Ali Carter
Professor Powers
Global Justice
Fall 2014
Harmful Humanitarians? When Food Aid is Morally Problematic
Hunger kills more people each year than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.[1] Roughly one in nine people in the world are malnourished, most of them children.[2] And these hungry children grow up physically and cognitively stunted, with poorer life outcomes educationally, economically, and in health metrics.[3] Food aid is one tool to combat world hunger. Food aid is typically distributed by sending food produced in developed countries to developing areas suffering from a shortage of food. In this paper I will investigate food aid sent from the United States through the United States Agency for International Development through the Food for Peace Title II Programs. First I will look at the background of global hunger and the history of U.S. food aid, and then I will explore the moral questions that the current system raises.
Global Hunger
The global hunger problem isn’t that there is an overall lack of food in the world. We have enough food production worldwide to satisfy every person on the planet’s caloric needs.[4] Yet this food production is clustered in certain highly productive areas, so many regions of the world can’t produce enough to feed local populations. Additionally, even many regions that do produce enough of certain crops don’t produce enough crop diversity to provide appropriate levels of micronutrition. Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals found in varying levels in different foods that are needed consistently in low amounts for optimal health.[5] For example, in many countries people do not have access to enough iron through meats and dark green leafy vegetables. A lack of iron can contribute to developing anemia, which causes chronic fatigue and lowers productivity levels.[6] Similarly, in some areas there is a dearth of beta-carotene—an important precursor for Vitamin A—which is highly important for growth and development, vision, and immune system maintenance.[7] So, even if a person is eating enough calorically, they can be malnourished through a lack of micronutrients.
History and Organization of Food for Peace Title II Programs
Food aid was developed in the United States as a way to fortify our agricultural sector and provide food to those in need in other countries. Institutionalized food aid began in 1954 in the United States by President Eisenhower at a time when the country had large food surpluses.[8] When he signed the legislation, he said that the program would “lay the basis for a permanent expansion of our exports of agricultural products with lasting benefits to ourselves and peoples of other lands.”[9] It was expanded radically into its current form by President Kennedy who said, “Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want.” From these two quotations it is clear to see that U.S. food aid was never designed to be a purely altruistic program, but instead was designed to be a tool that would benefit ourselves as well.
Distributing food aid bolsters our agricultural exports and generates goodwill in other nations, and therefore is used as a geopolitical tool to increase United States’power in the world. As shown in Figure 1, U.S. food aid policy has more nuanced objectives than the fairly straightforward aim of getting food to those in need. It benefits American famers by disposing of any surpluses in certain crops and increases farm income by adding another large-scale buyer to the market. We distribute food aid, as Kennedy remarked, to those “whose goodwill and friendship we want,”or in other words to those governments from whom we would like to obtain political and military benefits. This is not to say that U.S. food aid does not accomplish its goal of feeding undernourished populations or supporting foreign governments (often those who we would like to prop up, again possibly for our own benefit), but it does warrant emphasizing that U.S. food aid is designed in a way that strongly benefits the United States’interests.
The United States’predominate method of distributing food aid is through Food for Peace, a program of USAID. In this program, private voluntary organizations—typically either non-governmental organizations working on the ground in developing countries or the World Food Program of the United Nations—first submit proposals to USAID for how and why food aid should be distributed in a particular area.[10] If the aidorganization isawarded a grant then they are allowed to choose which foods they would like the USDA to purchase from American farmers from a pre-approved list of surplus crops. Then USDA purchases the foods on the open market after submitting a call for bids. Then the crops are taken to port and loaded onto U.S.-flagged vessels. U.S.-flagged vessels are shipping carriers registered with the United States to be able to fly the American flag. The list does not include all U.S.-owned vessels, and does include some non-U.S.-owned ships. Finally, once the cargo arrives in the destination port it is sent to the area of need and is either distributed for free or is monetized to raise money for development programs.
Positive Aspects of Food Aid
There are several important positive aspects to distributing food aid. The first, which cannot be understated, is that it gets food to people who are in desperate need. Despite the negative aspects of food aid that I will explore later in this paper, it is important to note that food aid in and of itself is a powerful tool to help those in extreme suffering. Because of this, I will not argue that food aid needs to be completely eliminated, but rather that the U.S. programs to distribute food aid could be more effective if reformed.
