Stories
The Heart of the Problem: Tied Food Aid
As RESULTS volunteers, we are here to ask for change that is vital to helping the world's poorest. We’d like to read this brief excerpt from an article about the impact of U.S. tied food aid policies. The article is titled, “Dead Children Linked to Aid Policy in Africa Favoring Americans.” Here is how the article starts:
The bag of green peas, stamped “USAID From the American People,” took more than six months to reach Haylar Ayako.
For seven of his grandchildren, that was a lifetime.
They died as the peas journeyed from North Dakota to southern Ethiopia. During that time, the American growers, processors and transporters that profit from aid shipments were fighting off a proposal before Congress to speed deliveries by buying more from foreign producers near trouble spots. As a result of legal mandates to buy U.S. goods, the world’s most generous food relief program wasn’t fast or flexible enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia’s drought-ridden South Omo region this year.
“I am so grieved that I lost those children,” said Ayako, a Bena tribesman, speaking in his local Omotic language. “They died of the food shortage.”
The dry peas Ayako took home almost eight weeks ago had traveled more than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) by rail, ship and truck, starting 15 miles south of the Canadian border with their harvest in August 2007. Stops included Lake Charles, Louisiana; Djibouti, the small African country whose capital on the Gulf of Aden serves as a port for food aid; and Nazareth, Ethiopia, two hours south of Addis Ababa, the capital. Warehouse stays punctuated each leg until the peas finally arrived in the village of Shala-Luka.
U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved, said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.
“No one can take the high moral ground against it, so they hide behind closed doors and kill it,” he said. “It’s all done behind the scenes.”[1]
Behind the scenes, children are dying because of our inefficient and ineffective aid policies. President Bush wanted to remove some of these food aid restrictions and President Obama has also pledge to reduce tied food aid. We ask for your partnership in building support in Congress so that our U.S. tax dollarsspent on food aid actually reach those most in need.
[1] Alan Bjerga, “Dead Children Linked to Aid Policy in Africa Favoring Americans,” Bloomberg, 9 December 2008. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=aU7BLQWMss2k.
