How to Feed the Hungry, Faster

By TINA ROSENBERG

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Tags:

development, food aid, international aid, vouchers

On Friday, I wrote about how people in Dhobley, Somalia, are getting emergency food despite a guerrilla war that is keeping out aid workers ― and food.  Instead of trucking in sacks of food, World Concern and its partner, the African Rescue Committee, distribute  vouchers that people in Dhobley use to buy what they need from local merchants.

The vast majority of food aid still comes in the form of sacks of grain ― a policy protected by entrenched interests.

Many countries that donate emergency food aid are moving away from shipping bags of food and toward using vouchers or other methods for local purchase.  (The World Concern program is financed by Canada Foodgrains Bank and the Canadian government.)   The United Nations World Food Program is also using cash, vouchers and electronic transfers ― often by cell phone ― when circumstances allow.   Vouchers solve many of the serious problems that have always plagued in-kind food aid:  food can get to the hungry quickly; there are no transport or storage costs; it works in dangerous situations; it allows recipients to buy the food they want and increases the welcome for refugees and contributes to the local economy.  Aid is multiplied as it helps not only recipients, but merchants.  For example, Catholic Relief Services responded to floods in Benin with a program that gives villagers vouchers they can use to buy grains, legumes and oil from local small vendors ― usually women who sell tiny quantities of goods in outdoor markets.  Without the voucher business, these women would be almost as poor as their new customers.

Reader DMH (4) pointed out a familiar parallel:  “It mirrors the Red Cross and Salvation Army’s requests that people donate cash to help after disasters. There are appropriate places and times for donating used or new goods, but as the article points out logistical costs can make it inefficient.”
While vouchers are a creative solution, there are projects that go further.  Cash for Work not only feeds people in an emergency, it can improve local agricultural conditions so that fewer emergencies happen.  In 2007, for example, World Concern began to use Cash for Work in refugee camps in Chad that housed people fleeing Darfur and eastern Chad.   The program hires thousands of people to plant trees and build small dams and rock walls on hills to slow the runoff of water.  Such projects can transform land from desert to arable in a few years.   “It was a way to pay back the community for the environmental damage wreaked by refugees, who cut down trees,” said Tracy Stover, the emergency coordinator in Dadaab, Kenya, of World Concern, who worked on the project.  On pay day, World Concern organizes a market ― merchants bring their wares to the camps for people to buy.

Derek Sciba/World ConcernMohamed Yagouv, a 21-year-old refugee from Darfur, helped build a wall for better irrigation in a camp in Goz Geida, Chad. He earned food vouchers to purchase goods at a local market through a World Concern program, Cash for Work.

Cash for Work has many variations. The government of Ethiopia runs a large-scale program that employs the most destitute ― mostly women ― in projects in their community that improve agriculture or build roads, schools or clinics.   They are paid in cash where there is food to be bought, bags of grain and cans of oil where there is none.    This program, called the Productive Safety Net Program, is helping some 8 million people.   In the Philippines, where a cellphone can cost as little as $10 and 80 percent of the people have access to one, the W.F.P. is experimenting with using text messages to give people vouchers they can spend at thousands of different stores.   They earn the money through labor in projects that rebuild their communities after typhoon damage.

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Cash, vouchers and cash-for-work are not feasible in every emergency, but most organizations and governments are moving toward using them where they can.  The United States indirectly finances some of these alternatives to in-kind food aid: “Even the United States has supported the efforts of W.F.P. and others to engage in the use of cash transfers and vouchers, as well local and regional purchases of food for distribution as aid,” wrote  FuzzyR from Floyds Knobs, Ind. (22)
But America is the world’s largest direct donor of food aid, and the vast majority of it still comes in the form of sacks of grain ― a policy protected by entrenched interests.   The Bush administration tried to challenge them ― it asked Congress to give more flexibility to as much as a quarter of the food aid budget.   “They tried through the appropriations process and the farm bill,” said Gawain Kripke, the director of policy and research at Oxfam America.   “But they didn’t put the full force of their lobbying effort behind it, and it got stomped on by industry. It was never really seriously considered by Congress.”
In the 2008 farm bill, the Bush administration managed to get money for a pilot project testing alternative forms of aid (which don’t really need more testing).  The numbers were small ― $60 million over four years.  Kripke called it “a small divot ― hardly enough to even do a pilot.”
Last year, the Obama administration allowed $300 million of the State Department’s disaster assistance budget to be used for alternative forms of emergency food aid.   It has helped people in Pakistan after floods there, in Somalia and Niger, among other places.   The White House is requesting the same sum for next year.
“The thinking has always been that the U.S. government needs to have as many tools in its tool box as possible to meet emergency food needs of people in crisis,” said Jon C. Brause, the Agency for International Development’s deputy assistant administrator for democracy, conflict and humanitarian assistance.  “I’ve been in this business for 20 years and it’s always been something we’ve wanted.”
But Brause said the administration will not try to liberate any of the $1.69 billion it requested for Food for Peace in the 2012 farm bill.

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Read previous contributions to this series.

America’s biggest food aid program sits in the farm bill because the program was originally designed as a way to get rid of surplus agricultural products to keep prices high. But seeing food aid through the lens of domestic agricultural means there has never been serious consideration of how to make food aid more effective.
The loudest voice for in-kind food aid is that of the shipping industry, which has even managed to get a requirement that 75 percent of food aid shipped must go on American carrier ships.   Kristine Grow, a spokesperson for USA Maritime, a group of carriers and maritime unions, argues that ocean freight is responsible for only 10.6 percent of the Food for Peace appropriation. But there are other costs associated with the requirement of buying food in America ― higher prices and the cost of shipping grain over land to and from ports.
Many humanitarian aid groups themselves back in-kind food aid.   This is in part because they are allowed to sell some of the food they get on the open market, and use the profits to fund their operations.   Some groups, like CARE, have stopped this practice, which is called monetization of food aid.  But others continue ― Catholic Relief Services, for example, is the second largest distributor of American food aid in the world after the World Food Program.  It is also raises money through monetization ― this year, $30 million of its $817 million budget.  Monetization helps humanitarian organizations  finance important work.  But it also gives them added incentive to support a system that is inefficient at best and counterproductive at worst.
American food aid to the starving is imperiled ― for Congress, it’s an easy cut.  That’s an argument for shifting to a more efficient delivery system. “You get 100 percent more assistance for the money if you make these reforms,” said Kripke.   But because the current system does serve influential American interests, changing practices is politically risky. “My concern is if you do it most economically efficient way will you maintain level of support at that funding?” said Stephanie Mercier, a former staff member of the Senate Agriculture committee who is now a consultant on agricultural policy issues.  “If you don’t, and you get $500 million instead of $1.5 billion for food aid, that’s not a positive outcome. You talk to the folks who deliver food aid and they say it’s probably more efficient if we had cash to do it.  But they’re willing to accept inefficiencies in order to have the  program.”

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/how-to-feed-the-hungry-faster/