October 16 was established as World Food Day in 1979 by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as a symbolic way to mobilize advocacy efforts and strengthen political will to address global issues of hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, while also drawing attention to important new achievements in food security and agricultural development. To mark the occasion, CALS Notes is spotlighting the work of Chris Barrett, Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and an international professor of agriculture, who is drawing attention to how U.S. food aid should change to feed more people with less money.
According to Barrett in an article published earlier this year, only about 40 cents of every dollar in U.S. food aid goes to purchase actual food. The remainder is used to ship commodities from the U.S. all across the world, a system that benefits transportation companies more than hungry people.
“Imagine you want to send a gift of food to a friend who has fallen on hard times,” says Barrett. “You pick out some lovely food from your local market and then it costs you just as much to send it as it did to buy the food. Is that how you’d do it? I doubt it. You’d look to buy from a place near your friend that could deliver to them cheaply, or you’d send a gift card to a grocery or just send them a check. That logic holds for U.S. food aid too.”
Barrett has been advocating for a redesign of the U.S. food aid system to replace commodity donations with cash payments – a proposal supported by the Obama administration as part of this year’s stalled Farm Bill negotiations. Barrett says that enabling local aid agencies to acquire food from regional sources using U.S. donations is not only cheaper and quicker, it also reduces the risk of spoilage and stretches taxpayers dollars to feed more hungry mouths.
