JOHANNESBURG, 5 May 2010 (IRIN) – Most major food aid donors, like the European Union, have officially opted to feed people in needy countries by means of a selection of response tools, such as cash or vouchers for food, but the US has remained the exception, and still largely ships food produced at home as aid.
The Barack Obama administration’s hands are tied by domestic policies like the Farm Bill, which governs American food aid and is updated every five years, but it is making efforts to keep up with the rest of the donors.
-We are increasing our humanitarian ‘tool kit’ through cash for local and regional procurement that can support local markets and, in some cases, reach beneficiaries sooner, Ambassador William Garvelink, Deputy Coordinator for Development at the US government’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative (GHFSI), told IRIN. The tool kit includes “voucher programmes, which means vulnerable households can purchase food directly in local markets”.
The new strategy
Soon after taking office in early 2009, the Obama administration announced that the US, the worlds lar-gest provider of food aid, would fo-cus on agricultural development in the countries it helped support, rather than having them remain recipients.
The US Depart-ment of Agriculture said improving global food security was a matter of national security, a change in mindset that came about after the global food crisis of 2007/08, when at least one government – Haiti in the nearby Caribbean – was toppled, and the number of hungry grew to a billion – a sixth of the world’s population.
The Obama administration established the GHFSI, and announced a “government-wide” global food security strategy, to be coordinated by the GHFSI and the National Security Council Interagency Policy Committee on Agriculture and Food security.
Its emphasis on supporting agriculture to wean people off food aid was informed by the realization that supporting poor communities in the developing world often did not seem to have a long-term effect of enabling them to produce their own food.
