American Food Aid: Saving Lives, or U.S. Jobs?

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-06-25 14:51:00 UTC
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Over on AidWatch, Laura Freschi draws attention to a particularly conspicuous bit of aid-related parochialism. It's a USA Maritime-backed invitation to a DC forum touting the delivery of American food aid from "U.S. farms to foreign lands" — and, of course, the importance of U.S. ships in ferrying such supplies.

Over the past 50 years, U.S. food aid has helped feed millions and save countless lives. But that's incidental to USA Maritime's main point here. Instead, USA Maritime wants to stress the way America's food aid helps create local jobs, too. Specifically, 870 of them. In Iowa.

Okay, more than that. According to the shipping industry, requiring U.S. food aid to be grown in and shipped from the U.S. creates over 13,100 jobs. While no one's arguing that such jobs aren't important, as Freschi puts it, should millions of lives around the world be risked, just to create 561 jobs in Kansas?

Because effectively, that's what's happening. As we've written before, requiring American food aid to be grown in the U.S. may be a boon to American farmers, but it's a wildly inefficient way to accomplish the stated purpose at hand: feeding hungry people.

That's because shipping costs can end up consuming, in some cases, fully two-thirds of every dollar the U.S. devotes to food aid overseas. Meanwhile according to government estimates, sourcing food locally in sub-Saharan Africa would be 34% cheaper than purchasing U.S.-grown and U.S.-shipped produce.

Such are the absurdities of the system that in 2007, humanitarian group CARE went so far as to outright reject $45 million in U.S. food aid, not wanting to participate in an exchange in which developing world farmers are shortchanged for the sake of their counterparts in the West.

The shipping industry makes the case that if the U.S. started doing business differently — for example, by buying food in regions where such supplies are needed — their industry would shrink, and jobs would be lost. Maybe there's some truth there. But the job of the U.S. food aid program is to get food to the hungry, not to subsidize USA Maritime.

Photo Credit: jdnx

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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