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Charity says U.S. food aid hurts poor
Associated Press ^ | Aug. 16, 2007 | KATHARINE HOURELD

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.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: africa; care; charity; hunger
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To: BwanaNdege

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”.


21 posted on 08/16/2007 6:54:55 PM PDT by tbw2 (Science fiction with real science - "Humanity's Edge" by Tamara Wilhite)
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To: hinckley buzzard
"Lucrative contracts" ~ does someone think "contracts" to ship stuff around should not be at least "remunerative"?

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.

22 posted on 08/16/2007 6:55:19 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: DB
Nothing is really ever "free". The very secret of agriculture as the foundation of all civilization is that it increased food production many times higher than could be done by "gathering" alone.

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.

23 posted on 08/16/2007 7:01:18 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: decimon

the bottom line is the united nations is holding out for more extortion money from CARE.


24 posted on 08/16/2007 7:03:30 PM PDT by JohnLongIsland
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To: muawiyah

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.


25 posted on 08/16/2007 7:17:04 PM PDT by DB
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To: muawiyah
The clothing is not free and is not put in the hands of the tailors.

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.

26 posted on 08/16/2007 7:41:02 PM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (A good marriage is like a casserole, only those responsible for it really know what goes into it.)
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To: Harmless Teddy Bear
Hmm ~ food welfare ~ like doughnuts eh?!

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.

27 posted on 08/16/2007 8:01:14 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: DB
I've heard that Kenya and a couple of other places in Africa grow great MJ.

Is that a false rumor?

28 posted on 08/16/2007 8:02:48 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: DB

Check this:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www3.grips.ac.jp/~yamanota/Kenya%252090.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www3.grips.ac.jp/~yamanota/Milk%2520Trading%2520in%2520Kenya.htm&h=960&w=1280&sz=478&hl=en&start=8&um=1&tbnid=07lO98pMgqDWoM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkenya%2Btrucks%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN


29 posted on 08/16/2007 8:05:30 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah
I think the CARE administrator who came up with that argument should be dealt with roughly and sent away.

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.

30 posted on 08/16/2007 8:21:42 PM PDT by Grizzled Bear ("Does not play well with others.")
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To: muawiyah

it clearly said that the problem is different in a famine situation where local agriculture is devestated. In that case food aid is nessecary


31 posted on 08/16/2007 8:32:54 PM PDT by ChurtleDawg (kill em all)
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To: ChurtleDawg

It’s never different any time ~ we are discussing food, not tinkertoys.


32 posted on 08/16/2007 8:43:17 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah

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.


33 posted on 08/16/2007 8:48:19 PM PDT by ChurtleDawg (kill em all)
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To: ChurtleDawg
I believe I said: "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." ~ and CONGRESS PARTY is Gandhi and Nehru and the whole spinning wheel crowd.

Sometimes you have to read the whole post.

34 posted on 08/17/2007 5:00:39 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: decimon
A book, "The Ugly American" outlined this problem and had the solution to it. This book was written in the 1950s I believe, or early 1960s. Forget the author, however, it envolved sending help in the way of expertise and experience, by sending the ugly American in to teach people how to fend for themselves.

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.

35 posted on 08/17/2007 6:16:11 AM PDT by calex59
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To: DB

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.


36 posted on 08/17/2007 7:04:17 AM PDT by seemoAR (Absolute power corrupts absolutely)
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To: muawiyah; ChurtleDawg
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.”

Sometimes you have to read the whole post.


And the whole article.

;-)

37 posted on 08/17/2007 5:01:20 PM PDT by Grizzled Bear ("Does not play well with others.")
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To: Grizzled Bear
Yeah, read the whole article.

The point is that outside of famine or disaster they were of the erroneous belief that free food was harmful.

38 posted on 08/17/2007 5:39:22 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah

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.


39 posted on 08/17/2007 5:45:21 PM PDT by Grizzled Bear ("Does not play well with others.")
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To: Grizzled Bear
Food is not intrinsically evil nor harmful.

It's hardly a handout.

40 posted on 08/17/2007 5:49:24 PM PDT by muawiyah
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