U.S. urged to beef up food aid

Increased exports would help farmers, ease global hunger

While U.S. grain bins overflow with bountiful crops, the nation’s major farm and humanitarian organizations are warning lawmakers of a looming world food aid crisis.

The industry groups — including U.S. Wheat Associates, American Soybean Assn., USA Rice Federation and the Kansas Wheat Commission — are urging Congress to consider ways to help the more than 842 million people worldwide who do not have enough to eat.

The United States now provides less than half the amount of food aid it gave in 1993, Agriculture Department figures show. But during the 1990s, the ranks of the malnourished swelled by 18 million people.

Along with higher commodity costs and transportation prices, emergency food aid needs have tripled and the food aid budget shortfall is now estimated at $824 million, said Ellen Levinson, executive director of the Coalition For Food Aid. The Washington-based group represents 16 nonprofit organizations that distribute food globally.

“There tends to be chronic underfunding of food aid and because of that when an emergency arises there is not enough money to purchase commodities as needed,” she said.

To make up the shortfall, the government in November canceled orders for food aid shipments that would have gone to countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Uganda, she said.

Despite the shortfall, the Bush administration has neither sought supplemental funding for food aid nor dipped into the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust emergency stockpiles, Levinson said.

Benefits for Kansas

Food aid groups want Congress to encourage the administration to allocate the food and funds before it recesses for the holidays.

“This is something we can do as the U.S.,” said David Frey, administrator of the Kansas Wheat Commission. “Lord knows, we need all the friends we can get out there. It is one way, one very real way, to help people in the world, and rather inexpensive compared to other types of foreign aid.”

Kansas is a huge beneficiary of such foreign aid because the U.S. government buys wheat and other commodities it donates to a hungry world.

While commercial wheat exports are essential for Kansas, so too are commodity food aid purchases because they are mostly wheat and flour. Kansas — also the nation’s leading flour milling state — is particularly concerned about flour destined for food aid.

The United States was once the world’s largest flour exporter but has lost most of those markets to European competitors and others, Frey said. Nearly all flour milled in the United States today — with the notable exception of flour processed for foreign food aid — is eaten domestically.

One Kansas mill that has been a longtime supplier of food aid is the Horizon Milling facility in Wellington, he said. The plant’s owners, CHS Inc. and Cargill Inc., announced earlier this year they planned to close the Wellington plant by May 2005.

“Kansas has traditionally been the largest player in food aid from the U.S. side because of our flour mills and because of wheat production,” Frey said. “It used to be when flour was donated, you could almost count on it coming from a Kansas flour mill — and it was Kansas wheat that was ground.”

Humanitarian interests

John Gillcrist, president of the Bartlett Milling Co. in Kansas City, Mo., is a vocal advocate of food aid. Food aid comprises less than 1 percent of company revenues, he said.

In the 20 years he worked for the company, Gillcrist said he didn’t think much about his company’s food aid sales to the U.S. government until he went to Africa last December, when he was chairman of the North American Millers Assn.

The villages that got the food aid expressed such goodwill toward the United States that Gillcrist said he was convinced this country could become the “superpower of humanitarian assistance.”

“This is something — aside from the clear humanitarian need and responsibility I think we have as a country — there are all types of other benefits as well,” he said. “There is security, the positive impact that has at reducing terrorism.”

The United States already donates more than half of the aid that goes to poor countries in the world, sending about $1.5 billion worth of food aid to feed 100 million people abroad, he said.

But he notes the country spends $40 billion on domestic programs like food stamps that feed fewer than 30 million people, $40 billion for homeland security and $200 billion to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Had we been more proactive in some of the areas of the world than we are today, could we have prevented the type of foment and hatred against the United States that has existed?” he said.