International Herald Tribune
U.S. food aid spending is inefficient, study finds
By Celia W. Dugger
Published: March 22, 2007

WASHINGTON: The United States provides more than half the food aid that feeds hungry people around the world, but its programs are plagued by inefficiencies that have sharply reduced the amount of food being provided and slowed deliveries, the Government Accountability Office has reported.

Rising shipping, transport and logistical costs have been taking an ever larger share of the $2 billion in annual spending on food aid in recent years, contributing to a 43 percent decline in the amount of food delivered over the past five years, the office said Wednesday in a report to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Such costs, along with administration, now consume almost two-thirds of spending for the main food aid program, Food for Peace, leaving slightly more than a third of the budget to buy food.

As a result, the United States is feeding about 70 million people a year instead of the more than 90 million it fed five years ago.

“It’s stunning,” Thomas Melito, the office’s director of international affairs and trade, said. “You have to squeeze the transport and logistics costs down to increase commodities shipped to feed people. I mean, that is the purpose of the program.”

The office found that flawed planning and contracting practices, as well as inadequate coordination among various agencies and insufficient oversight had hampered the quality, timeliness and amount of food aid.

It also documented that ocean shipping was eating up a larger share of the food aid budget as the costs of moving each metric ton of food have soared to $171 last year from $123 in 2002. In contrast, the UN World Food Program pays only $100 to ship each metric ton.

By law, three-fourths of all U.S. aid must be shipped on U.S.-registered ships that employ U.S. crews. Those ships typically charge higher rates.

But the bigger picture — and one not addressed by the report — is that Europe, Australia and Canada are moving away from shipping homegrown food to Africa and Asia, and are increasingly giving cash to buy food in developing countries that are located as near as possible to areas hit by hunger crises — an approach that eliminates ocean shipping charges.

U.S. law requires that virtually all food given as aid be grown in the United States. But for the third year in a row, the Bush administration is asking Congress to allow the government to use up to a quarter of the budget of the main food aid program to buy food in developing countries.

Congress has killed the proposal in each of the past two years. And senators at the hearing on Wednesday did not seem to have warmed to the idea.