Additionally, food aid can be distributed in creative ways to incentivize good behaviors. For example, another U.S. food aid program called Food for Education distributes food in schools to encourage families to send their children to school, and some US food aid programs have provided nutrition education to mothers.[11] Food aid can also be distributed in conjunction with medications so that individuals are provided access to certain drugs that they may need.
Negative Aspects of Food Aid
Unfortunately, while food aid does a great deal of good in the world, it also is at times inefficient and has even been called harmful. In this section I will briefly touch on some of the major problems that have been found to be associated with food aid.
Sometimes U.S. food aid is inefficient or ineffective because of bad actors. For example, after Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma in 2008, the authoritarian government largely closed the borders of the country to all foreigners and refused to issue visas. This meant that much aid that arrived to help the Burmese people spoiled at the borders of the country with nobody to access it.[12] However, this is a failure of certain individuals more than it is indicative of a failure of the entire system of food aid. This type of failure is less interesting to me than failures of the system itself, and so I will not focus on problems that arise from particular people acting in immoral ways.
One major problem that should be easily avoided with better planning is cultural insensitivity in providing food aid. This may seem like a minor concern compared to making sure people are fed, but it can end up having enormous implications that make food aid completely ineffective. For example, in the Ahahinka region of Peru there was a food shortage and so the United States sent food aid to the region. The food aid suppliers chose products from the USDA surplus list that they thought would travel well and last for a long time without spoiling. The main product that they chose was powdered milk because milk is a staple in the American diet and would travel well and not spoil upon arriving. Yet what the providers did not take into account is that the region has high levels of lactose intolerance, so many people could not make use of the food aid, and many of those who did became ill in doing so.[13] Now, this is one specific example, and there are many cases in which food aid has been delivered appropriately and this type of problem has not arisen. However, the current food aid system of shipping food from the U.S. to regions of need heightens the probability of this type of mistake. The long shipping time limited the options of what food could be sent. If the aid had been delivered in food vouchers for the hungry people, or if local food had been purchased, this mistake would not have happened.
Arguably even worse than sending inappropriate food is the possibility that food aid prolongs civil conflict. Nunn and Qian found in their 2014 paper that, while it is unlikely that food aid has an effect on the outset of civil conflicts, it could be responsible for their incidence and duration.[14] One mechanism for this is the stealing of food aid by militias. It is estimated that in conflict zones up to eighty percent of food aid can be stolen as it is transported across long and instable distances.[15] Anecdotal evidence points to a high amount of “taxation”of food aid by rebel groups as it is being transported, and the World Food Program has paid a “security fee”of $20,000 every six months to the Shabab in Somalia.[16] Even when food aid does reach its intended destination it can be stolen by local militia groups and used for bargaining power. Some governments have been documented restricting received aid to certain racial or political groups.[17]
What’s more, there have been studies that show that food aid does not actually help stabilize food availability in developing countries. Developing economies are relatively dependent on rainfall for agriculture since they do not have the same irrigation infrastructure as more developed nations. So, in years of poor rainfall there is often a food shortage. Yet U.S. food aid does not necessarily correlate with the amount of need in a region.[18] Instead, it is often distributed in higher amounts depending on the amount of excess production in the United States. So a country can have extreme food shortages in one year but not receive adequate aid until a few years down the line when the U.S. has high surpluses.
Finally, the most common issues with U.S. food aid arise because it is “tied.” Tied aid is aid that has certain strings attached to it that make it be used in certain ways. The major cases of this are that U.S. food aid must be purchased from U.S. agricultural surpluses and that it must be shipped on U.S.-flagged vessels. These two requirements ensure that food aid is beneficial to the United States as well as the recipient country, but also means that the program is wildly inefficient. Since there are a limited number of U.S.-flagged ships available at any time, there is often a delay at port while waiting for a vessel to transport the food aid. The shipping costs lead to a 30-50% increase in costs and an average five month delay in delivery. Of the Title II budget, only 39% goes to actual commodity purchases. 45% goes towards freight and shipping and handling costs. And, rising shipping costs have meant that the actual amount of food aid sent to areas of need has decreased 64% over the last decade.[19] The shipping costs of food aid could be greatly reduced if foods were purchased in the area of food need rather than in the U.S. and sent overseas.
