In the midst of the drought still effect­ing Ethiopia, Oxfam is call­ing on the US gov­ern­ment to reform food aid.

Oxfam and many other advo­cates say that US food aid would be more effi­cient if it would buy food locally to the aid recip­i­ents. Instead, US law requires the food aid to be bought in Amer­ica, then hav­ing to ship the food half way across the world. This errent law both makes for expen­sive trans­porta­tion costs and less ben­e­fit to the economies of the devel­op­ing world.

From this ABC News piece, reporter Dana Hugees illis­trates the prob­lem further.

A hun­gry Ethiopia gets 70 per­cent of its aid from the U.S., but accord­ing to a new report by the aid orga­ni­za­tion Oxfam Inter­na­tional, that help comes at a cost.

U.S. law requires that food aid money be spent on food grown in the U.S., at least half of it must be packed in the U.S. and most of it must be trans­ported in U.S. ships. The Oxfam report, “Band Aids and Beyond,” claims that is far more expen­sive and time con­sum­ing than buy­ing food in the region.

“For roughly $1 spent on aid, the U.S. tax­payer is pay­ing $2 to get it here,” said Car­olyn Gluck, an Oxfam spokeswoman.

Amer­i­can aid poli­cies also under­mine long-term devel­op­ment strate­gies that could break the cycle of drought and star­va­tion in Ethiopia.

“It’s like hav­ing a health ser­vice that’s run­ning on emer­gency ambu­lances to deal with the sick all the time,” said Gluck. “You can’t just deal with the prob­lem. You need to treat the under­ly­ing causes, oth­er­wise you’ll be locked into this end­less cycle of for­eign food donors.”
…

“It is a clumsy resource,” Chris Bar­nett, a devel­op­ment eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, told ABC News. Bar­rett, the for­mer edi­tor of the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Agri­cul­tural Eco­nom­ics, said the cur­rent food aid sys­tem is not only expen­sive, but counter-productive to the idea of help­ing a coun­try in an emer­gency.
…

There is a major push by inter­na­tional aid groups and ana­lysts for reform in the laws, some­thing that Bar­nett says mem­bers of Con­gress who have agri­cul­tural con­stituent inter­ests are resis­tant to adopt.

“Not many con­gress­men like giv­ing up domain,” said Bar­rett. “Con­gres­sional com­mit­tees that are deal­ing with agri­cul­ture and ship­ping don’t have the same inter­ests or back­grounds as the for­eign affairs and for­eign rela­tions com­mit­tees do. They’re view­ing it in the broader con­text of farm­ing, not in terms of development.”

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