Introduction
The politics of food aid: in the donor countries – in the recipient countries
Not just any kind of aid
Concluding remarks
References
Ecol. Of Food and Nutrition, Vol.23, 1989.
CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
Abstract
Long-term non-emergency food aid is rightly accused of many things: being based on a false logic: doing more harm than good; maintaining (and protecting) the status quo in Third World countries; undermining food autonomy: being a weapon for the rich countries: aiding development of hunger. There is no indication that policies regarding food aid – both in donor and recipient countries – are changing drastically despite evidence for the above claims. Food aid can play a role in fostering development, but not just any kind of aid. In this context, it is important to determine which kind of aid would be needed, for whom. and under what circumstances, short of a call for an overall discontinuation of food aid. Triangular deals, involving neighbouring regions or countries for provision of food. have been one such innovative approach. Food aid has its own politics. Denouncing its deleterious effects is not enough. Some political action needs to be taken now.
While it costs approximately $400 to send a ton of food to Africa. IFAD estimates that for $200 it can enable small landholders to produce a ton of additional food for each year for a lifetime.
(US House Select Committee on Hunger. 1985).
Introduction
“In the late 20th century, hunger is no longer a scourge, it is a scandal” (George, 1985). The present situation has been shaped by a century of colonialism, a quarter century of development efforts that have excluded the rural population, and 10 years of drought in different parts of the world. Reversing this situation overnight is but a dream (Fardeau, 1984).
In this context, the mere thought that food aid can bring mutual benefits is simply an ethical fiction. Moreover, the assumption that this aid can be neutral is as shaky as the now-discredited notion of a value-free education. Present day food-aid policy makers, therefore, face pressing questions regarding the relevance of their own work (Hoeffel. 1984).
Food aid, as a form of development assistance should not automatically be considered as well-suited to the Third World (World Food Council. 1984). In the international development community it has actually gotten a rather bad image as a resource that has been poorly used. Mostly, the way it has been used is what has given it its bad reputation (Ghassemi. 1984).
The fact that most formulas for using food aid were actually developed to expedite rapid disposal with minimal financial and political costs has conditioned the current drawbacks that have been pointed out. The result is that there are serious deficiencies in the operation and theoretical foundation of food-aid projects. These projects are often not implemented as planned and nutritional impact per se remains unrealized (Sahn, 1984).
It seems undeniable to many that an unavoidable crisis is lingering in international food aid. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality packages and the demands that international capital markets impose on the poor countries have clearly reduced what little autonomy Western development aid and especially food aid had to offer to fight Third World poverty (DeSilva, 1985).
Nevertheless, food aid remains high on the agenda of the optional resources chosen to help poor countries (Muscat, 1984). Each year, about $2 to 2.6 billion worth of food, accounting for some ten percent of all official U.S. development assistance. Is sent to developing countries from the U.S. alone. The latter accounts for about 50% of worldwide food aid. The European Economic Community (EEC) and other nations contribute another 25% to that aid and multilateral agencies roughly the other 25% (Cowell, 1984; Mellor, 1984). The amount of food shipped for aid purposes virtually tripled between 1973 and 1984 (Hoeffel, 1984).
According to most estimates, about 70% of the concessional or free food sent to developing countries is delivered directly to governments to be sold on local commercial markets, thereby relieving those governments of the need to spend hard cash for food and creating revenue for use in other activities (Cowell, 1984). On the other hand, commercial cereal imports by developing countries have increased dramatically over the last 20 years while food aid has proportionately declined, both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis. During this same period, the share of food aid in total imports of cereals dropped from nearly 40% to less than 10%, even in the lowest income countries, resulting in a per capita food aid drop of some 60%. Only sub-Saharan African countries increased their receipts (tenfold, to 6.37 kg per person in 1981 or equal to 1/5 of the total cereal imports) (Mellor. 1984).
Food aid is extremely vulnerable to political pressures and “is an area in which politics literally stands directly between life and death” (DeSilva, 1985). Actually, hardly anything is more politicized than the statistics of food itself.
