WASHINGTON, 20 August 2007 — Now CARE, one of the World’s biggest charities, has announced that it intends to boycott the controversial policy of selling tons of heavily subsidized US-produced food in African countries. CARE wants the US government to send money to buy food locally, rather than unwanted US-produced food.
The US arm of the charity says America is causing rather than reducing hunger with a decree that US food aid must be sold rather than directly distributed to those facing starvation and extreme hunger. In America, the subsidies for corn in particular, help underpin the junk food industry, which uses corn extracts as a sweetener, creating a homegrown health crisis.
The farm lobby meanwhile has a stranglehold on Congress, which has balked at making any changes that would interfere with a system that promotes overproduction of commodities.
Critics of the policy say it also undermines African farmers’ ability to produce food, making the most vulnerable countries of the world even more dependent on aid to avert famine. Under the system Washington buys tens of millions of dollars of surplus corn and other products from agribusiness. The food, which can only be exported on US-flagged ships, is then sold by charities to raise money to pay for emergencies.
Globally there are about 800 million who are chronically hungry and the number is rising every year. US farmers love the present system, but it is slow and unresponsive when there are food emergencies and crucially leaves people hungry who could be fed.
CARE has caused a huge upset in the American charitable sector by deciding to phase out the practice. It has also upset US agribusiness and shipping interests, which benefit to the tune of some $180 million a year from the practice.
Attempts to get Congress to end the policy have so far failed as it debates a new farm bill that will last for the next five years.
Alina Labrada, a spokeswoman for CARE said the present policies were bad news for Americans who donate. “ I don’t think that Americans who generously donate want people to go hungry at their expense,” she said.
CARE’s decision has led to a rift with some of the biggest US charities, including World Vision, Feed the Children and Africare, who rely on the system to fund a large part of their budgets. They argue that it keeps hard currency in impoverished countries and stops food prices from rising.
However the US system has other harsh critics, not least former President Jimmy Carter. The Carter Center refuses to participate and says the system only survives because it benefits the charities, agribusiness and maritime interests.
Carter told the New York Times that the charities were as much a part of the problem as the farm lobby and shipping interests, because “they speak from the standpoint of angels.” Peter Matlon, a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, another critic, told the newspaper that selling US farm products in Africa for cash to promote development revealed how US farm policies were dictating the country’s response to hunger abroad.
The charities “have been ignoring this evidence for years that there’s a negative impact on the prices farmers receive,” Matlon said.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are at odds with the US policy and spend some $150 million trying to increase the productivity of African farmers.
The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan, investigative arm of Congress, also says the system is “inherently inefficient.” CARE must now try to replace the lost income from donors. It is also trying to make its own aid programs profitable in the belief that profitable businesses for aid recipients are more likely to survive in the long term.
The US claims to be the world’s most generous provider of food aid, amounting to $2 billion annually. Much of that aid is lost in the overheads of shipping it to Africa.
At the other end of the pipeline, not only does subsidized US food hurt African farmers, but also food purchased in the United States regularly takes four months to reach the destination where there is an emergency. In contrast food bought locally takes days to arrive.
