In het dagblad De Morgen verscheen op 20 augustus een artikel met als titel: “Amerikaanse voedselhulp ‘vernietigend’ voor Afrika”.

Hier volgt eerst het artikel uit De Morgen en daarna het artikel uit de New York Times.

Amerikaanse voedselhulp 'vernietigend' voor Afrika
door Barbara Debusschere

Hulporganisatie Care weigert 45 miljoen dollar van regering VS
Een van 's werelds grootste hulporganisaties, het Amerikaanse Care, weigert 45 miljoen dollar aan voedselhulp van de Amerikaanse regering. De manier waarop de hulp wordt georganiseerd spekt de VS- landbouwindustrie en houdt de Afrikanen voor wie de hulp is bedoeld arm, stelt Care.

Door de Afrikaanse markten te overspoelen ondermijnen de VS op lange termijn het werk van de kleine boeren daar, zo stelt hulporganisatie Care.

Care boycot zo het controversiële, maar al jarenlang toegepaste Amerikaanse beleid om binnenlandse voedseloverschotten in derdewereldlanden lokaal te verkopen. 'Onze ngo's zijn kritiekloze onderaannemers van de regering geworden', klinkt het.

Het gerespecteerde Care staat bekend om zijn emotionele oproepen om medemensen die honger lijden te helpen. Dat de organisatie nu de zowat 45 miljoen dollar aan overheidshulp weigert, lijkt dan ook contradictorisch. Maar Care wijst erop dat in de overheidshulp zelf een tegenstelling schuilt, die, wat de organisatie betreft, niet langer te dulden is.
Voor jaarlijks ongeveer 280 miljoen koopt de Amerikaanse overheid landbouwoverschotten op. Dat wordt dan op Amerikaanse schepen naar behoeftige landen gebracht. Ngo's moeten het daar verkopen om hun kas te spekken en hun hulpprogramma's te financieren. 'Monetization', heet dat.

Experts en ook het Amerikaanse Rekenhof bestempelen die methode, die al een tiental jaar in zwang is, als 'niet efficiënt'. Omdat het daarenboven de lokale economie verstoort, stapt Care eruit. "Ik denk niet dat de Amerikanen die genereus geld storten willen dat mensen in derdewereldlanden daardoor honger lijden", zo formuleert Carewoordvoerster Alina Labrada het.

De Keniaanse boer Walter Otieno is een van hen, zo schrijft The New York Times. Vier van zijn twaalf ondervoede kinderen zijn de afgelopen jaren gestorven. Otieno kon met hulp van Care zonnebloemen kweken en de oogst verkopen aan een lokale olieraffinaderij. Die koopt jaarlijks echter ook tonnen Amerikaanse sojaolie op. Het betreft overschotten van een Amerikaanse sojagigant, door de overheid opgekocht als ontwikkelingshulp en verscheept naar Kenia, waar Amerikaanse ngo's dus genoodzaakt zijn ze op de lokale markt te verkopen.

Omdat sojaolie een concurrentieproduct is voor Otieno's zonnebloemolie, en omdat de Amerikaanse olie in grote hoeveelheden en goedkoop kan worden aangekocht, blijft de kleine onderneming van Otieno zeer kwetsbaar en in het beste geval ter plaatse trappelen.

Door de lokale markten zo te overspoelen, ondermijnen de VS op lange termijn het werk van de kleine boeren die de kern van een stabiele economie zouden kunnen vormen, zo stelt Care. Daarnaast is het systeem risicovol, omdat er verhandeld moet worden door tussenpersonen. Direct geld geven aan de ngo's zou beter zijn, zo klinkt het.

"Dat is wat Europa, na een strijd aangevoerd door de ngo's, wel doet", reageert Bodgan Vanden Berghe van 11.11.11. "Het Amerikaanse systeem heeft perverse effecten. De hoeveelheid hulp hangt af van de Amerikaanse oogsten. Als de lokale oogsten groot zijn, zitten Afrikanen die allerlei andere vormen van hulp zouden kunnen gebruiken met voedsel dat niemand wil en dat op de zwarte markt wordt verkocht, waardoor boeren hun eigen oogst niet kwijt raken. Het is een moedig en belangrijk politiek signaal van Care daar uit te stappen. Het zal nu toch al lastiger worden voor de VS om de overschotten te slijten."

