Moral Obligations and Domestic Pressures: Who Does Food Aid Really Benefit?

By GEG Student 23

Although short-term economic woes have long been gripping the headlines, last month’s Hurricane Sandy pushed climate change back on the United Sates’ radar. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans now believe that President Obama should prioritize global warming over cutting taxes for the rich, reforming immigration, or cutting defense spending during his second term. Lucky for us, we have the money, manpower and infrastructure to quickly respond to disasters like Sandy, limiting lives lost and long-term economic damage. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are not as fortunate, and some of our home-grown policies limit their ability to recover after climate-induced crises.

As the poorest and most food-aid dependent region in the world, Sub-Saharan Africa has little capacity to deal with climate-induced shocks. Last year, intense droughts in the horn of Africa put 10 million people at risk of not having enough to eat. The same area experienced both severe droughts and flooding just 5 years earlier. These erratic and extreme weather events are expected to become the norm, with the number of floods, droughts and cyclones in Africa projected to increase within the next century. The number of food emergencies has already tripled since the 1980s. Although 60 percent of the African population works in agriculture, poor distribution systems, low technical capacity and increasingly erratic weather patterns limit its ability to feed itself. According to the UNDP, 239 million Sub-Saharan Africans (nearly one-third of the entire population) currently suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition.

Skyrocketing food and transportation costs have slashed the level of U.S. food aid to less than half of what it was 5 years ago. Coupled with the projected increase in extreme weather events, this spells certain disaster for food-insecure Africans. The price of wheat (America’s top-donated commodity) has gone up by an astonishing 181 percent in the past two years alone. What’s worse, strict U.S. shipping regulations mean that 65 percent of food aid funds are wasted on transportation. Rather than using an open-bidding system, the United States mandates that 50 percent of all food commodities must travel on U.S.-flagged vessels, greatly increasing lag times and cost. The Maritime Administration estimates that American-manned vessels are 2.7 times more expensive to operate than those of foreign competitors. With a limited fleet, coordinating food aid acquisition, transportation and distribution can take up to six months, which, in the event of a food security crisis, could equate to hundreds of additional lives lost in wait.

Clearly, the United States needs to reform its food aid formula. For starters, opening our shipping system to foreign bidders would increase food aid shipments by 25 percent. An even more efficient and effective solution would be to abandon direct aid transfers altogether. If we instead switched to triangular trade, in which we paid a local agricultural-producing partner in Sub-Saharan Africa to ship food to its crisis-stricken neighbors, we would vastly reduce the amount of dollars lost in transport.  However, with a vocal Farm Lobby reliant on food aid income, the switch from commodity-driven transfers is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Flagship reform is also unlikely to come to fruition, with a 2012 bipartisan House bill proposing to boost  requirements to 75 percent in an effort to create seafarer jobs.

Although President Obama asserts that America “has a moral obligation to lead the fight against hunger and malnutrition,” our in-house policies hinder nations from receiving the aid they need to become food secure and crisis-resilient. For the 55 to 65 million additional Africans expected to become food-aid dependent by 2080, let’s hope that current and future presidents will act on this obligation and change our food aid course.