"I am very interested in the topic of food security. One of the main accomplishments from my time in the Central African Republic was establishing a nutrition garden at the main hospital where we lived. The hospital has a nutrition centre where malnourished children are rehabilitated, sometimes treated for other conditions like TB or malaria, and then are sent home. Many of the kids come in too late for treatment and die at the centre, others come and go as food availability back home does not change, and others improve remarkably and continue with relatively healthy lives. The garden was designed to help mothers learn about the variety of foods it is possible to grow in that area, how to grow them and how to prepare them in a way that maximizes their family nutrition and fits in to normal food consumption patterns in the region. The garden has been running for two and half years now and has been very successful. Seeds from the garden are free to any of the mothers when their children are released from the hospital.
How does this relate to food aid? Before the garden, the nutrition centre relied 100% on products donated from the World Food Program (WFP). They would receive corn flour, yellow split peas, sugar, oil and salt. Of these, yellow split pea was the only protein supplement the children received as meat is very expensive and harder and harder to come by in the region. YELLOW SPLIT PEA DOES NOT GROW IN CAR. Even if it did grow, the product received was not plantable as the seeds were split and therefore damaged. Hundreds of mothers came to see this product dumped from China and the saviour of their children's health and they could not provide it for themselves. The garden has been doing trials of other beans that are suitable for the region and we hope to be able to one day replace the reliance on WFP peas with our own home grown beans one day.
What is holding this process back is that the peas from WFP come free, which is very attractive to a hospital that receives very little outside aid and cannot afford to run the centre without it. Using locally produced beans would require paying for them, so for now, the hospital is unable or unwilling to do it. The garden is run on about $150 a month, all from outside aid coming from the US and Canada.
It makes much more sense for the WFP to buy locally produced beans and then distribute those free of charge, if they must, to the various feeding programs that they support. At least then, when someone puts a few uncooked seeds in their pocket, there is a chance that something even more helpful will grow out of it.
To this end, Canada has made some progress. We recently untied our food aid so that rather than maintaining quotas of how much food aid must be in the form of Canadian grown food, aid agencies can ask Canada for cash instead. This is not the case in the US however. Read the following article to get an idea of how dramatically tied US food aid is to US producers and US transport companies. It is very shameful, and yet, they are looking out for their own citizens which is what governments tend to do, is it not?
http://www.worldpress.org
As one who has been on the receiving end of food aid and shipping containers full of donated items, I have seen their harmful, rather than helpful, attributes. Take for example, the donation of used clothing in emergencies. While to North Americans it seems like an altogether generous thing to do to send our things over to people who have no things, what we are really doing is relieving ourselves of guilt while destroying local markets. Do we really think that there is nothing whatsoever in the places where our generosity is destined? By sending large amounts of anything, we are putting small businessmen, who earn a living and contribute to their communities, out of business. Why pay for a new dress when you can get one for free from the charity down the road. The amount that is spent in shipping our generosity around the world could be used to buy the same amount or more from local suppliers, thereby boosting the local economy, not creating jealousies by having some people walking around in 'American' flip flops while the unlucky ones are still wearing the 'local' ones, and not setting the aid worker up as provider of free stuff from America.
I know there is another side to this argument too. What do we do with our over-consumption, if we can't give it to 'poor people'? Won't we un-naturally boost an economy only to have it fall when we leave? By raising the demand for local food won't we skew the price and upset local production and consumption patterns?"