Vorige pogingen om de wetgeving daarover te veranderen zijn in het Congres mislukt, grotendeels onder druk van de machtige landbouw- en scheepslobby's, zo klinkt het. Jaarlijks strijken beide sectoren dan ook vele dollars op dankzij monetization.
Toch is niet iedereen het eens met Care. "Hoewel het kan dat het systeem de markt verstoort in arme landen", zo reageert een overheidswoordvoerder, "proberen wij om dat effect te vermijden. Het uiteindelijke resultaat is wel positief." Vijftien andere ngo's reageren gezamenlijk eveneens dat de positieve effecten groter zijn dan de negatieve.

Voormalig president Jimmy Carter, die een hulporganisatie heeft voor Afrikaanse boeren, treedt Care en specialist Peter Matlon wel bij. "Jarenlang hebben ngo's bewijs dat dit systeem schade aanricht genegeerd", zegt Matlon. Carter voegt daaraan toe: "Dit slechte systeem is ook blijven bestaan omdat de hulporganisaties die er geld mee krijgen het zijn blijven verdedigen." Volgens George Odo van Care is het "de trieste realiteit" dat de ngo's door het systeem "de onderaannemers van de regering" zijn geworden. "Dat heeft onze mogelijkheid om kritiek te geven gecompromitteerd."

Onderstaand het bericht van 16 augustus 2007 in de New York Times:

CARE Turns Down Federal Funds for Food Aid
By CELIA W. DUGGE, August 16, 2007; New York Times

MALELA, Kenya ‘CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

The charity says it will phase out its use of the practice by 2009. But it has already deeply divided the world of food aid and has spurred growing criticism of the practice as Congress considers a new farm bill.

‘If someone wants to help you, they shouldn’t do it by destroying the very thing that they’re trying to promote,’ said George Odo, a CARE official who grew disillusioned with the practice while supervising the sale of American wheat and vegetable oil in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

Under the system, the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

Neither the Bush administration nor members of Congress are looking to undo the practice, which has gone on for more than a decade. In fact, some of the non-profit groups say it has worked well and are pressing for sharp increases in the amount of American food shipped for sale and distribution to support development programs.

The Christian charity World Vision and 14 other groups, which call themselves the Alliance for Food Aid, say that CARE is mistaken; they say the system works because it keeps hard currency in poor countries, can help prevent food price spikes in those countries and does not hurt their farmers. Not least, they argue, it also pays for their antipoverty programs.

But some people active in trying to help Africa’s farmers are critical of the practice. Former President Jimmy Carter, whose Atlanta-based Carter Center uses private money to help African farmers be more productive, said in an interview that it was a flawed system that had survived partly because the charities that received money from it defended it.

Agribusiness and shipping interest groups have tremendous political influence, but charitable groups are influential, too, Mr. Carter said, because ‘they speak from the standpoint of angels.’

Some charities that champion the system bristle at such suggestions. Their allies in Congress say that maritime and agribusiness interests are essential allies for programs to aid the hungry.

‘Sure it’s self-interest if staying in business to help the hungry is self-interested,’ said Avram E. Guroff, a senior official at ACDI/VOCA, which ranked sixth in such sales last year. ‘We’re not lining our pockets.’

But Peter J. Matlon, a Nairobi-based agricultural economist and a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, said in an interview that converting American commodities into cash for development was a case of ‘the tail wagging the dog,’ with domestic farm policies in the United States shaping hunger-fighting methods abroad.

The nongovernmental organizations ‘have been ignoring this evidence for years that there’s a negative impact on the prices farmers receive,’ Mr. Matlon said. He is involved in an effort by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, financed with an initial $150 million, to increase the productivity of Africa’s farmers.

The Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress, also concluded this year that the system was ‘inherently inefficient.’ CARE and Catholic Relief Services ‘who rank first and second in money raised through the current system ‘say they recover only 70 to 80 percent of what the United States paid for the commodities and shipping.

But while Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children, which ranked fifth last year in such sales, agree with CARE that the system is inefficient, they also say they will not stop converting American food into money unless Congress replaces the lost revenues with cash. They help poor people with the money, they say.

The experiences of Walter Otieno, a grizzled Kenyan farmer in mud-stained pants, illustrate the paradoxes of paying for rural development through sales of American farm goods.

Over the years, he had watched 4 of his 12 children die of measles, which is more often fatal for the malnourished. He has had difficulty growing enough to feed his family. ‘My children were skinny, and their skin was dull,’ he said.

Then last year he began growing a small patch of sunflowers on a hill sloping down to Lake Victoria in the village of Malela, with help from a program that CARE finances through the sale of American farm goods here.

A CARE extension worker, Rosemary Ogala, taught him and dozens of farmers in his group where to buy sunflower seed, when to plant it, how to space the rows and when to harvest.

CARE has also connected them to a ready market: the Kenyan company Bidco Oil Refineries, whose managers say they could more than quintuple the amount of sunflower seed they buy from Kenyan farmers to process into vegetable oil.

The profit Mr. Otieno earned from the crop rescued his family from dire poverty. Now, with his new earnings, he is able to play with his sons and daughters, who are plump on eggs and milk, at the family’s general store, a tiny shack stocked with goods financed by the sunflower sales.

The question is whether small-scale sunflower farmers like Mr. Otieno would have done better if non-profit groups had not sold tons of American crude soybean oil, a competing product, to the same Kenyan company that purchased Mr. Otieno’s meager crop. CARE and some other experts say the answer is a clear yes.

In 2003, Bidco bought almost 9,000 metric tons of crude soybean oil sold to the United States by Bunge, the agribusiness giant.
Altogether that year, Bunge sold the United States 15,180 metric tons of oil for resale by the nonprofits in Kenya. A metric ton equals 1,000 kilograms, or 2,204.62 pounds.

American law requires aid groups to establish that such sales will not discourage production by local farmers, but some critics say it is a conflict of interest to ask the nonprofits to select experts to make this determination.

In this case, the nonprofits hired a consultant who advised them in 2003 that they could safely sell up to 38,000 metric tons of vegetable oil in Kenya, which mostly depends on imports. That amount, about 10 percent of the country’s consumption, was ‘negligible,’ he said.

But Mr. Odo of CARE disagreed, saying in a memo that the importation from the United States ‘reduces the growth in the local market.’

Ultimately, CARE’s decision to phase out such sales evolved from a senior manager’s change of heart. Daniel G. Maxwell, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University, was a food security adviser for CARE in Nairobi who saw sales of American food as an imperfect, but useful way to raise money.

He knew firsthand, however, how risky it was to manage projects financed in fluctuating commodities markets. When prices sank, CARE had too little money and was sometimes forced to lay off workers. Mr. Maxwell said he also strongly suspected that buyers had offered too little for the farm goods, knowing they were dealing with aid workers who were novices in commodities trading.

As he and Christopher B. Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, researched a book, ‘Food Aid After Fifty Years,’ his doubts deepened.

‘Not only was it a pain the neck,’ he said, but there were possible serious effects ‘that would be damaging to farmers and trade.’

In 2004, Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Barrett made the case against the practice at CARE headquarters in Atlanta. They recalled that the senior vice president, Patrick Carey, who has since died, cautioned them that leaving the system would be like ‘an act of partial suicide’ for the nonprofits. Nonetheless, CARE committed to the shift the following year.

CARE says it will try to raise money to replace the lost revenues from philanthropies and other donors, and by making its own aid programs profitable.

One of those programs could be seen in action one recent afternoon in the Kenyan village of Poche. CARE has helped local women bypass local middlemen to sell pineapples at better prices in Nairobi’s big supermarkets, 10 hours away by road.

