As such, it can be seen that food aid is a massive means to stop and solve the issues on hunger and famines. Moreover, it is often perceived in the eyes of the vast majority that food aid is equivalent to helping the needy and helping the needy is good, thus through deductive reasoning, people come to the conclusion that food aid is generally good, but this is not quite true.
Circumstances: With Strings Attached
Between 1982 and 1990 nine U.S. economic assistance packages provided to the Costa Rican government contained a total of 357 “covenants” that made disbursement conditional on more than twenty structural changes in the domestic economy. These included eliminating a grain marketing board that assisted small farmers; slashing support prices for locally grown corn, beans, and rice; allowing more imports from the United States; easing regulations on foreign investment and capital flows; and complying with specific clauses in similar agreements signed with the World Bank and the IMF.
Such conditionality works in a carrot-and-stick fashion. When the Costa Rican congress balked at approving an outrageous new law demanded by the United States that would allow aid to bypass the government and go directly to the private sector, USAID suspended a $23 million disbursement. Ironically, this came at the very moment at which the Costa Rican Central Bank had exhausted the foreign exchange reserves needed for the daily operation of the economy. An internal USAID memo written several months before the incident occurred-which we obtained access to years later-showed just how cynical the United States can be. A top USAID administrator predicted the month in which the reserves would run dry and recommended timing a key disbursement to take advantage of that moment as leverage to guarantee that the desired law would be passed.
It was precisely the replication of changes like this-and of structural adjustment-throughout the third world that produced rising inequalities in the 1980s and 1990s. For most of the third world the 1980s were a lost decade, during which living standards of impoverished majorities fell to pre-1960s levels. Not surprisingly, this became a period of widespread economic, social, and ecological crisis. Millions of the rural and urban poor were cut out from opportunities for progress. Credit, extension, subsidies, and technical education all fell by the wayside as budgets were slashed, and the lifting of tariffs flooded local economies with imported foodstuffs often placed on the world market at prices below local costs of production. As a consequence, poor farmers were caught in a squeeze between the high price of chemicals and other farm inputs and low crop prices, often losing their lands and moving to cities.
With conditions attached and circumstances like that, do the recipients of food aid really have a choice of whether to accept or decline the offer to “help” them? I have to say no. Thus it is unethical for the richer countries to take advantage of situation like these to offer “help” to the poorer countries, purely for the sake of self-benefit, which brings me about to the point on altruism, is self-centeredness and sacrificing others for the sake of self benefit really ethical? No doubt it is in human nature for us, humans, to be self-centered, but is it really right to partake in the idea of altruism?
Clearly, the vast majority of people think that food aid is good and all for the sake of the recipient countries, but that is in fact not the case. As such we can see this misconception which has arisen due to the different human perceptions of different individuals and the way we have been exposed to only the “good” side of food aid.
Doesn’t Target the Needy
Title II development food aid is usually distributed through so-called “food-for-work” programs that hire the jobless to provide manual labor for road improvement, irrigation development, and other infrastructure projects, in exchange for food. In theory, society as a whole benefits from this sort of program-the jobless get to eat, while the rest of society gains from the public works projects. Yet a careful examination shows that food-for-work benefits the well-off disproportionally, while the poor receive no long-term gains.
An example from Haiti, where so many people are deprived of enough to eat, makes this clear. In a particular village, one family controlled the local government and community offices. When a U.S. relief agency came to the village with a food-for-work program, this same family was chosen to administer it. Jobless villagers built roads and tended the gardens of a well-to-do village leader, which took them away from their lands five days a week. The wealthy family gained benefits through the improvement of their lands, better access to markets for their produce, and increased patronage power. The workers gained temporary work, which provided food during the slack agricultural season, at the cost of not attending to their own plots, but they did not gain long-term, fundamental changes or a sustainable lessening of their poverty and hunger. Similar stories dot the landscape of food-for-work programs.
Surely, if the target recipients of the food aid do not benefit from it at all, then what is the point in food aid? The rich and powerful who are given responsibility over these projects clearly adhere to the principle Altruism, where they place self-benefits ahead of bring harm upon others. And surely this is not in the least ethical nor morally right.
Forestall Development & Alleviate Hunger
The inflow of food aid-even in many emergency cases-has proved time and again to be detrimental to local farm economies. Cheap, subsidized, or free U.S. grains undercut the prices of locally produced food, driving local farmers out of business and into cities.
Somalia is only one case in point. When a civil war began in 1991, domestic transportation was interrupted, precipitating a food crisis in large regions of the country. The UN estimated that almost 4.5 million people-over half of the estimated total population of the country-were threatened by severe undernutrition and malnutrition-related diseases at that time.
Yet in December of 1992, when U.S. troops landed under the UN banner to distribute food and achieve a cease-fire, the worst of the famine was already over. The death rate had dropped from three hundred per day to seventy, and good crops of rice, sorghum, and corn from the agricultural regions of Afgoye and the Shebell River valley had already been harvested. Nonetheless, food aid poured in, driving down the prices received by local farmers for their harvest by a whopping 75 percent. Sometimes they couldn’t sell their crops even at the lower prices. Mrs. Faaduma Abdi Arush, a Somali farmer, tried to sell her corn to six relief agencies. None would buy it, as the U.S. government only provided them with funds to buy American food from U.S. companies. Many Somali farmers, unable to make a living by selling their produce, were forced to abandon their farms and join the lines for handouts of imported food.
This kind of food aid is still about the injection of food into the economy of recipient countries, which results in the distortion of food markets. Just as it does with other forms of food aid, this distortion weakens the local food system, drives farmers off the land, and ultimately creates long-term dependency on imported U.S. agricultural commodities. These effects remain.
From this, we can relate to the Area of Knowing: Economics. As in economic theory, this intervention by donor countries prevents the market from acting freely through interactions of demand and supply. And thus, destroys the efficient free market system, causing farmers to be unable to sell their produce due to sudden surplus in food grains.
What we perceive to be true might not necessarily be true as seen from the above example, it can be grossly inaccurate due to different perceptions brought about by surroundings and culture, what we are exposed to.
Political Tool
US food aid policies are still being used as a political tool, but unlike during the Cold War when it was used to support friendly regimes, it is now used against rogue states in the War on Terror.
Shipments of food aid to Afghanistan and Iraq before the invasions skyrocketed and was part of a media propaganda effort both domestically to US audiences as well as to foster support within those countries. Shortly after the invasions were over and such media attention diverted, such aid fell again
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and primarily food aid, has been used by the invasion forces as a public relations measure to win domestic and international public opinion and the hearts of the people living in the war zones. In October and November 2001, TVs worldwide showed the airdrop of food rations by US aircrafts on Afghanistan. A few tons of food were dropped, which was insignificant compared to the monthly national requirement of more than 50,000 tons needed by the Afghan population at that time.
AOK: Politics. The placement of public opinion of the country above all else, includes the basic core of saving lives, politics over the needy. Is this trail of thought and action really necessary and for the good of the society? This goes for what the government promises its people, to ensure better living conditions, but is at the sacrifice of the recipient countries, is it really worth the trade?
Usage of media as propaganda
Many times, on the tv or in newspapers and magazines, pictures of hungry and skinny malnourished people are shown, bones sticking out of their body. Videos of donor countries dropping food aid in recipient countries are also often depicted in the news. All these implants in viewers a sense of sympathy and pity towards these malnourished people and influences viewers to perceive that the richer countries are doing all they can to help combat hunger in these countries, when the fact is absolutely the opposite. Media propaganda affects emotions, which in turn will affect how people perceive things, thus is a major factor.