It should come as no surprise that the ways in which one explains the causes of hunger will determine the ways through which one seeks to do away with it. Implicitly, some seem to believe that without food aid, the present hunger crisis would be even worse. If this view were correct, there would be no reason to alter present food and development strategies and one should simply spend a great deal more money on both (George, 1985). The basic problem, however, is that these present strategies do not adequately address the issue of redistribution of assets and income, the issue of income generation for the poor and of other public expenditures for the poor (DeSilva, 1985). Moreover, the biggest stumbling block to agricultural development is not the low level of nutrition from which many peasants suffer; structural socio-economic barriers are.
On the other hand. research carried out in Panama indicates that the marginal propensity to consume food out of in-kind income is not different from that with wage (cash) income (Franklin. Harrell and Leonard. 1987). This fact forces us to discuss the policy issue of whether to use cash rather than food transfers, the former having less or no effect on local food production. If the goal is to improve nutritional status by increasing income, as many claim food aid does. a rather fundamental reconsideration of how to do so is required (Sahn, 1984). Direct income redistribution measures can result in up to a 12% jump in food demand in the space of a single year. since incremental income is first spent on food. as evidenced by what occurred in Chile in 1972 (George. 1985).
Food aid alone does not eradicate hunger; rather, hunger is to be seen as a symptom of overall poverty and underdevelopment. It is a question of people not having the means or incentives to grow food or of earning enough income to buy sufficient food. Poverty and underdevelopment allow hunger to persist in the midst of plenty and the policy implications of this understanding are profound. The hunger problem supposedly requiring food is just the more visible part of the economic crisis unfairly singling out the poor in Third World countries (Hoeffel, 1984). Development cannot be achieved by food aid as a (second best) proxy (Ake, 1985).
Therefore, for alternative food strategies to become a cornerstone of genuine development, policy cannot be usefully discussed outside a broader geo-political and socio-economic framework (George, 1985). Much more far-reaching steps must be taken to avoid the catastrophic breakdown of food availability in the future (Hoeffel, 1984), and this issue is what we will set out to explore next.
The politics of food aid: in the donor countries – in the recipient countries
States do not have friends, only interests. – General C. de Gaulle
Largely under the pressure of the developed countries, Third World countries have placed priority on cash crops; now, the West wants to give them food aid (World Food Council, 1984). But aid given with one hand is actually being taken away with the other. Export promotion and food aid strategies are often encouraged by the same donor agencies, “making us wonder whether the left hand knows what the right hand is doing” (DeSilva, 1985).
Transnational corporations most often clearly underpay Third World agricultural commodities. These exporter countries will then tend by themselves to produce greater amounts of cash crops just to keep their balance of payment in the black. Food crops are obviously the ones that suffer. Moreover. IMF adjustment or austerity plans push countries to export even more, regardless of their internal food situation. The question, then, is: can any food aid approach be borne in the shadow of superpowers and transnational corporations actually making the decisions that affect the Third World? The systems that dominate the world are increasingly global and dependency-creating and, definitely, our degree of control over them is not encouraging (George, 1985).
As we see. then, food aid is nowadays too involved in looking at improving the system’s management, ignoring the need for system reform. Donor agencies cannot afford to raise the issues of structural changes, because of the conflict of interests this inherently raises for them. Food aid is actually still coupled with a strong belief in the (discredited) trickle-down process despite the evidence that the actual value of the transfer from most supplementary feeding projects is usually less than 5% of annual total household expenditures and participation is less likely by the poorest, who are more inaccessible (Sahn, 1984).
Politics in the Donor Countries
“Food aid makes sense for the rich countries”. On top of creating future markets. the sums they now spend on storing food surpluses are far greater than those they need to use food as development aid (George. 1985). It is thus pertinent to ask: what would happen 10 these surpluses if they were no longer used as food aid?
Already roughly one in four acres of farmland in the United States produces food for export to the Third World. Without these markets, there would be a 20% to 25% loss of gross farm income bringing further hardship for the distressed American farmer, the consumer, and the economy. At the very base of food aid is the undeniable fact that grain reserves in the eighties have been the largest in history whereas, unfortunately for the farmers, food prices have been low.
