Teaching other nations to cultivate more and better so they may be weaned off U.S. assistance in lieu of food aid - see below.

 CQ WEEKLY,  IN FOCUS
 March 16, 2009 ‚ Page 589
 Helping Foreign Farmers to Help Themselves
    By Aliya Sternstein, CQ Staff

    American food aid has long been a simple thing, at least structurally speaking: Take surplus crops grown in the United States and send them to countries where people are hungry but don't have the capacity to produce all their own food.

    But that equation is about to be shaken up, to judge by the consensus emerging among policy makers and experts on world hunger. In the past month, an array of lawmakers and experts from across the political spectrum have proposed legislation and policy shifts designed to advance agriculture development - teaching other nations to cultivate more and better so they may be weaned off U.S. assistance - to the forefront of the food aid agenda. The flurry of recommendations is timed to influence the writing of the federal budget and spending plans for fiscal 2010, which starts in October, in the hopes of winning over an Obama administration that hasn't yet indicated a strong stance on the question.

    Much of the present campaign focuses on Africa and South Asia, where hunger is most endemic. Commodity-based aid has only bred steeper dependence on external food aid throughout those regions, experts say. The United States has been spending 20 times as much on food aid for Africa as it has spent on teaching Africans to feed themselves, according to a policy proposal released last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. In addition, the group reports, inflation-adjusted federal spending on foreign agriculture development has shrunk about 85 percent since the mid-1980s, to about $60 million two fiscal years ago.

    The idea is as old as one of the most- rehearsed Chinese proverbs: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. And it's gained some influential advocates on Capitol Hill ‚ led by Indiana's Richard G. Lugar, who's not only the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but also holds the No. 2 GOP seat on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry panel. Citing the Chicago Council research, Lugar argues the time is ripe for a second Green Revolution - the aid initiative from the 1950s into the 1980s that sent high-yield crops and seed strains, together with training in modern farming techniques - to the developing world.

    The Chicago Council is advancing a series of proposals to redirect aid policy toward agriculture development. It contends that some of the work can be done without additional budget outlays - by reconfiguring the priorities of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, or expanding the range of projects funded to improve rural infrastructure by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, created by the Bush administration in part to boost private-sector involvement in foreign aid. But the council also proposes $340 million in new funding for next year - which would amount to about 2 percent of what's being spent during fiscal 2009 on all non-military foreign assistance ‚rising to $1 billion after five years.

    Green Revolution 2.0

    Lugar has proposed creating a so-called hunger czar at the White House who would work to pump up agriculture development aid abroad and coordinate policy across government agencies. Reversing the long decline in funding "requires coordination and leadership at the top of the administration, " he said, and this new official would be someone "who directs the traffic, who is sensitized in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy."

    His bill would authorize $10 billion over five fiscal years, much of it to train farmers abroad to better feed their own populations. It also would link U.S. land-grant universities with communities in Africa and Southeast Asia to strengthen research capacity abroad.

    Green Revolution policies fell off the aid agenda once they were largely declared a success in the 1980s - but recent global spikes in food prices point up major regional shortages, suggesting plenty of international agricultural development work still needs to be done, experts say. Making emergency commodity shipments the backbone of U.S. food aid is a bad idea, said Dan Glickman, an Agriculture secretary in the Clinton administration and a main author of the Chicago Council report. The real problem "is a lack of infrastructure, lack of roads, lack of fertilizer, lack of technical assistance," added Glickman, who's now the movie industry's top lobbyist. "I think that our country has had the belief that agriculture policy is not a strong part of relieving the problems of world poverty."

    Lawmakers want to plug those infrastructure and training gaps without also jeopardizing emergency food aid programs. "You want to be able to help in the short-term but also to build the long-term facility that the developing world should have to feed their people with their own infrastructure, " said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who sits on both Foreign Relations and Agriculture and is Lugar's cosponsor on the food-czar bill.

    But both are quick to point out that their proposal would not dismantle the commodity donation provisions in last year's farm bill - an enormous financial help to the farmers who cultivate the commodities purchased by the government and then shipped abroad.

    In the House, Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern and Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson have helped assemble a coalition of more than 30 associations to combat global hunger. Those lawmakers, who also co-chair the Congressional Hunger Center, hope the new group will help them win support for the same two-pronged approach the senators advocate: emergency drop-offs overseas coupled with cash to help poor countries improve their own farming systems.

    A White House spokesman said last week that the president hasn't taken a position on the matter. But President Obama has offered some encouraging, if vague, reassurances to the lawmakers and advocates who want to put farming first in the panoply of aid objectives. In his inaugural address, for example, he declared, "To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow, to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds." And his 2010 budget outline for foreign aid calls for "significantly increasing funding" for "key" programs, including energy initiatives, programs addressing climate change, agriculture investments and the Peace Corps - in that order. But it will be next month before he specifies what dollar amounts he has in mind.

    The budget plan does propose one funding innovation: It would boost funding for humanitarian programs in the regular appropriations process, effectively instituting an ongoing crisis fund for aid.

    In Search of Specifics

    Other anti-hunger advocacy groups want to see many more specific measures implemented to bolster foreign farm development. In addition to the White House food czar, for example, the Alliance for Global Food Security wants aid to go initially to infants and young mothers.

    "Pregnant and lactating women, infants and children under age 2: If you target them, you get your best bang for the buck," in securing a population's health and productivity, said Ellen Levinson, the alliance's executive director. "Most of our money for food aid is used to respond to dire emergencies, so we would like to see more cash assistance, development assistance to support long-term production and targeted nutrition."

    The omnibus fiscal 2009 spending package enacted last week already includes an account for international disaster aid that is authorized to go toward local food purchases. The alliance wants that money increased and extended to support local initiatives, such as vegetable gardens and water conservation, that can soften the blow of food crises.

    The Chicago Council also argues for a greatly expanded program to subsidize the tuitions of foreign students who study agriculture at U.S. universities. The council suggests a budget for African and South Asian student aid that would be phased in to provide $6 million the first year and $10 million by the fifth year. Total funding would be $90 million over a decade.

    But even if Obama does issue a call to action, U.S. development aid could be hobbled by traditional legislative and bureaucratic turf wars - and a paucity of administrative expertise since the Green Revolution's lapse. "I wish it were less controversial, " Glickman said of the agricultural development proposal, noting that USAID, which many advocates look to for implementing greater development goals, has been experiencing major attrition. Since the collapse of the Cold War, USAID has lost roughly 2,000 employees, the council's report says, and now only has just more than 20 agricultural specialists on staff.

    Meanwhile, some farm-state lawmakers remain skeptical about the feasibility of regional development schemes. Lawmakers from rural states typically have fought against legislation that would facilitate foreign purchases of food among developing countries, fearing it might reduce demand for Farm Belt products.

    Nicholas W. Minot, senior researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank, contends that such criticisms are misguided; as opposed to aid delivered from the United States, it's often cheaper and more efficient to harvest "corn in South Africa and even Uganda to give to Ethiopia," Minot noted. "In a world where politics did not play a role, the ideal situation would be untied aid."

    FOR FURTHER READING: Fiscal 2009 omnibus appropriations (HR 1105 - PL 111-8), p. 612; the Lugar-Casey bill is S 384; Obama's fiscal 2010 budget, CQ Weekly, p. 472; 2008 farm bill (PL 110-234), 2008 CQ Weekly, p. 3256; foreign aid and U.S. image abroad, p. 2656; domestic hunger, p. 1238.

    Source: CQ Weekly
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