Posted on 08/16/2007 6:26:59 PM PDT by decimon
NAIROBI, Kenya - A humanitarian group has turned down $46 million worth of U.S. food aid, arguing that the way the American government distributes its help hurts poor farmers.
CARE said wheat donated by the U.S. government and sold by charities to finance anti-poverty programs results in low-priced crops being dumped on local markets and small-scale growers cannot compete.
Other experts said they share CARE's concern, but stressed that food donations are sometimes needed when a natural disaster harms a local area's agriculture, such as the flooding that North Korea says has devastated vast tracts of its farmland.
The Atlanta-based CARE agreed with that view. "We are not against emergency food aid for things like drought and famine," spokeswoman Alina Labrada said Thursday.
But, she added, the donation of wheat and other crops does not help in regions where people consistently go hungry because local farming has been weakened by international competition. "They are being hurt instead of helped by this mechanism," she said.
Labrada said such areas would be helped more if the U.S. and other donors gave cash that could be spent on locally produced crops, which would stimulate agricultural expansion.
The United States Agency for International Development said Thursday that its experts carry out detailed assessments to try to ensure that commodities do not disrupt local production. Jim Kunder, USAID's acting deputy adminstrator, said $375 million is the approximate average cash value of commodities that are donated for sale.
CARE decided in 2005 to phase out accepting grain donations within four years, but the move is gaining new attention because of the current debate in the U.S. Congress over the Farm Bill, which is reauthorized every five years.
"This is a crucial time. It will set policy for the next five years," Labrada said.
The U.S. farm sector and the maritime industry are the biggest supporters of the current system. The program soaks up surplus farm production, and shippers get lucrative contracts to transport donated grain for sale in needy regions.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office published a study in April saying that emergency American food aid takes an average of 4.5 months to arrive and that legal requirements mean two-thirds of the money spent by the government on food aid goes for packing and shipping.
Washington spends an average of $2 billion on food aid programs a year, mostly funneling the help through the United Nations' World Food Program. According to some aid groups, if the U.S. gave its aid in cash rather than food, it could support about twice as many people.
In the last two farm bills, the U.S. administration called for a partial shift to cash donations instead of grain, but that was voted down by farm supporters.
According to the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development, the U.S. administration's proposals for future farm spending call for 25 percent of the food aid budget to be in cash.
The European Union has spoken out strongly against U.S. food aid policy in the Word Trade Organization, accusing Washington of using such programs to skirt rules limiting agriculture subsidies.
Christian Rasmussen, at the EU's agriculture directorate in Brussels, Belgium, said the bloc had replaced food aid with cash to ensure help gets to poor countries more quickly.
"It ensures a correct diet, because you also try to buy the proper products. It's also very cost effective because you can buy the food close to the market, unlike in the U.S. case," he said.
Like aid groups, African farmers are divided.
Ousmane Ndiaye, director of the farmer and rural worker group in the West African nation of Senegal, said dumping cheap crops undermines local agriculture.
"We have the resources that we need to nourish our population. We have land. We have men and women with the capacity to do it," he said. "We have millet here. But instead of buying the millet that comes from the middle of Senegal, some people prefer to buy sorghum from foreign countries."
In neighboring Mali, however, the secretary-general of the farmers association said foreign aid helps Malians get crops that aren't produced locally.
"We farm wheat in the north of Mali, around Timbuktu. But that's not enough for all the flour we need for bread," said Fousseyni Traore. He said Mali could never produce enough wheat because its southern areas are too wet and tropical.
The Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said that in 2001, the sale of donated American grain provided 30 percent of U.S. aid groups' gross revenues, totaling $1.5 billion.
Tom Getman, executive director for international relations at the aid group World Vision, said he shared CARE's concern about the system but didn't want to turn away any kind of aid.
World Vision also is pushing to get more cash donations and less food, "because we've all gotten more and more anxious about how much it costs to do the shipping and the mixed results on the ground," Getman said.
"But there is going to be a continuing need, like in (North) Korea right now, where we've got to have food available for emergency situations. So it's just finding the balance that is so tough."
___
Associated Press writers Alexander Higgins and Frank Jordans in Geneva and Heidi Vogt in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.
There is a simple solution to this: end farm subsidies.
It is insane that our taxes pay farmers to raise too much grain, which we then buy back, then pay shippers to ship, to send to countries who are saying, “Hey, guys, you’re hurting OUR farmers”.
All "lucrative" means in the context is that they get paid to haul it, which should always be the case.