One woman, Doreen Amimo, a 52-year-old grandmother, has seen her weekly earnings rise to $18 from $11. She can now afford to feed and clothe an orphaned niece and nephew.

‘And I never lack sugar in the house,’ she said, ‘and we can have tea and milk every morning!’

These farmers are selling their fruit to a small company, Vegcare, that CARE and a Kenyan company started with an investment of $170,000 in 2005. Vegcare advises farmers on how to grow pineapples that meet supermarket standards, buys them and trucks them to a wholesaler in Nairobi that supplies Nakumatt, a Kenyan supermarket chain.

CARE’s idea is that a profitable business is more likely than a charitable venture to survive when foreign aid runs out.

‘What’s happened to humanitarian organizations over the years is that a lot of us have become contractors on behalf of the government,’ said Mr. Odo of CARE. ‘That’s sad but true. It compromised our ability to speak up when things went wrong.’

via IATP, 070816 

Nog een tweede bericht dat meer van algemene aard is:

SOURCE: World Politics Review, USA, Aug. 29, 2007
AUTHOR: Lauren Gelfand
URL:    http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=1074

REJECTION OF U.S. FOOD AID BY NGO SIGNALS CHANGE IN GLOBAL HUNGER POLICY

(Lauren Gelfand is a freelance journalist and commentator with a special interest in African issues.)

LONDON -- Advocates of a global overhaul of efforts to meet the needs of the world’s 850 million chronically hungry people have received a boost with the decision by CARE, a top U.S. aid organization, to walk away from tens of millions of dollars in annual U.S. federal financing.

In opting out of the mechanism by which donated U.S. food aid is transported overseas and sold in local markets to fund anti-poverty programs -- a decades-old process known as monetization -- CARE joins a growing number of international non-governmental and governmental groups demanding an end to a policy they say can be harmful to the countries being helped.

”It’s not the best way to use food, to generate cash, and it’s quite clear that it’s not cost-effective,” said David Kauck, a senior technical advisor with CARE USA about the organization’s decision to completely phase out monetization by 2009, which made headlines earlier this month with CARE’s announcement it would forego $45 million in federal funding this year.

”There is a host of economic literature that says monetization has unintended and harmful consequences overseas,” Kauck told World Politics Review in an exclusive interview.

”And after much due diligence, CARE reached the conclusion that the practice is inconsistent with what we wanted to achieve.”

Despite being the world’s largest supplier of food aid -- some $2 billion annually or the equivalent of four million metric tons of food commodities -- the United States has attached a sheaf of conditions and caveats to its donations through its development arm USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that critics contend help to do more for the domestic agriculture markets than for the depressed and impoverished countries that are the main targets for U.S. food aid.

Because of the way the current U.S. food aid program is structured, U.S. commodity suppliers earn an 11 percent premium above commercial prices for food aid purchases, according to the development agency Oxfam.

And those commodity suppliers are far from being family farms: a U.S. Government Accountability Office study noted that just 18 U.S. companies were deemed eligible to bid for the food-aid contracts, with four of the country’s largest agribusinesses -- Cargill, Archers Daniel Midland/Farmland, Louis Dreyfus and Kalama Export Company -- earning some $28 million in food aid contracts in March/April 2003 alone.

Shipping and transport from the United States is also a costly process that drains needed funds from the actual provision of food aid. U.S. legislation requires that 75 percent of all food aid shipments be sent aboard U.S.-flagged carriers, which tend to be more expensive than other vessels plying the world’s seas and skies.

A GAO report commissioned by U.S. Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Saxby Chambliss (D-Ga.) in April this year found that the cost of transportation -- not food -- now represents 65 percent of the total expenditure for the largest U.S. emergency food aid program.

”At current U.S. food aid budget levels, every $10 per metric ton reduction in freight rates could feed almost 850,000 more people during an average hungry season,” the report concluded.

