Foreword

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Notes

The USA is the largest single food-aid donor. When J. F. Kennedy renamed the 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (PL 480) ‘Food for Peace’, he stated: ‘Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want’.

In 2007, CARE caused a stir among US NGOs by withdrawing from a system whereby the US government purchases goods such as sunflower oil from (largely subsidised) US agribusinesses, ships these goods overseas, and then donates them to NGOs, which in turn sell them on the local market and use the proceeds to finance their anti-poverty projects. Following a review, CARE concluded that the system was inherently inefficient and that it displaced, or at least discouraged investment in, local production. On the face of it, the arrangement amounts to a costly and elaborate form of dumping. According to former US President Jimmy Carter, the system continues because household-name NGOs defend it – because much of their funding now depends on it (New York Times, 16 August 2007, posted at www.un-ngls.org/article.php3?id_article=330&var_mode=calcul, retrieved 7 February 2011).

A significant problem was that because the subsidies were geared to produce rather than to producers, large irrigated farms in northern Mexico switched to producing maize and wheat for export, effectively cornering the support intended for small-scale rain-fed produce for the local market.

Contemporary safety nets still include variations on ‘food aid for development’, but these have been joined by conditional cash transfers (CCTs), whereby an agency (whether state, official aid agency, or NGO) identifies the ‘target’ population whose behaviour they wish to change, and who agree to do things that they would not have done without financial inducement (such as attending antenatal clinics, getting children vaccinated, keeping girls in secondary school). Paying people to do things, however objectively desirable, begs the question of whether the behaviour change will outlive the supply of cash. Even proponents of FFW schemes which provide infrastructure that should benefit the community – roads, irrigation, school buildings, water tanks – have found that it falls into disrepair once there is no material inducement to maintain it. A Caritas official in Haiti once described how the ‘community councils’ (known as food councils or konseys manjes) worked: ‘They construct roads in order to receive food … Where there is no more food, there can be no more work. Goodbye food, goodbye road! If they got food in order to finish a road, they regret it as soon as they have finished … They only then wish for the deterioration of the road so that they can re-do it’ (cited in Jackson and Eade 1982: 32).

The Northern consumer movement is by and large a middle-class phenomenon, because those who are struggling to make ends meet do not enjoy the same luxury of choice.

Development in Practice has published dozens of articles on food-related issues and three special issues in conjunction with CGIAR member organisations, two of which are also available in book form: Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research (2002) and Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Eade

Deborah Eade was the Editor-in-Chief of Development in Practice from 1991 to 2010.