Looking at aid from another angle and putting food aid in perspective, US security aid (military aid and Economic Support Fund) in 1981 was about 54% of its total aid program. It was 67% in 1985 and around 72% in 1988. PL 480 funds (Public Law 480 on food aid) were about 11% in 1985 and around 9% of all aid in 1986. At this point it is also worth remembering that more than 1/3 of all U.S. bilateral economic aid has been traditionally extended on a loan or credit basis and is being repaid with interest (so. far, surprisingly quite promptly). Further, there has also been a trend away from aid to the lower-income countries. In 1985, the U.S. was giving around $.50 per person in aid to the low-income countries and $11.65 per person to the high-income countries (Sewell, 1985). The concentration of U.S. aid on only a few countries shows that its objectives are strategic rather than humanitarian. In Africa, two thirds of the aid goes to Egypt, and in the 48 sub-Saharan countries, half has been going to Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Liberia.
On another political note, donors actually agree that food aid can discourage local production, increase dependency, alter food habits, encourage corruption, and not reach the more needy. Nevertheless, they contend that none of these problems need happen under proper safeguards. They genuinely seem to believe that food aid. when used for strict developmental purposes, can be made to have none of the above drawbacks. How this is going to come about is seldom elaborated upon. (George, 1985).
Food aid has thus been used to support development projects in two main ways: as a compensation for people for their labor and in special supplementary nutrition programs. Both modalities will be explored below.
Politics in the Recipient Countries
Third World countries often accept food aid. because of the scant availability of alternative sources of policy advice in the food and nutrition area (DeSilva, 1985). They have thus increasingly relied on food imports rather than stimulating local production of food. Donated or cheap food (often subsidized) is imported from the North creating dependency and non-local food preferences among the populace (World Food Council, 1984). As is well known. if a peasant takes his surplus to the market and finds this market swamped with donated grain, he will take his products home again. Therefore, he has made no profit and will produce less next year.
Moreover, the recent world recession resulted in cutbacks in food imports which further revealed the serious inadequacy of local production. Servicing the foreign debt has also brought many ongoing food-producing agricultural efforts literally to a halt. Sadly, food aid has actually permitted governments to postpone further the attention they need to give to their neglected agricultural sector (Hoeffel. 1984). In addition, the same food aid causes severe budgetary and logistic problems to the recipient countries since donors often pay for only some (or none) of the costs of internal transport, storage, and handling of the food donated.
To complicate matters, the time lag between initial request and final delivery of food aid have often been excessive, an average of 377 days for cereal delivery in the early 1980’s has been quoted (George, 1985). Untimely delivery may trigger some of the most harmful consequences of food aid, especially when delivery coincides with the country’s own harvests. As a result, many local producers may be ruined. Therefore, in these cases, it would be better to wait even longer before delivery (George. 1985).
According to Susan George, the following postulates are generally true for most countries receiving food aid:
– A strategy that benefits the least well-off groups will not be acceptable to the dominant groups unless their own interests are also substantially served.
– A strategy that benefits only poor classes will be ignored, sabotaged, or otherwise suppressed by the powerful, insofar as possible.
– A strategy that serves the interests of elites while doing positive harm to the poor will still be put into practice and, if necessary, maintained by violence so long as no change occurs in the balance of social and political forces (George, 1985).
In the case of the most seriously affected continent, Africa, “it could be better off if the West did nothing at all to assist in its development”. Only strategies supported from the bottom up, with the participation of those whose development is desired, will help Africa’s plight. Much Western aid tends to divert Africa from coming up with such strategies. Aid provides little leverage for making leaders respond to internal cues from their peasants. The causes of African underdevelopment are linked to the coercion and abuse of peasant producers. Constantly coerced to act against their own interests, they have become demoralised. Had they been left to follow their own interests, allowed to attend more efficiently to their own survival as they had done for centuries, hunger on the present scale would not occur (Ake, 1985).
African governments are spending close to one quarter of all their foreign exchange earnings on food. compared with just 10% at the beginning of the 1970’s (Liaison Office for North America, 1985b). Despite these figures. Africa still assigns insufficient priority to agriculture. Correcting this attitude will go far beyond food aid at its best. New priorities favoring agriculture are thus needed (Mellor, 1984).
