November 21, 2005

This Thanksgiving, while millions of Americans are sitting at tables overflowing with food, children will be starving in Niger, southern Sudan and the earthquake-damaged regions of Pakistan.

Each year, 6.5 million children die from hunger-related causes -- that's one child every five seconds.

They are dying not because the world produces too little food. There is plenty to go around. But the food is not reaching all of those in need.

Food aid is one response to combat this hunger. The United States ships millions of tons of food each year to developing countries, and yet hunger prevails. One reason is because of the way the United States distributes this aid.

Instead of giving priority to feeding starving stomachs, the focus of U.S. food aid is on fattening pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies.

For example, Horizon Milling, a joint venture of Cargill and CHS Inc., has sold $1.09 billion of grain for food aid operations to the U.S. government since 1995.

The second player, the shipping industry, is supported by the 1985 Farm Bill, which requires that at least 75 percent of U.S. food aid be shipped by U.S. vessels.

This preferential treatment to food produced in the United States and transported by U.S. shipping companies makes U.S. food aid the most expensive in the world. The premiums paid to suppliers and shippers raise the cost of food aid by more than 100 percent compared to local purchases. What's more, this requirement delays delivery of emergency food aid by nearly five months.

Recognizing this, the European Union procures a major share of its food aid -- 90 percent in 2004 -- in developing countries themselves. Canada increased local and regional purchases from 10 percent to 50 percent this September. But the United States still avoids local and regional purchases.

Starting next year, the White House and the U.S. Agency for International Development have proposed to spend one quarter of the food-aid budget to buy food grown by local or regional producers.

But House and Senate leaders have rejected this recommendation. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, warns bluntly that buying food aid overseas would erode congressional support for famine fighting programs. "It must come from American farmers so it will circulate through the American economy," he said.

Polls show that most Americans believe the largest federal expenditure is foreign aid. But the truth is that foreign aid accounts for less than half of 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget.

Americans are more generous than that, as the outpouring of donations after the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the South Asian earthquake demonstrated.

But the public must also do more by challenging the lawmakers who make U.S. food policy.

Food aid must be kept separate from corporate interests. And it ought to come from local and regional sources.

What's more, rather than dumping food aid from the skies, the United States should work with local farmers in developing countries so they can provide for their own populations. More, not less, aid for rural development is necessary.

Policies that help affected countries develop their own agricultural sectors actually feed more people and decrease developing countries' dependence on aid programs in the long run.

This Thanksgiving, we cannot eliminate global hunger, but we can vow to reform our nation's policies so that fewer children die every day from starvation.

Anuradha Mittal is the director of the Oakland Institute (www.oaklandinstitute.org), a policy think tank whose mission is to promote fair debate and increase public participation on critical economic and social issues. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.