The Changing Outlook for Food Aid

But these efforts are taking place as traditional food aid appears threatened from several directions. Donors are cutting back on the amount of food aid they allocate. Increasing conflicts and other catastrophes are diverting food aid from development uses to emergency use. And critics are asserting that food aid has never been particularly effective anyway.

The results of the food aid debate could have tremendous implications in the coming decades, when food aid needs are projected to be great. A recent study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that by 2007 the number of people unable to meet their nutritional needs will be 1.2 billion, including two-thirds of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa. According to an IFPRI model, the food gap in developing countries—the difference between production and market demand for food—could more than double in the next 25 years. In 2020, if the world continues with business as usual, 150 million children under age 6 will likely be malnourished.

Can food aid play a significant role in meeting these needs? Should it? This is what donor countries, aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations are working to determine.

Giving Away the Surplus

In the past, food aid has been a convenient way for industrial countries to dispose of their large surpluses of agricultural products, thereby supporting prices and helping their own farmers, while also meeting humanitarian goals and rewarding friendly governments. Some of the food goes to recipient country governments, which sell the food in the marketplace and spend the proceeds. Some of it goes to humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which distribute it to the hungry or sell it and use the cash for development in needy countries. Still other food is transferred to the World Food Programme and other aid organizations for use in emergencies and other projects.

But food aid donations have fallen sharply over the past few years. Whereas donors supplied 15 million metric tons of cereals and other food aid in 1992/93, the total plunged to 6.7 million metric tons in 1996/97, a reduction of 55 percent. Cuts in U.S. food aid, which dropped by two-thirds from 8.5 million metric tons to 2.8 million metric tons over that period, accounted for most of the decline. Now, as part of the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, donor countries have pledged to slash the agricultural subsidies that stimulated large surpluses. This change could reduce the amount of surplus food available to food aid organizations even further.

According to Edward Clay, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, “Because of changes in agricultural policies and the Uruguay round, we are no longer in a situation of regular structural agricultural surpluses. We can no longer assume surpluses will be available.”

In the absence of large surpluses, some donor countries are buying food for food aid on the open market. This means that resources for food aid in many cases now come out of overall aid budgets. Many donor countries face the question, If you have a dollar for aid, do you spend that dollar on food or some other kind of aid?

A Reexamination of Food Aid

Many are arguing that the new scarcity of food aid is giving rise to a healthy examination of how food aid should be used, if at all. There is general acknowledgment that food aid has not always been used efficiently. In the past food has gone bad before it could be delivered, failed to reach those who really need it, and fueled conflict instead of feeding hungry civilians. Some food aid programs have supplied hungry people with food they are unaccustomed to eating or food with little nutritional value. Food aid has often done little to address the underlying causes of hunger. Food aid also appears to raise the risk that food supplied as aid will harm local agricultural markets by depressing prices for locally grown food.

Supporters of food aid argue that all of these problems can be and are being solved. Donors are trying to target aid more carefully, selling food and providing cash to recipients where appropriate, and working to ensure that food aid is more than a short-term fix. NGOs that distribute food aid are facing stringent new requirements from donors on reporting the impact of their work.

Namanga Ngongi, deputy executive director of WFP, says, “Donors are demanding more and more transparent accountability. We have to be sure that food gets to the people that are targeted and is in the form it is needed. Monitoring is therefore more complex, and we are going the extra mile to make sure that the food gets to its intended beneficiaries.”

In response to the new food aid climate, WFP is undertaking a major policy review of food aid. “In the past several years, food aid has become a scarce resource. So the question is, where do you use it best?” says Dianne Spearman, chief of the Policy Service, Strategy and Policy Division of WFP. “What can be achieved better with food aid than with some other form of assistance?”

Although WFP is still working out the details of its new food aid policy, it has made commitments to several key goals. According to Spearman, WFP has adopted a stronger emphasis on reaching the poorest countries and the poorest people within those countries. “We have begun concentrating on where food as food aid is needed. We have increased our programming for pregnant women and young children, for example, because we know that nutrition in the womb and in the first two years of life is important all through that person’s life.”

Food for Relief or Food for Development?

One trend that donor governments, aid agencies, and NGOs must take account of in their deliberations is the dramatic increase in emergencies requiring food assistance. In 1990, emergency food aid made up 19 percent of global food aid. By 1997, this share had risen to 42 percent. This use of food aid is relatively uncontroversial because people suffering the consequences of war, drought, and other disasters first need the basic necessities of life, including food, to rebuild their lives.

“In an emergency,” says Spearman, “the first thing you do is provide food and save lives. Then, as soon as you can, you begin to build development activities into the emergency assistance. It is important to move away from free distribution as soon as possible and use more development-oriented approaches.”

But the need to cope with emergencies diverts resources and attention from longer-term development. Historically, WFP has devoted most of its resources to development projects like feeding programs for the most vulnerable and food-for-work projects, in which poor people work on development projects like roads or bridges and receive payment in food. These projects are designed to increase people’s capacity to pull themselves out of poverty and thus out of hunger. Between 1990 and 1996, however, emergency aid rose from 34 percent of WFP’s portfolio to 66 percent, severely squeezing the development aid budget.