Moreover, nothing, not even drought, may have impoverished Africa as much as the international commercial trade system. If the farmers involved in export were paid a dollar an hour instead of a couple of dollars a day. Africa would have annually deserved an extra $50 billion, three times the total flow of public and private aid, loans, and investment to Africa in 1984 alone (Matthews, 1985). Additionally, developing countries in general would earn over $8.5 billion more a year if protectionist barriers in agricultural trade were cut in half by all nations in the North (Hoeffel. 1984).
When consideration is given to food for work, which accounted for some 15% of food aid in 1984, it has to be kept in mind that people prefer to work for food only when there is simply none to buy and only as a transitory measure (World Food Council, 1984). In food for work programs, it has been calculated that the actual disposable income of participant households can be increased by around 10-11% of annual wage income. However, one has to count on some of the food in these programs being sold by recipients, thus potentially reducing the intended direct benefits. Recipients thus benefit more from mixed forms of payments (in kind and in cash), especially since food for work schemes often provide income only for a short season forcing recipients to plan ahead for the other seasons (Mellor. 1984).
Food for work projects should theoretically contribute to development. All too often, however, they have contributed far more to the capacity of Third World governments to repress the poor (Jackson. 1983). The appropriateness of food for work projects is conditioned by the extent to which they are oriented either towards relief (charitable welfare) or towards the construction of needed infrastructure and the generation of assets that benefit the participants thereafter. These projects do not improve nutritional status markedly during the short-term, when the food assistance is actually being distributed. Returns on investment do not begin to flow immediately either. Moreover, participation is often irregular and intermittent. On the other hand, these projects, by increasing local food availability, tend to depress local food prices. Eventually, this situation temporarily increases the net food consumption of the local vulnerable groups, but this increase cannot be measured with the traditional indicators of nutritional status (Sahn. 1984).
What is true for food for work schemes is also true for the benefits of most supplementary feeding programs for children and mothers; they are usually modest. The observed effect of these programs on growth is small or absent. Their administrative costs are exceptionally high. Increments in birth weights attributed to these programs typically run in the range of 40-60 grams. As is known, only a part of the food given actually reaches the targeted population. Leakages of the supplemented food occur when the food is shared by nontarget family members. In sum, supplementary feeding programs are generally able to fill only 10-25% of the apparent energy gap in the target population (Mellor, 1984).
Not just any kind of aid
Food Aid: For whom, which kind and under what circumstances?
Properly used food aid can contribute to three objectives: stimulating production, promoting stability of supplies, and ensuring a greater access to food by the needy (Liaison Office of North America. 1985a). Food aid may give farmers some breathing space while changing land uses so as to make permanent improvements to their land and will perhaps have a better chance for impact if food is made available during the period preceding the harvest (World Food Council, 1984).
Non-emergency food aid still needs to reach the poorest groups, not merely the poorest governments (DeSilva. 1985). Therefore, more poverty-focused strategies are needed. But a caveat is here called for since past performance shows that the emphasis has too often been placed on the number (and cost) of people reached by the aid as opposed to the number of people whose malnutrition has been reversed to some extent due to such aid. In addition, to be more effective, food aid should generate a multiplier effect on the amount of resources allocated for other anti-poverty programs and as such should primarily meet the transitional needs and costs of such anti-poverty policy adjustments, acting as a catalyst (DeSilva. 1985).
At the very least, donor countries must ensure that food aid is not merely used as a balance-of-payment support for previously planned imports. Using food aid as a substitute for commercial imports will not increase consumption by low-income consumers. Therefore, in more and more instances, donors are requiring that recipient countries meet their usual marketing requirements commercially before becoming eligible for aid. Food aid must be substantially additional (not otherwise purchased) to even expect any kind of impact (Mellor, 1984).
Further, food aid must be made a small part of a country’s overall food strategy, should primarily be used to multiply the opportunities for productive work and should be more strictly attuned to seasonal needs. (George, 1985).
Another goal of food aid must be in some way to use it to help increase the bargaining power of the poor and the politically marginalized. For this to occur, peasants must be helped to form or strengthen their own representative associations. If a recipient government cannot agree to this basic condition – which will necessarily alter the internal balance of power – then it would be better for the donor to withhold aid (George. 1985).
