What's the catch?

As executives, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and NGO workers scarfed ‘heaping platters of jumbo shrimp, lamb chops and crab-stuffed mushrooms… at the food aid conference organized by the Department of Agriculture and the Agency for International Development’ in Kansas City last Tuesday, according to Celia W. Dugger in today’s NY Times, an estimated 850 million people around the world were starving. Actually, the Millennium Development Goals site reckons that it was 823.1 million in 2002, the latest date that they have data for, so we can be reasonably sure that it’s much more than that five years down the track. Over a quarter of them were in that well known powerhouse of capitalist development, the posterchild of Thomas L Friedman and the Eustonites, India. And the MDG data exclude many countries where we know there are undernourished people, including Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and of course the ‘Land of the Free’ itself. In some, but definitely not all, cases, this is likely because the data aren’t available.

Charles Worledge, who works for the Long Island-based Sealift Inc., a major shipper of American food to the hungry, offered an insight essential to understanding the politics of food aid.

“I thought this was a charity,” he explained during the party, for which another shipping company played host. “It’s not. It’s a business.”

This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s paid any attention to aid in general and food aid in particular. It virtually goes without saying that most of the money going into food aid is specifically earmarked for purposes other than feeding hungry people.

A Government Accountability Office report released on the eve of this conference described in stark detail a system rife with inefficiencies: the amount of food shipped over the past five years has fallen by half as shipping and other logistical costs have soared. Only a little more than a third of federal food aid spending actually buys food. [my emphasis]

And in line with Worledge’s insight, we needn’t look far for the motivation.

Early in the 1950s, the government was the farmer’s buyer of last resort when commodity prices fell, and as a result it sat on mountains of grain. Public Law 480 and the Food for Peace program, adopted in 1954, provided a way to dispose of the surplus grain, which was costly to store, and at the same time feed the world’s hungry people. The law mandated that food for the program be grown domestically.

It was the storage costs that motivated this generosity, and, as a distant second, the desire to appear generous.

Over the years,…the requirement that it be grown in the United States never changed. In recent years, the United States has bought more than half the food for its aid programs from just four agribusinesses and their subsidiaries: Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge and Cal Western Packaging, according to the Agriculture Department.

Unsurprisingly,

some in Congress, as well as lobbyists for interest groups that benefit from food aid, warn that untying aid from requirements that the food be grown in America and mostly shipped on American-flagged vessels would shatter the political coalition that has sustained the program for decades and made the United States the world’s largest food aid donor.

“Are we committed to eradicating hunger because it’s feasible, not terribly expensive and our moral obligation as the richest society in human history?” asked Christopher B. Barrett, a Cornell University economist and the co-author of “Food Aid After Fifty Years.” “Or are we just trying to placate a few agribusiness, shipping and NGO constituencies with a handout?”

But ‘Some researchers and advocates say it is time to rethink the American approach to fighting world hunger’.

It would be rude for researchers and advocates to point out that the US government, in part through its World Bank and IMF proxies, that has actually caused its fair share of world hunger in the first place. In any case, specifically, it was at the last food aid conference in Kansas City two years ago,

that the Bush administration pushed for a fundamental change in food aid that would have diminished profits to domestic agribusiness and shipping companies. It proposed allowing a quarter of the Food for Peace budget to be used to buy food in poor countries near hunger crises, rather than buying only American-grown food that had to be shipped across oceans… such a policy would speed delivery, improve efficiency and save many lives.

Now what kind of thing is that for George W Bush to be advocating. Surely his job as leader of the free world is to administer the US government in the interests of all US capital, not just his oil and armaments buddies. Why shouldn’t Archer Daniels Midland and Sealift Inc get a piece of the action?

‘Congress in each of the past two years killed the proposal, which was opposed by agribusiness and shipping interests who stood to lose business’. Opponents of the proposal ‘warn that cash sent to poor countries can be misused or stolen, and that a mismanaged program to buy food in poor countries could drive up food prices’. But that can’t be why the Bush administration is ‘pushing’ for this – just to drive up third world food prices? It’s got to be because he wants to keep the corn for ethnol.

Delta blues

As a lot of people know, the UN has instituted a program of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set standards for achieving certain targets across a range of development indicators that they have identified by the year 2015. One of these indicators is the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), the proportion of ‘infants dying before reaching the age of one year per 1,000 live births in a given year.’

According to Indicators for Monitoring the Millennium Development Goals: Definitions Rationale Concepts and Sources (UN, 2003), the rationale for collecting IMR is that

Infant mortality rates measure child survival. They also reflect the social, economic and environmental conditions in which children (and others in society) live, including their health care. Since data on the incidence and prevalence of diseases (morbidity data) frequently are unavailable, mortality rates are often used to identify vulnerable populations.

According to the MDG website, in 2004 IMR ranged from 165 per 1000 live births per year in Afghanistan, the same as in 2000, doubtless thanks to the US invasion and concomitant full liberation of Afghan women, and Sierra Leone, down to 2 per 1000 per year in Iceland. It may be of interest that the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have pretty good records on this indicator, with 5/1000. Cuba, with 6/1000, scores a little better than the US with 7/1000. (Note that the MDG figures differ rather significantly from the 2007 estimates in the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia.)

But that 7/1000 ratio is just the tip of the iceberg. Erik Eckholm, writes in this morning’s NY Times, ‘The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.’ That 14/1000 figure puts Blacks in the US in the same league as those in Mauritius. Curiously, the Eckholm article claims that the most recent national figure from the US are for 2003, while the MDG table claims 2004 data. In any case, more recent data are available at a state and county level. Specifically, ‘In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004’. An IMR of 17/1000 puts Mississippi Blacks in with Albania and Vietnam. A Venezuelan or Syrian mother has a better chance of seeing her baby survive to see its first birthday. And that was two years ago, with an apparently very steep increase in progress.

And that’s the state average. ‘In the past 10 years, the infant mortality rate for blacks in most of the Delta has averaged about 14 per thousand in some counties and more than 20 per thousand in others.’ Tonga has an IMR of 20/1000, it’s a higher rate than claimed for Colombia or Lybia.

“I don’t think the rise is a fluke, and it’s a disturbing trend, not only in Mississippi but throughout the Southeast,” said Dr. Christina Glick, a neonatologist in Jackson, Miss., and past president of the National Perinatal Association.

That’s how the most powerful, prosperous, democratic, and free country in history treats Southern Black women and children, among the most vulnerable members of American society.