Clue, guys, CAPITALISM WORKS, as does CHARITY. They can work hand in glove to make things better for more people.
Withholding free food from the market to "protect the price of local crops" results in malnutrition, deprivation, poverty, death, injury, etc. Always did. Always will.
To hunters and gatherers, wheat farming must certainly have seemed like getting free food.
Your arguments might make sense with regard to "manufactured products" but not with food. It is, as it turns out, quite fungible, and additional food will always increase the wealth of the community. Whether you grow it locally, or it's dumped by Canada, or Australia, or the United States, or you trade for it, it increases community wealth, with or without the stimulus of famine.
the bottom line is the united nations is holding out for more extortion money from CARE.
These places don’t have transportation systems to move perishable foods or anything else around effectively. They don’t have exporters with established markets. The locals don’t grow their food with the needed documented requirements so that it can be exported knowing it is safe and meets the standards of the importer. Also many of the foods they grow are very culturally specific and aren’t attractive to other possible buyers.
It is cheaper then can be made with locally produced cloth but it is not free.
Here's the deal, more stuff is good, less stuff is not good. Anything that violates the integrity of that belief is BS.
I am sorry that you are wrong. You could find many examples of that not being the case in American society if you bothered to look.
You could begin with welfare.
There's a decided absence of kwakishor ridden little kids crowding the sidewalks in this country.
This is barely 70 years after Francis Perkins fostered research into protein deficiency in the diet of Southern children.
Up until that time it was thought the problem was hereditary ~ that poor Southern whites were genetically different from everyone else.
A little bit of "welfare" went a long way when that problem was defeated.
Now, concerning the clothing, Gandhi proposed that Indian people should make their own cloth and not buy it from mills in England. That's where his little hand-held thread spinner comes from in the Congress Party's logo.
Obviously the mills in England could always make cloth cheaper than householders in India ~ so economically it was not a sound idea, and very akin to the thoughts the Luddites had regarding mass milling.
The fostering of such ideas made Congress Party popular because they could "spin" everything into a story about how this would enable India to become free from England. In the end it fostered a continuation of and a deepening of the poverty that'd plagued India for the last thousand years.
In recent times Indians have gotten a lot smarter and now they seek to have India do or grow those things which it does well and that other people cannot, and then trade those things for stuff they don't already have.
There are now thousands of examples of the value of trade so we don't need to get into it.
But, back to the tailors. Kenya is simply not a great place to manufacturer cloth. Still, people in Kenya need clothing. The least cost way to get good clothing is to take donations from the wealthier parts of the world, and then recut and tailor them.
Absent those donations those local tailors would have little to do ~ Kenyans have been chronically short of cloth for millenia.
Is that a false rumor?
From the article: “Other experts said they share CARE’s concern, but stressed that food donations are sometimes needed when a natural disaster harms a local area’s agriculture, such as the flooding that North Korea says has devastated vast tracts of its farmland.
The Atlanta-based CARE agreed with that view. “We are not against emergency food aid for things like drought and famine,” spokeswoman Alina Labrada said Thursday.”
The CARE administrator echoes your idea about famines and disasters.
it clearly said that the problem is different in a famine situation where local agriculture is devestated. In that case food aid is nessecary
It’s never different any time ~ we are discussing food, not tinkertoys.
you kind of missed Gandhi’s point about not buying cloth from the British. the economics were not his concern. They were protesting the one-sided British trade policies with India.
Sometimes you have to read the whole post.
I may not be remembering the book exactly but the basic idea was that by sending people to teach the poor farmers HOW to farm better, more could be accomplished and they would become self sufficient.
The way things stand now these countries are in a circle that will never end.
I believe it has been said best with this statement: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". I know this is an old and often quoted statement but it remains true.
What happens if you feed 100 starving people who live in an area of the world where food crops will not grow well?. They will have more children and more free food will be needed. At what point will the demand exceed the supply?. Is it better for 1000 to starve than 100?. I wish I knew the answer.
Sometimes you have to read the whole post.
And the whole article.
;-)
The point is that outside of famine or disaster they were of the erroneous belief that free food was harmful.
The point is that outside of famine or disaster they were of the erroneous belief that free food was harmful.
Growing up in a liberal hell hole (Detroit), I can attest that hand outs (aka a welfare society) are very damned harmful.
If you don’t believe me, move there. And good luck to you.
There’s nothing wrong with a “Hand Up,” in other words helping someone back onto their feet. A “Hand Out” destroys self sufficiency.
It's hardly a handout.
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