US food aid program is starving Haiti's farmers
Posted By richards on January 13, 2014
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti The idea that the delivery of American food aid needs an overhaul goes almost without question here in the capital of a nation still recovering from the devastating earthquake of four years ago.
Farmers in Haiti and many of their counterparts in the United States are joining foreign aid organizations calling on the United States to stop sending American crops to Haiti through what many critics say is the deeply flawed and wasteful strategy of the current, multi-billion-dollar U.S. Department of Agriculture Food for Peace program.
Unfortunately U.S. policy doesn't consider first the political interests of farmers abroad, but of its own, said Camille Chalmers, director of a Haitian farmers' association.
But now there is a chance to change that, he added.
A consensus has formed that something needs to be done to end the unintended consequence of food aid that actually ends up hurting some of the world's most vulnerable people in developing nations like Haiti, where local farmers can't compete against less expensive U.S. crops.
The turning point in the debate over U.S. food aid came when the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) the entity that oversees foreign aid admitted the program was flawed, urging Congress to permit the agency to send cash rather than food to nations in need. Agency officials believe they could feed 2 to 4 million more people per year if they were allowed to spend more of their budget on procuring food aid locally in the countries where it is needed (another study put the figure of additional beneficiaries even higher, at 4 to 10 million people).
In Washington, the proposed reforms have been gaining support among legislators on both sides of the aisle: Democrats who defend U.S. foreign aid spending and want to see the money stretch further, and Republicans concerned foremost with fiscal responsibility who want to tighten up a wasteful program. Several libertarian-leaning think tanks including The Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and Taxpayers for Common Sense support cash over food because it gives individuals in developing nations the ability choose for themselves what sorts of food to buy.
Even American farmers who ostensibly have the most to lose if the program were to cease purchasing U.S. crops have come out in favor of the reforms, led by a letter from the president of the National Farmers Union.
President Barack Obama proposed an even more radical reform: removing food aid from the Farm Bill altogether, placing it instead in the international disaster assistance budget and two other funds so as to avoid the Title II restrictions entirely.
That's because the U.S. wasted $219 million over a three-year period through its food aid monetization program, by which U.S. crops are sent abroad on American-owned ships and sold to generate revenue for aid operations, according to a 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). Currently 15 percent of U.S. food aid must be monetized in this way.
