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World Food Program
FOOD AID
Shipping food commodities overseas from the United States as part of the federal government’s
food-aid programs is costly in terms of time and money. Reforms that Bread is seeking would
eliminate some of these costs.
Bread for the World’s 2014 Offering
of Letters focuses on reforming the federal government’s food-aid programs
so that funds are used more effectively
and efficiently. One of the reforms that
Bread is advocating for in the campaign is to give the government more
flexibility in using local and regional
purchases (LRP), the practice of buying food at or near the site of a humanitarian crisis or development project.
This option would enable the government us to act more quickly in a crisis
and save more lives, as we witnessed
in the post-disaster Philippines earlier
this year.
The proposed cargo-preference provision, however, would reduce funding
for LRP. Food shipped under cargopreference law from the United States
takes an average of 14 weeks longer to
reach people in need than locally purchased food.
Buying food locally food mitigates
the effects of disaster on the local econ2 Bread | May-June 2014
omy and helps local farmers and vendors continue to support themselves
and their families. LRP also uses tax
dollars more efficiently and costs 25 to
50 percent less than food shipped from
the United States—and reaches millions more.
In short, this harmful provision
could result in the United States spending more money on slower, less-effective assistance to hungry people rocked
by crisis, and the help we do provide
has the potential to undercut local
farmers and merchants—some of the
very people U.S. food aid seeks to help.
Smart food aid is forward thinking.
In 2012, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and
the United Nations World Food Programme (UN WFP) were able to feed
more than 72,000 people in Rwanda
while supporting Rwandan farmers
through local purchase. This drastically reduced costs–saving $243 per metric ton on corn and $899 per metric ton
on beans–and allowed food aid to be
delivered months sooner than if it had
been shipped from the United States.
The cargo-preference restrictions,
added shortly before the bill was
passed, are based on the argument
that food aid hurts exports. However,
food aid accounts for only one half of
one percent of all U.S. exports. Food
shipped from our shores yields about
40 cents for every aid dollar spent.
The small loss in export revenue
becomes much less urgent in comparison to the millions of lives saved and
the long-term consequences of resilience. Building resilience in developing
countries often leads to future trading
partners. South Korea, once a povertywracked recipient of U.S. food aid, is
now the United States’ sixth-largest
goods-trading partner.
Local purchase may not be the
best option in every scenario. What
is important is that the United States
has the flexibility to respond to each
scenario by choosing the method that
reaches hungry people in the shortest
amount of time.
You can raise your voice in support
of food-aid reform in opposition to this
bill by participating in Bread’s Offering of Letters. The Coast Guard bill
goes to the Senate next for consideration. Bread will strongly oppose any
final legislation that includes cargopreference restrictions that decrease
funding for flexible food-aid programs.
We must continue to let our members
of Congress know that we support legislation that saves taxpayer dollars and
increases efficiency, not legislation that
takes food out of the mouths of the
world’s hungry.
Alyssa Casey is a government relations
intern at Bread for the World.