Food aid or food sovereignty?: ending world hunger in our time

Food aid has been ‘cheap’ aid, expected to serve domestic interests and to fight hunger at the same time. This paper argues that apart from specific disaster situations, this does not work. The author claims that food aid participates in the rise of hunger while it helps the implementation of adverse policies.

The paper underlines that:

• food aid, as implemented, implies the withdrawal of small-scale agriculture and directly threatens the livelihoods of family farmers
• indeed, it dumps large quantities of low-priced grain in developing countries, making it impossible for the small domestic producers to compete
• a major change is required in terms of international assistance
  

The document emphasises that fighting hunger requires the reform of a number of institutions and a real commitment by developed countries to allocate adequate financial resources, rather than sprinkling their food surpluses.

Recommendations are that: 

• what is needed to find sustainable solutions for the eradication of hunger is not just the reform of food aid procurement policies, but drastic reform of the entire aid system
• food aid must be kept out of the WTO; involving the WTO, a trade body, in food aid would not help the hungry
• agriculture and food aid should not be managed separately, and FAO can coordinate and monitor international assistance geared towards the eradication of hunger
• transforming the World Food Programme (WFP) into a World Relief Program would eliminate the bias toward the use of food aid from contemporary relief responses
• food aid should be only directed to areas of real need, which should be determined by objective need assessments
• it is necessary to develop further mechanisms to address food deficits, chronic food insecurity, and reconstruction and recovery needs