Niger is a case study for this dynamic. Despite a record harvest in the fall, millions of families are again facing food shortages because the food crisis last year forced them to sell off livestock and go into debt to stay alive. By this spring millions of villagers had already exhausted their food stocks. Down the road from the feeding center, a village elder said that in the aftermath of the shortages last year, grain prices are already double what they normally were at this time. "We don't have any stored-up food," he said, displaying a nearly empty grain bin.
When asked why they had not given more food aid in the face of the oncoming crisis, American and European officials in Niger say that food aid should only be a last resort. It is far more effective, they said, to give money for long-term development.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric does not reflect reality. Foreign aid from rich nations goes almost entirely to military support or disaster relief. Little attention is paid to the aid programs that would help Africans head off catastrophe. In the crucial months before a hunger crisis peaks, food aid is almost completely ignored.
Emergency relief often seems to benefit the donors more that the beneficiaries. As with most things in the twisted world of international famine relief, the term "food aid" itself is duplicitous. The United States, for instance, gives by far the most food aid of any country. But that's not quite what it seems. While most of the world gives aid agencies cash that they use to buy food locally, 99 percent of the food aid provided by the U.S. is purchased from American farmers at market prices and is then shipped overseas on U.S.-registered vessels. (The vast majority of container ships are registered in countries like Liberia and Panama; the U.S.-registered container ships used in the feeding program are almost an anachronism, kept alive in part because of this aid program.)
By general consensus, U.S. food aid is inefficient and overpriced, and can be damaging to the African economy. The Financial Times called the American type of assistance "a subsidy programme for rich world farmers," such as American agro-giants Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, based in Paris, this kind of direct food aid can take five months or more to arrive and costs 50 percent more than if the assistance had been given as cash used to buy food locally; also, it tends to undercut local markets. If the assistance had been provided as cash, it would have added $750 million to the approximately $4 billion in food aid already donated by rich countries.
Under increasing pressure to reform its food-only aid approach, last year the Bush administration tried to get Congress to pass legislation allowing for one-fourth of American emergency assistance to be delivered in cash instead of as processed crop purchases. Andrew Natsios, former head of the USAID, argued passionately for the legislation, saying that the U.S. would be able to provide twice as much food for the same money because of the savings on transportation alone.
But even with the administration behind it, the proposal went nowhere. It was killed by agribusiness, the shipping industry and the farm-state congressmen who control food aid. The chairmen of the committees, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., received nearly $1 million and $500,000, respectively, from agricultural interests. Ironically, they had lobbying assistance not only from agribusiness giants and shipping companies, but also from charity aid agencies such as Catholic Relief Services and CARE. Why? Because the aid agencies sell much of the food they receive to pay for other programs such as healthcare and development assistance that they provide to impoverished nations. Once food aid goes from being backed by special interests and becomes a normal budget line item, it is that much likelier Congress will cut it.
It was a "coalition of self-interest," said Ed Fox, the head of legislative affairs for USAID.
Jeffery Sachs, the eminent economist who heads Columbia University's Earth Institute, echoes the views of many experts globally who believe the money is there to break the cycle of hunger in Africa, but that the funds are misdirected. "Africa alone in the world lives and dies on food aid because its agriculture is broken, and the donors have contributed to that," he said. The first step, according to Sachs, is to provide food aid before people start starving, and to give them the resources to help them provide for themselves.
The world's richest countries could prevent these recurrent crises with aid directed toward helping the poor grow the food they need to live, by providing subsidized seed, fertilizer and irrigation. "They say we are against subsidies, we are for the market approach. It's absurd, it's cruel, and it's the most inept misapplication that I've seen. These people do not know what they are doing on the ground, and it's a disgrace," said Sachs.
Another key factor, much neglected, is education, especially for women. Literacy rates in Niger are among the lowest in the world. More than half of girls have had no school; only 9.4 percent of women are literate. "If girls go to school, they will have less children, better jobs, and less disease," said Carol Añonuevo, a senior researcher at the UNESCO Institute of Education who is conducting a study of sub-Saharan Africa.
Another development specialist, Peter Timmer, notes that Africa has never received the kind of long-term agricultural development assistance that helped reduce poverty in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. "Neither the donors nor the countries themselves have tried that kind of massive investment in rural economies," said Timmer, who taught development economics for two decades at Harvard. While the U.S. spends hundreds of millions on emergency food aid in Africa, it only devotes a small fraction of that to long-term development. "That's a crazy set of priorities," he said.
What is needed is a mix of both emergency aid -- to feed people before they become acutely malnourished -- and long-term agricultural development assistance, so they can provide for themselves. What does long-term development look like? Here's one case study: The Red Cross gave small cash grants to 5,000 households in 88 villages. The women to whom the money was given used it to buy food, pay off debts and buy livestock and clothes. In one village, the women pooled their money to buy an ambulance to get to the nearest health center, which was otherwise a several hours' walk through the desert. The "ambulance" was a donkey cart. At least it did what it was supposed to do.
About the writer
Samuel Loewenberg is a journalist who writes on politics and public health. He visited Niger in March on a trip sponsored by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
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