Moral Dilemmas with Food Aid
One moral problem with food aid is that of dependency. When we ship U.S.-grown foods to developing areas we uncut the resiliency of the local market. Some food aid is monetized upon arrival to help fund development activities, and other aid is distributed free of cost. Either of these two mechanisms mean that U.S. famers are being paid for what they have grown, yet local farmers have a hard time competing with the cheaper crops brought in by food aid. At its worst, this could be compared to dumping of surplus U.S. crops. When food aid undercuts local farmers’abilities to sell their crops, they can be forced out of business, making the region even more in need of food aid.
Also of concern is paternalistic nature of food aid. By sending U.S. foods to developing regions with food shortages we are imposing our will on weaker nations. Paternalism in itself is not necessarily a bad thing—sometimes experts really do know best how to confront certain issues and resolve them properly. For example, we do listen to the medical advice of our doctors, because they have knowledge and expertise in an area that most of us don’t understand well. However, there is the fear, as described by William Easterly, that “wise Westerners”will use developing regions as testing grounds for their development theories.[20] And as Easterly argues, sometimes these tests of development theories are complete failures and we aren’t able to recognize it until many years down the road once the damage has been wrought. A more powerful concern with paternalism is that it reduces the ability for people to live self-determined lives. We uphold agency as a powerful moral right so that people have the autonomy to make their own life decisions from the available options. This does not necessarily mean that we have a right to all possible options, but it does mean that we should not be forced into certain pathways because of an external power. Food aid can limit agency because it imposes the decisions of a few powerful people on a large population with little or no consultation.
One of the largest moral issues with food aid is that it does little to increase structural fairness or social justice around the world. In fact, it promotes just the opposite, by generating a profit for American farmers but doing little to support developing economies. If social justice aims to close the gap between the best and the worst off, U.S. food aid is not a policy aiming for social justice. Large benefits accrue to U.S. farmers while food aid can hurt farmers in regions of food scarcity. This bolsters a climate addressed by Powers and Faden in which some people have to work harder to obtain prospects of a decent life while others are positioned to enjoy the benefits of a decent life just because of their social status or luck of birth.[21] Current food aid policy does little to ameliorate the structural problems that lead to food insecurity in the first place. It is plausible to assume that most people working to promote U.S. food aid are well-meaning. However, the U.S. food aid policy as a whole is shortsighted and can be damaging in the long run for local farmers and local economies because it perpetuates systematic disadvantages.
Potential Reforms for Food Aid
The World Health Organization estimates that about 1.5 million people in the world are infected with at least one type of intestinal worm. These worms survive by stealing food from the gut of their human hosts, causing malnutrition and anemia. There are medications to deworm people that have all been donated by major pharmaceutical companies, and the remainder of the distribution costs arecovered by several NGOs.[22] If food aid is going to regions where intestinal worms are endemic, then the efficacy of the nutritional supplementation is greatly reduced by the worms. A possible reform for food aid is to provide it in conjunction with mass drug administration of deworming medications so that all of the supplied food program is optimized to decrease levels of malnutrition.
Another possible reform for food aid, and a new way to “tie”it to make it more effective, would be to administer it in alongside women’s rights programs. The World Food Program estimates that 150 million fewer people would be hungry if women farmers had the same access to resources as male farmers. In too many regions of the world there are unequal rights and women are excluded from economic activities. If food aid were administered with programs to integrate women into the market, it is possible that the need for food aid would be diminished.
Another possibility for reforming food aid that would make developing regions lessdependent on food aid in the future would be to include infrastructure-strengthening loans, education programs, or technology transfers to developing countries. As stated before, many regions of the world where food aid is most often sent are the most dependent on rainfall for their agriculture. If the U.S. were to help these areas implement technologies to enhance irrigation or sustainable agriculture, they would be in a better position to wean themselves off of food aid through local production capabilities.