Food aid that results in permanent improvements in real income of the poor is likely to result in greater reductions in malnutrition than aid that produces only transitory gains in income. Food transfer programs are more likely to have a limited effect than real income transfers. Thus, even if food aid fosters moderate income changes, what is needed is the transfer of income earning resources to the poor (Pinstrup-Anderson & Kumar, 1984). One of the measures to achieve the latter is fair prices for the farmers. However, this measure translates into higher food prices for the urban population which is itself vulnerable to hunger. Special funds (estimated at about $1 billion annually over the next five years) will have to be made available to countries to help their urban populations make the transition to higher food prices. These funds should be directed only to those countries that have undertaken serious steps to develop and implement equitable and comprehensive national food strategies (Hoeffel, 1984).
If the donors buy the food to be donated from other developing countries, this considerably increases its development impact. It supports the agricultural economy of those nations by providing a needed market. The basic idea of these triangular food aid arrangements is to purchase grain in a Third World surplus country and to transfer it to a deficit country. Sales revenues are committed to a revolving fund to supply rural credit or to support other development projects. These operations have less of the drawbacks of foreign food aid and can be managed by local non-government organizations (George, 1985). Food aid should thus no longer be in kind only but should also provide finances for these three-way operations, as well as for village storage schemes and market stabilization measures. Food aid will, therefore, have to be amended to ask donors to make more direct financial contributions. All these substitution operations are based on a partial monetization of food aid resources which, however, is a concept that has been much resisted by donors.
Concluding remarks
Abolishing long-term food aid is, at present, not a realistic proposition. “Only with enough political and moral courage will we be able to provide an alternative to the less and less attractive models offered by food aid” (George, 1985).
Perhaps aid needs to be rethought and restructured, not necessarily withdrawn. But that will require fostering the political and economic changes necessary to make it possible for food aid to really make a difference (Ake, 1985). We must, then, make the best of it. Since about two thirds of all food aid is sold locally for local currency, making the best means making the best use of counterpart funds. The question is whether to make counterpart-fund utilization subject to negotiation or imposing conditions. The risk is for the latter effort to become another area for the donors being (rightly or wrongly) accused of neo-colonial interference (George, 1985).
Cash aid should replace the value of food aid as the latter is phased out. Food and financial aid should be made interchangeable. If the donors refuse these substitution measures, we will have to recognize that “its food aid, is after all. only about surplus dumping and all the rest is mere window-dressing” (George, 1985).
Food aid is good only when used as a vehicle of transition. The real commitment to the eradication of hunger and malnutrition implies a massive assault on the roots of underdevelopment and poverty (Hoeffel, 1984). Food aid thus only adds false hopes to the prospects of poverty alleviation (Muscat, 1984). At best, food aid treats the symptoms of poverty, not its causes.
While both food aid and domestic agricultural production add to the supply of wage goods, the latter tends to stimulate the creation of new employment and income opportunities. Its contribution to growth is. therefore, far superior to that of food aid. To avoid the demotivating effect of food aid on agriculture. employment must be created for low-income people (with a high propensity to spend on food) and aid must be tied to other forms of assistance to facilitate agricultural development. An important demotivating effect of food aid occurs when that aid is used to solve short-term problems of food supply. (hereby allowing politicians to turn their attention to matters other than those pertaining to agricultural development (Mellor, 1984).
To solve their food problems, Third World countries must become more inward looking and not count on export crops revenues to purchase food from abroad. First and foremost, food strategies in the Third World must increase incentives to producers while protecting the lowest income consumers.
Food giveaways can fill bellies but they can never end hunger, for unlike food. one cannot give people power over their lives. What we can do, however, is make sure that we do not further undercut the power of the hungry, blocking the way for change. Instead of asking ourselves how many tons or how many dollars poor people need. we must ask ourselves whether our (Western) tax dollars are being used to shore up the economic and political power of a few who make the powerlessness of the many inevitable. Do our tax dollars go to regimes who sustain themselves in power by repression against the hungry? Statistics cannot help us answer such questions. Only identifying with needless human suffering will (Moore-Lappe, 1985).
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Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.