U.S. food aid and civil conflict

An article (via) in the current American Economic Review finds U.S. food aid "increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts." A commenter in the thread at the linked blog questions the data analysis. In any case, I think it's true, as the linked post says, that U.S. food aid is generally more concerned with disposing of domestic grain surpluses than anything else. In an overhaul of U.S. development assistance, the food aid program should be one of the first things to be reformed. (Are there political obstacles? Of course. There are obstacles to everything. That's no reason not to raise the issue.)

Voices from Mali

This post (by two political scientists from Notre Dame) reports data from surveys of 500 Malian villagers conducted in Jan. 2012 and summer 2012.

The main message:

...while the international media has fixated on political crisis, the respondents actually cared much more about a different sort of crisis: daily survival in the context of increasing desertification and unprecedented drought....We hope that their testimony is a reminder of the many underpublicized crises that rural citizens experience every day, regardless of political instability. Coups and rebellions incite international action and capture headlines, but [lack of] access to food, clinics, and potable water continually create life-or-death situations for many Malians.

Food, water, and conflict

A post by Daniel Little with numerous links.

Grim food situation in Ethiopia

Aid agencies are estimating, according to the BBC, that as many as 8 million people in Ethiopia may be affected by the severe drought in the country; adding to that figure the 7 million who are always short of adequate food makes for nearly 20 percent of the population.

"Oxfam has just released a fresh appeal. It says the aid required is $260m short of its target.

But figures produced by the United Nations office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs show that $772m has already been pledged, the vast majority from the U.S., which has nearly trebled its aid to Ethiopia this year."

Ethiopia is a U.S. ally in the current geopolitical troubles in the Horn of Africa, which gives the U.S. multiple motives for trying to ensure that the current food situation in Ethiopia does not become a widespread famine of the kind that has afflicted the country more than once in the past. (Ideally, of course, humanitarian motives alone should be sufficient, but two motives are usually more effective than one.)

GAO: U.S. aid to Africa is 'fragmented'

The Secretary of State's defense of the Bush administration's foreign policy, which I wrote about last month, mentioned that U.S. development assistance to Africa has increased four-fold since 2001. The glass-half-empty part of this, however, is that U.S. aid efforts in Africa are ill-coordinated and have slighted long-term agricultural development, as have multilateral lenders. The GAO said this in a report released at the end of May: see Anthony Faiola, "Food Relief for Africa 'Insufficient,' GAO Says," Wash Post, 5/29/08. With food prices rising sharply, the World Bank is taking steps to re-emphasize agriculture, the article notes, but U.S. efforts in this area probably will remain inefficient (because they rely on American-grown food) and focused too much on the short term.