Food Aid: When generosity isn't enough, a Tom Fox interview

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Food Aid: When generosity isn't enough, a Tom Fox interview
The U.S. sends more food aid overseas than any other nation. Are U.S. food aid policies helping the poor -- or helping to keep them poor? Tom Fox interviews Sophia Murphy, senior advisor to the Minneapolis-based Institute on Agriculture and Trade Policies to learn how U.S. food aid policies are working -- or not working.
Two years ago, Murphy co-authored a food aid report called "Time to Get it Right." The report, hailed as forward thinking, offers a set of reforms to meet changing food needs around the world.

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Episode 1: The complications of food aid (13 min.)
The United States has food resources in abundance and Americans believe that we should be sharing that. "But the whole notion that we should be feeding other people is problematic," Sophia Murphy tells Tom Fox. "One of the things that complicates food aid is that the impulse is generous and good," she says. "But the questions asked aren’t deep enough and the interests aren’t as altruistic as they set themselves up to be."
She says, "It is more important that people can feed themselves. A continent like Africa, we are inclined to see as always having been hungry. But of course it hasn’t always been hungry; it has been able to produce a tremendous amount of food over its history, and is a rich continent in many ways, and was a lot more food security in the 1960s and 1970s."

Episode 2: The changing face of food aid (19 min.)
The heart of food security is access, Murphy tells Fox. Except in emergency situations, often local markets have enough food to feed local populations. When lack infrastructure or poor communication is at the heart of the access problem, she said, "the key is making sure you have the three or five year plan to strengthen capacity to distribute their food locally rather than building dependence on food grown in the United States."

Episode 3: The future of food aid (19 min.)
Murphy says we have to start demanding that food aid programs develop and articulate better long-term vision for food security. There are emergencies that demand urgent, immediate responses, she says, but "it is important to be planning all the time. It's not good enough to say I need to get food to this person or they are going to die, because you can set up a lot of deaths down the road if you don't get the programs right and if you don't think carefully enough about what is happening."

Learn more about food aid
Web sites:
       Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
       Trade Observatory
Books:
       Food Aid After Fifty Years, by Chris Barrett and Dan Maxwell. 2005.
Briefing papers:
       U.S. Food Aid: Time to Get It Right, by Sophia Murphy and Kathy McAfee
       Improving Food Aid: What Reforms Would Yield the Highest Payoff?, Erin Lenz and Chris Barrett
       Food Aid or Hidden Dumping? Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
Articles:
       Global Good Neighbor Initiative - International Relations Center (good references)
       The writings of Edward Clay Edward Clay, a British scholar at the Overseas Development Institute