According to the United Nations, 6.7 million Haitians — two-thirds of the population — “struggle to meet their own food needs on a regular basis.”
A consensus has formed that something needs to be done to end the unintended consequence of food aid that actually ends up hurting some of the world’s most vulnerable people in developing nations like Haiti, where local farmers can’t compete against less expensive U.S. crops.
Farmers in Haiti are joining foreign aid organizations calling on the United States to stop sending American crops to Haiti. American crops are so heavily subsidized that when they arrive in places like Haiti they sell at below-market cost, undercutting local farmers.
“Unfortunately U.S. policy doesn’t consider first the political interests of farmers abroad, but of its own,” said Camille Chalmers, director of a Haitian farmers’ association. “We have many people who are hungry. We have people who can only eat once a day,” Chalmers said. “It’s unjustifiable in a country with the capacity to feed itself.”
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), that oversees foreign aid, admitted the program was flawed, urging Congress to permit the agency to send cash rather than food to nations in need. Agency officials believe they could feed 2 to 4 million more people per year if they were allowed to spend more of their budget on procuring food aid locally in the countries where it is needed (another study put the figure of additional beneficiaries even higher, at 4 to 10 million people).
The U.S. wasted $219 million over a three-year period through its food aid monetization program, by which U.S. crops are sent abroad on American-owned ships and sold to generate revenue for aid operations, according to a 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). Currently 15 percent of U.S. food aid must be monetized in this way.
“Ocean transportation represents about a third of the cost to procure and ship commodities for monetization, and legal requirements to ship 75 percent of the commodities on U.S.-flag vessels further increase costs,” according to the 2011 report.
Yet a U.S. Senate having been heavily lobbied by the shipping industry rejected most of the proposed reforms in a June 2013 vote that left “the status quo in place, which means we will continue to spend more food aid dollars to reach fewer hungry people around the world,” wrote Timi Gerson, Director of Advocacy for the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), which has led the push for reform along with Oxfam. Instead of adopting the full reforms, the Senate passed a watered-down version that would allow just 20 percent of Food for Peace funding to be spent on local food procurement.
Since 1954 the United States has spent more than $100 billion on Title II food aid programs. The U.S. is the world’s largest food aid donor, giving about half of all global food aid, according to the GAO. But the U.S. is virtually alone in the world when it comes to so-called ‘food dumping,’ or sending surplus or heavily subsidized food abroad en masse.
The World Socialist Movement believe every person on this Earth has the right to be fed. Technology already affords an abundant food supply to achieve this. We will not be able to feed future generations if we do so at the neglect of the very resources – the land, water and air – that sustain us. Technology allows more efficient production that's made it possible for farmers to feed more people, while consuming fewer natural resources and generating less animal waste. Socialists commit ourselves to ensuring that a global supply of safe and abundant food can become a reality in our lifetime. Socialists have come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult and deplorable conditions, and animals are produced as if they were inanimate and not a living species. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system.
A consensus has formed that something needs to be done to end the unintended consequence of food aid that actually ends up hurting some of the world’s most vulnerable people in developing nations like Haiti, where local farmers can’t compete against less expensive U.S. crops.
Farmers in Haiti are joining foreign aid organizations calling on the United States to stop sending American crops to Haiti. American crops are so heavily subsidized that when they arrive in places like Haiti they sell at below-market cost, undercutting local farmers.
“Unfortunately U.S. policy doesn’t consider first the political interests of farmers abroad, but of its own,” said Camille Chalmers, director of a Haitian farmers’ association. “We have many people who are hungry. We have people who can only eat once a day,” Chalmers said. “It’s unjustifiable in a country with the capacity to feed itself.”
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), that oversees foreign aid, admitted the program was flawed, urging Congress to permit the agency to send cash rather than food to nations in need. Agency officials believe they could feed 2 to 4 million more people per year if they were allowed to spend more of their budget on procuring food aid locally in the countries where it is needed (another study put the figure of additional beneficiaries even higher, at 4 to 10 million people).
The U.S. wasted $219 million over a three-year period through its food aid monetization program, by which U.S. crops are sent abroad on American-owned ships and sold to generate revenue for aid operations, according to a 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). Currently 15 percent of U.S. food aid must be monetized in this way.
“Ocean transportation represents about a third of the cost to procure and ship commodities for monetization, and legal requirements to ship 75 percent of the commodities on U.S.-flag vessels further increase costs,” according to the 2011 report.
Yet a U.S. Senate having been heavily lobbied by the shipping industry rejected most of the proposed reforms in a June 2013 vote that left “the status quo in place, which means we will continue to spend more food aid dollars to reach fewer hungry people around the world,” wrote Timi Gerson, Director of Advocacy for the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), which has led the push for reform along with Oxfam. Instead of adopting the full reforms, the Senate passed a watered-down version that would allow just 20 percent of Food for Peace funding to be spent on local food procurement.
Since 1954 the United States has spent more than $100 billion on Title II food aid programs. The U.S. is the world’s largest food aid donor, giving about half of all global food aid, according to the GAO. But the U.S. is virtually alone in the world when it comes to so-called ‘food dumping,’ or sending surplus or heavily subsidized food abroad en masse.
The World Socialist Movement believe every person on this Earth has the right to be fed. Technology already affords an abundant food supply to achieve this. We will not be able to feed future generations if we do so at the neglect of the very resources – the land, water and air – that sustain us. Technology allows more efficient production that's made it possible for farmers to feed more people, while consuming fewer natural resources and generating less animal waste. Socialists commit ourselves to ensuring that a global supply of safe and abundant food can become a reality in our lifetime. Socialists have come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult and deplorable conditions, and animals are produced as if they were inanimate and not a living species. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system.
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