Showdown ahead on Bush's bid for food aid reform
Source: Reuters
(Adds White House 2008 budget proposal, USAID comment) By Missy Ryan WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - The Bush administration has revived a proposal to reform food aid, touting changes it says could save 50,000 lives in a food crisis, but it remains unclear whether lawmakers will sign on to the plan. "It's a lot of inertia" standing in the way of proposed changes to U.S. food aid, said Gawain Kripke, a trade specialist at aid and advocacy group Oxfam America. Even so, the way Washington doles out food aid could be reshaped later this year when Congress writes a new farm bill, the umbrella law that sets farm policy every five years. The United States is a giant force in world efforts to feed 200 million undernourished people a year, but U.S. food aid is currently routed through a complex set of programs that marry a sometimes uncomfortable mix of commercial, political and humanitarian goals. Bush's proposal to improve the system would allow up to 25 percent of emergency "Food for Peace" aid to be bought in the country or region where a food crisis occurs, instead of requiring that U.S. companies ship U.S. crops to famine areas. The change would come as part of a proposed $1.2 billion the administration wants to spend on food aid overall in fiscal year 2008, about $80 million more than in 2006. "The U.S. is slower and has less flexibility to save lives and prevent famine," the administration said in its proposal for the 2007 farm bill, due to be replaced around September. It can take up to five months to ship U.S. aid. Sometimes aid comes too late or not at all, officials say, pointing to insufficient help for Iraq in 2003 and Lebanon in 2006. The proposed change would help the United States feed at least 1 million extra people for six months, and in the case of emergencies could save at least 50,000 lives, administration officials said. In a report last month, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization urged donor countries to end 'tied' aid, saying a third of the $600 million spend on food aid every year went to growers, processors and shippers in rich nations. TOUGH ROW TO HOE IN CONGRESS Reshaping a historic program could be difficult, as the administration found when similar plans foundered in recent years. Kripke, however, suggested the time may be ripe now because "people have had time to digest" these ideas. Chris Garza, who directs congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, a major lobbying group, predicted Bush's plan would not pass muster with lawmakers who were more interested in defending their constituents' subsidies. "There is no support on the Hill ... to do this," he said. One official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which runs the program, said chances for reform could be better this year because the administration wasn't trying to usher in changes through the yearly budget process. "This is the first opportunity we've had to bring this issue to the authorizers on Capitol Hill," he said. Ellen Levinson, who heads a coalition of aid agencies that deliver U.S. food aid, wants a pilot program to test the changes before any larger reform. Her member groups, charities like World Vision and Africare, focus their push on more overall aid for 'chronic' problem countries instead. The plan could also prove contentious because it would allow U.S. aid dollars to go to farmers from other countries. Officials promise most of the new buying would draw from developing countries or from other areas of the same country facing a localized crisis occurs, rather than wealthy countries like France. Food aid may also crop up in the Doha round of trade talks, which are advancing slowly after a half-year lull as negotiators try to reach consensus on agriculture.
| AlertNet news is provided by |  |