Some critics are not worried by the shift from development to emergency aid. Food for development, they argue, should be the exception, not the rule. “In an emergency, food aid may be the only way to offer aid,” says Clay. “An obvious case is Sudan. There just isn’t any alternative. In other situations, it may not be the case that food aid is the best way to offer assistance. In Sahelian Africa, there may be a need for food, but does it make sense to transport food into landlocked countries?”

Carrying food into a developing country, especially one far from seaports, is an enormously expensive proposition, Clay argues. Transporting the food and distributing it to the people who need it can make up most of the cost of the operation, with the cost of the food itself making up only a small fraction. In an emergency situation, the high cost of food aid is worth it, but for development efforts, sending cash is usually more cost-effective, says Clay. Food for development, he asserts, should be justified on a case-by-case basis.

Patrick Webb of Tufts University, who has written extensively on food aid, sees cause for concern in the trends affecting food aid. He describes several cases in which food for development makes more sense than cash: where markets function poorly or not at all, preventing people from buying food even if they have the money; where donors wish to target a particular type of food or nutrient—like iodized salt or vitamin D—to a particular group of people, such as mothers and children, who cannot get it locally; and where donors want to implement self-targeting among recipients by offering an “inferior” food. “In certain contexts, if you offer rice,” says Webb, “then everyone comes. If you offer sorghum, only the people who really need it turn up. And then you can offer complementary inputs, like literacy training or vaccinations.”

“People say that cash always works better than food,” Webb continues, “but the reality is that there is no cash available for these kinds of activities in the locations where people most need them. Also, there’s a certain symbolism in food aid: it’s a physical sign that somebody cares and is doing something. And that’s important.”

Even in emergencies, the distribution of food aid is not straightforward. According to Marc Cohen, special assistant to the director general of IFPRI and a coauthor of the 2020 discussion paper Food from Peace, “In conflict a lot of people need food aid, but getting it to the people who need it involves dealing with one or more of the warring parties. Some of the food can get siphoned off, and then it can start fueling the conflict and you find yourself involved politically. Principles about how to distribute food sound good in theory, but if someone is holding a gun to your head, it’s a little trickier to uphold them.”

A Better Way to Use Food Aid?

Per Pinstrup-Andersen, IFPRI’s director general, and Bjorg Colding, a former IFPRI consultant, are proposing an alternative way to look at food aid. They suggest a food security strategy, in which food aid would be part of an integrated plan for development that would help people gain the ability to earn sustainable livelihoods. Such a strategy would be driven less by the supply of food available in food-surplus countries than by the needs of developing countries. “First we should see what the needs of food-insecure people are,” says Colding. “Then we should ask, Should we transfer food? Should we transfer cash? Or something else?”

“Countries that want to give food aid,” says Pinstrup-Andersen, “should buy food from developing countries with food surpluses and send it to countries with food deficits. They should buy food in a way that promotes development both in the country where they are buying it and in the country where they are distributing it.” This may mean, for example, complementing the purchase and sale of food with the development of roads, ports, and other infrastructure and the expansion of private marketing facilities in recipient countries.

Some European countries are already trying more flexible approaches to food aid. Based on a study by Pinstrup-Andersen and Colding, Denmark changed the kinds of food it provided as food aid—from meat and cheese to peas, wheat flour, and vegetable oil—and found that it was able to donate six times more calories and three times more protein at a lower cost. “That means you can feed more people,” says Colding. Other European countries are finding that their food aid budgets go farther when they buy food in a developing country for distribution in that country or in another, instead of relying on their own agricultural surpluses.

Could such an approach work for the United States, the largest single food aid donor? Not likely, say most observers. “The United States has strong constituencies that support certain aspects of traditional food aid,” says Tom Marchione, a nutrition adviser and evaluation officer for the Bureau of Humanitarian Response, U.S. Agency for International Development. “One has been agricultural producers, because food aid improves their exports and helps create markets for them. Other constituencies are the vitamin industry, the mineral industry, and food processors.”

Closing the Food Gap

According to the USDA study, closing the gap between available food and the nutritional needs of people in developing countries in 2007 would require 24 million metric tons of food, while just maintaining their current consumption levels would require 18 million metric tons. As it stands, food aid is unlikely to supply more than a fraction of the necessary amounts. Total food aid distributed in 1996/97 was about 7.5 million metric tons. Although the total for 1998 may be higher, owing to a combination of multiple emergencies and surpluses resulting from low exports to economically troubled Asian countries, in future years food aid is likely to continue to face downward pressure.

Ultimately, though, how big a role food aid plays in filling the food gap will depend not only on how much aid donors deliver, but also on how well that aid is managed for both short-term emergency relief and longer-term development. It also depends on whether food aid is accompanied by sound policies and broader forms of aid that can help people in developing countries achieve sustainable livelihoods.

Shahla Shapouri, a research economist at the USDA’s Economic Research Service and one of the authors of the USDA study, says, “While food aid is a tool to support food consumption in vulnerable countries in the short run, in the long run only improved agricultural performance in these countries can increase their food security.”

Reported by Heidi Fritschel
All or part of the text of this article may be reprinted without permission but with acknowledgment to IFPRI. Please send copies to IFPRI.
Photo credits: Photo 1, WFP/Philippe Borel; photo 2, WFP/Liz Gilbert.

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