit group dedicated to fighting hunger, described how more than a 
thousand farmers have turned American-style food aid on its head.

They are raising farm animals and growing crops on some 7,000 acres 
across America. They donate their land, labor and the use of their 
equipment, and church groups help raise cash for fuel and fertilizer. 
But instead of shipping the crops and animals to poor lands to feed the 
hungry, the farmers sell them in the United States. The Foods Resource 
Bank then spends the money from those sales in developing countries to 
buy seeds, fertilizer, tools and other goods poor farmers say they need 
to grow food for their families.

Vernon Sloan, 81, used to donate and ship corn he grew on his 200- acre 
farm in Ohio to Haiti, Liberia and Angola to feed the hungry. But after 
years of working with the Foods Resource Bank, he said in an interview, 
he concluded that it was more practical to sell the crops here, avoid 
the huge shipping expense and use the proceeds to help farmers in Africa 
support themselves. "It's what's needed there," he said, "rather than 
what we think they need."

_Copyright 2007 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>__ The New 
York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>_

-- 

Stacia Nordin, RD
Registered Dietitian
School Health & Nutrition Advisor
Basic Education, Ministry of Education

GTZ (German Technical Cooperation):
(Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer, Technische Zusammenarbeit) GmbH
Box 31131, Lilongwe, Malawi
www.gtz.de 
t: +265 1-755-000
f: +265 1-755-000

Personal:
Kristof, Khalidwe & Stacia Nordin
Consultants, Sustainable Food and Nutrition Security
Crossroads Post Dot Net 
x-124, Lilongwe, Malawi
nordin at eomw.net 
www.NeverEndingFood.org
t: +265 1-707-213
c: +265 9-333-073 (Stacia)
c: +265 9-926-153 (Kristof)
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