A decision by Britain to feed the world's hungry 50-year-old biscuits stockpiled from World War II raises questions about the real benefits of international food aid. Dr KEVIN DANAHER, co-author of Betraying the National Interest, which examines US foreign aid policy, argues that the current US food aid program benefits US farmers and powerful agribusiness companies at the expense of poor farmers and the starving in the developing world. SUPERNA AGGARWAL speaks with Dr Danaher about the size and use of the US food aid program.
Dr Danaher: I think that you have to look at it in context. The total aid program is about $15 billion. Out of that, only a few billion is food aid, about $2 or $3 billion. The majority of that comes under the two main titles, title 1 and title 2.
Title 1 works like this: the US government gives a low interest loan to a third world government. They purchase surplus US agricultural commodities which that government is then allowed to sell in the open market. The fact that they are selling it means that poor people are not getting it, so that 55-60% of the total US food aid does not actually get down to poor people because it's being sold on the open market.
The other 40-45% is title 2. That is distributed, usually free of charge, by non-governmental agencies like CARE, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services. They usually do it through churches or schools for feeding programs in refugee camps. So when you look at it, particularly in terms of the amount produced by the US, it's a very small amount of what could be given."
Superna Aggarwal: But it's been argued that countries like the US have a surplus production of agricultural commodities and countries like Somalia have a food deficit, and therefore it is only logical that the US tries to fill this gap.
Dr Danaher: It's very logical on the surface, but you have to look at the numbers. Only about 5% of the food that leaves the United States is in the form of aid; 85% of the food that leaves the United States
is commercial transactions. The bulk of that, about 50 or 55%, is going to wealthy countries to feed animals, which means meat, which means wealthy people are eating it. So this mythology of the US being the world's breadbasket is not true. The US is the world's restaurateur you may say, feeding the wealthy.
The overwhelming majority of people in the world are not affected positively by US exports. In fact, if you look at US subsidies, it's big agribusiness companies like Continental and Cartiers which benefit. What the government does is subsidise these companies so that they can sell their products more cheaply in the third world, like the EC countries do.
That means you get US grain products for example in South Africa; you can land US yellow number 2 corn at a price cheaper than you can buy corn from the next door country, Zimbabwe. The small Zimbabwean corn farmer gets slammed over the head by this low price US product. You can land US rice in West Africa at a price cheaper than the West African small farmer can produce it.
So here we are subsidising the big grain companies so that they can knock the small farmers out of business in the third world. To me that's crazy.
In Haiti in 1986 I witnessed one of the most amazing sights you can imagine, of peasant farmers chasing away a helicopter bringing in US food aid rice. At first we thought, are these people crazy? Well, they weren't crazy. They were local Haitian rice farmers, and they knew that if that US rice hit the local market free or at a subsidised price it would drive down the price they would get for their rice. So it was a direct loss to them to have this rice coming in.
It's a very tricky thing to give food aid. That's why the question we should be asking is not how do we feed all the people, but what political and economic changes do we need to make so that the hungry can feed themselves.
Superna Aggarwal: So you're basically saying that one of the main objectives of the current US food aid program is to boost the sales of US farm commodities in those developing countries?
Dr Danaher: If you look at the historical development of US food aid programs, the whole humanitarian aspect doesn't even get introduced in the initial legislation. The initial legislation is about getting rid of US surplus agricultural commodities, developing markets for US products for example.
You had the US going to places like Nigeria in tropical Africa promoting wheat, giving away free wheat and sending in bakers teaching them how to bake wheat bread and all these kind of things. Well, it's a thing that doesn't grow very well there. In fact there is a whole book written called The Wheat Trap.
You get the middle class in Central America used to eating wheat bread, for example, instead of corn or sorghum or some local crop. And then you've got them hooked, you get them strung out. It's very difficult then for a government when the US starts to say "Okay, now instead of giving it to you for free we're going to start charging for it".
It's difficult for that government to say "No, you take your bread and stuff it, we are going cold turkey". There will be riots in the streets because people are so used to eating those products. So what you see in terms of the historical development of the program is, the priorities were getting rid of US surplus, developing markets, propping up third world allies.
I should add that most of the recipients of US food aid have not been democratic governments. In the 1980s under the Reagan administration, the number one recipient of US food aid money was Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Over $5 billion worth of US food aid credits were used for things like trucks, hardware, weaponry and communications equipment for its military. So it's been more used as geo-strategic weapons than for feeding the hungry.
Superna Aggarwal: But given the geopolitical changes that we've seen over the last few years, do you believe that the objectives of the US food aid program have changed accordingly?
Dr Danaher: They haven't changed yet, but I will predict they're going to change. There is big turmoil in Washington. We have an office in Washington and we
keep an eye on what's going on. For the first time in 50 years, US foreign policy planners, the elite of foreign policy making, have no unifying ideology.
The unifying ideology in the past was the Soviet threat. They might now want to play the humanitarian role, as in Somalia. Now the problem is that you have structural blockages, you have massive interests like big agribusiness companies who are making billions right now, thank you very much. They would rather not have it changed, so it's a question of whether the public and some well-meaning officials in Washington get mad enough to break the log jam.
[This is the transcript of a Dispatches program prepared by Public Radio News Services.]