Noted Margie Morard, the food security advisor for Oxfam in West Africa, where a chronic malnutrition problem in the landlocked country of Niger deteriorated into a full-scale food crisis in 2005:”By the time all the costs are figured in, it’s like every dollar worth of food ends up costing three dollars to get to the people who need it. That’s an unreasonable level of inefficiency, not to mention the fact that it just takes so long to arrive that it can sometimes cause real problems for local markets.”

The impact of the imported food aid on local markets was a major factor behind CARE USA’s decision to step back from monetization, as was the sheer complexity of food trading in countries with damaged or insufficient infrastructure.

”Fundamentally, it put us in the business of being traders and we are not traders,” said Kauck. ”That’s a difficult and demanding business, and we [international NGOs] are not the best people to be involved in that business.”

Importing food into vulnerable markets can breed a number of problems, not the least of which is commercial displacement of local agricultural products. Local producers are unable to compete with the imported products and small traders find themselves priced out of their own markets.

Price spikes and their potential to have a devastating impact on already struggling local markets is one of the reasons why organizations like the U.N.’s World Food Programme, the world’s leading distributor of food assistance, are carefully researching local and regional sources for the agricultural products needed during emergencies.

”WFP increasingly purchases food locally whenever possible; 70 percent of all our purchased food is bought in the developing world, because it allows us to move food more quickly and cost-effectively to the people who need it most,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for WFP in Africa.

”WFP’s intention is always to stimulate local agricultural markets and avoid any negative impact.”

Cash donations, rather than food aid, will help strengthen those local markets, said Oxfam’s Morard, and help traders and consumers deal with the normal ebbs and flows of market fluctuations in typically agrarian countries such as Niger.

”It all really depends on the economics of what a country’s capacity is to absorb imported food without seeing a drop in the retail price for local producers,” she said from Dakar, Senegal.

”For example, in 2005 in West Africa, if international governments [like the United States] made cash donations rather than food aid, it would have helped to strengthen normal market linkages and allowed [international NGOs] to work with local traders to build their capacity and ensure they had that access to markets.”

CARE’s Kauck was careful not to consider local food purchases as some sort of magic bullet, however, particularly in countries vulnerable to drought or other natural fluctuations in market availability of agricultural products.

”The key is to have the flexibility to tailor aid to specific circumstances, and right now, that will require a fundamental rethink of the way the U.S. government approaches the problem of hunger,” he said.

But while the U.S. government is the largest player in the delivery of food aid, it is far from being the only body involved that requires a fundamental rethink in its approach to hunger.

The current approach focuses on emergencies -- the famines and food crises that make headlines and inspire star-studded concerts and celebrity pleas to Feed the World. But without attention to the root causes of chronic hunger and poverty, long-term economic analysis of markets and climate and sustained commitments to development that are done in concert with local governments, there will be very little change in the food aid game.

Some governments are taking matters into their own hands -- and moving to dictate how aid can come into their countries. Zambia, for example, faced bilateral pressure from the United States as well as from WFP in 2004 to accept genetically modified food aid and refused.

Niger, too, has stood defiant in the wake of the 2005 food crisis in how food aid is to be administered to its citizens, the world’s poorest according to the U.N. Human Development Index.

The government has made its disapproval of Food-for-Work programs operated by international NGOs known, believing that they undermine the country’s ability to ensure its own food sovereignty in making people dependent on handouts. Rather than food aid, the government wants to ensure that it can subsidize food purchases by consumers and replenish cereal stocks all over the country, not just in the breadbasket south.

Senior members of the administration of President Mamadou Tandja are also currently in talks with U.S. government officials about some three thousand metric tons of U.S. cereals already in Niger that have yet to be distributed -- amid optimistic reports that the country’s own harvests are on track for good yields. Should the U.S. food aid enter the market, it could hinder the recovery of the country’s own agricultural production.

”It is totally legitimate that the government be the first line in dealing with a country’s food needs and we, as international NGOs should be there, building the government’s capacity to do so, coming in only when it is critical,” said a Niger-based aid specialist.

”We should be there to technically inform governments and get out, not to make people dependent on food aid. Because that’s where the real troubles start.”

via GENET, Sept  4, 2007