Food aid defenders write Obama
February 22, 2013 | 02:22 PM
Seventy farm, humanitarian, shipping and labor groups wrote President Barack Obama Thursday urging him to sustain funding for the current Food for Peace (PL 480) and Food for Progress international food assistance programs and telling him they “strongly oppose proposals to eliminate or drastically reduce program funding or to shift these resources to overseas commodity procurement.”
The groups were reacting to rumors that the Obama administration’s draft fiscal year 2014 budget to be released in March contains a provision that would eliminate funding for Food for Peace or Food for Progress and replace it with a smaller amount of money for a program to buy commodities for food aid on the international markets.
This would mean that the approximately $1.5 billion currently spent on food aid could be spent anywhere in the world. The development reflects a long-term conflict between domestic suppliers, shippers and humanitarian groups that distribute the food aid and development advocates and critics who say that shipping foodstuffs from the United States is expensive and inefficient and benefits U.S. interests.
But the defenders of the current food aid programs have noted that there is a reliable constituency for the current programs and no guaranteed constituency for a cash food assistance program.
“Food aid programs have enjoyed strong bipartisan support for nearly 60 years because they work,” the groups wrote Obama. “Our country has the largest and most diverse, reliable, and effective food assistance program in the world. Food for Peace and Food for Progress form the backbone of those efforts.”
The groups, which range from the American Soybean Association and the National Farmers Union to the Alliance for Global Food Security and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, said that the current programs “are well-honed and dependable systems for identifying the appropriate commodities for targeted populations and for procuring and shipping these commodities.”
“These systems include prepositioning food where emergencies are most likely to occur and diverting cargoes on the high seas when an urgent need arises,” the letter said. “The transparency, accountability, and reliability of this system are the result of decades of cooperation through a uniquely sustainable public-private partnership among thousands of committed Americans at faith-based and other non-governmental organizations, and in agriculture, labor, industry, and government.”
The letter also pointed out that “Growing, manufacturing, bagging, shipping, and transporting nutritious U.S. food creates jobs and economic activity here at home, provides support for our U.S. Merchant Marine, essential to our national defense sealift capability, and sustains a robust domestic constituency for these programs not easily replicated in alternative foreign aid programs.”
The letter also noted that the bags of food bear the U.S. flag and are stamped as “From the American People.” In previous debates over this issue, the groups have asked whether food purchased in other countries would bear these seals of the United States and whether that food could be guaranteed to be as safe as the U.S.-purchased commodities.
On Thursday, 21 senators led by the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee wrote Obama also urging continued funding for Food for Peace.
The groups were reacting to rumors that the Obama administration’s draft fiscal year 2014 budget to be released in March contains a provision that would eliminate funding for Food for Peace or Food for Progress and replace it with a smaller amount of money for a program to buy commodities for food aid on the international markets.
This would mean that the approximately $1.5 billion currently spent on food aid could be spent anywhere in the world. The development reflects a long-term conflict between domestic suppliers, shippers and humanitarian groups that distribute the food aid and development advocates and critics who say that shipping foodstuffs from the United States is expensive and inefficient and benefits U.S. interests.
But the defenders of the current food aid programs have noted that there is a reliable constituency for the current programs and no guaranteed constituency for a cash food assistance program.
“Food aid programs have enjoyed strong bipartisan support for nearly 60 years because they work,” the groups wrote Obama. “Our country has the largest and most diverse, reliable, and effective food assistance program in the world. Food for Peace and Food for Progress form the backbone of those efforts.”
The groups, which range from the American Soybean Association and the National Farmers Union to the Alliance for Global Food Security and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, said that the current programs “are well-honed and dependable systems for identifying the appropriate commodities for targeted populations and for procuring and shipping these commodities.”
“These systems include prepositioning food where emergencies are most likely to occur and diverting cargoes on the high seas when an urgent need arises,” the letter said. “The transparency, accountability, and reliability of this system are the result of decades of cooperation through a uniquely sustainable public-private partnership among thousands of committed Americans at faith-based and other non-governmental organizations, and in agriculture, labor, industry, and government.”
The letter also pointed out that “Growing, manufacturing, bagging, shipping, and transporting nutritious U.S. food creates jobs and economic activity here at home, provides support for our U.S. Merchant Marine, essential to our national defense sealift capability, and sustains a robust domestic constituency for these programs not easily replicated in alternative foreign aid programs.”
The letter also noted that the bags of food bear the U.S. flag and are stamped as “From the American People.” In previous debates over this issue, the groups have asked whether food purchased in other countries would bear these seals of the United States and whether that food could be guaranteed to be as safe as the U.S.-purchased commodities.
On Thursday, 21 senators led by the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee wrote Obama also urging continued funding for Food for Peace.
