U.S. international food aid has been a win-win-win, proponents say.
It’s kept millions of people from starving to death.
It’s tamped down global unrest and helped keep a lid on terrorism.
And it’s helped struggling farmers in the Midwest and Great Plains stay in business.
“From the core of my mission, I'm farming because I want to feed people,” said Chris Tanner, president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers. “As farmers, we're sitting here raising products for a loss, and when you can go out and gift food with an American flag on it, it's more than food. It's American goodwill.”
Yet weeks after President Donald Trump took office a second time, the Department of Government Efficiency dismantled and defunded a seven-decades-old program called Food for Peace.
Food shipments to help some of the world’s most vulnerable people — stopped almost overnight.
“It's not just that they're going to be skipping a meal or feeling hungry at night. There are really desperate and dire consequences for people whose livelihoods and lives are under enormous strain,” said Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Farm state lawmakers swung into action and a bipartisan resuscitation effort managed to resurrect Food for Peace under the U.S. Department of Agriculture last December.
Yet the program is at risk again – as the proposed White House budget zeros out Food for Peace for the next fiscal year. The program's allies in the agriculture lobby are trying to keep it alive with a provision in the farm bill, which would keep it under USDA permanently.
“We don't want to play politics with the people (in need) that are trying to get food,” said Tanner. “So having at USDA will provide certainty that you know that it won't have politics played with it in the way that it has in the past.”
A common-sense idea from Cold War Kansas
The Food for Peace program started as a suggestion from a western Kansas wheat farmer back in 1954 during a meeting. By the following year, it had made its way through Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower, also a Kansan, had signed it into law.
It’s been a source of pride and income to farmers ever since.
Merrill Nielsen has been farming more than 50 years in the rolling hills near Denmark, Kansas. He believes that the program helps hungry people around the world who aren’t able to produce crops. And he knows it’s helped farmers.
“It allows us to sell some of our crops that normally we wouldn't have a market for,” he said.
When the Trump administration halted the program, Nielsen said the impact on prices was immediate.
“It was a blow to us,” he said. “The market realized that these crops, whether it be wheat or milo, were going to be stored somewhere and be hanging over the market, which lowered the price of the crop that we could sell.”
He’s glad the program is safe, at least for the moment, and says he doesn’t care what federal agency runs it as long as it operates as Congress intended.
But for Tanner, of the Kansas Wheat Growers Association, putting Food for Peace under USDA isn’t just about saving the program, but also improving it.
In recent decades Food for Peace has angered some farmers by taking a hybrid approach to fighting hunger; sometimes buying food from regional suppliers or just sending money to nations in need.
“Then they would purchase grain from our competitors,” said Tanner, “and it kind of defeats the purpose of the whole beginning of the program.”
Now the USDA is requiring Food for Peace to distribute food purchased from U.S. farmers exclusively,
Primarily supporting US farmers or feeding the hungry?
The interests of American farmers do not always align squarely with the needs of international food aid recipients.
For instance, shipping bags of grain from the middle of the U.S. to famine-plagued regions half a world away can take six months. By the time the food arrives people have died. And it’s not always the most efficient use of resources, according to Vigersky of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Buying food on local markets is often much more cost effective than buying it from us farmers,” he said. “The shipping costs that you're looking at paying to bring that from U.S. shores to foreign destinations adds another price tag.”
Before last year, Food for Peace was part of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department, the country’s diplomatic service. Food for Peace had staff on the ground in famine-stricken parts of the world to help access need and distribute food.
The USDA is trying to run the program without those specialists, said Dina Esposito, who directed Food for Peace from 2010 to 2016.
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture, it's important to understand, has no humanitarian mandate, it has no humanitarian experts to determine how best to direct the food to save the most lives to monitor the programs and hunger hotspots,” she said.
Even more concerning is that food may not be getting to the countries most in need.
While Food for Peace has selected seven countries for food aid shipments this year, according to Esposito, only three of the countries are top 10 hunger trouble spots as identified by the United Nations.
“Two of the countries have no or minimal food needs at all, so that means there are other reasons, besides humanitarian ones,” she said.
Those countries are Rwanda and El Salvadore, both of which have agreed to detain migrants from other countries deported from the U.S. under President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Esposito is glad Food for Peace is operating at all, but she hopes the Senate will weigh carefully putting the agency permanently under the USDA.
“Congress is considering finalizing that type of shift in law, and yet we have very little evidence to suggest what will its impact be on hungry people,” said Esposito. “What will its marginal return or benefit be to the American farmer before we, you know, codify this change?
The USDA knows how to buy and ship grain domestically, and Food for Peace has begun buying wheat, rice and other commodities with the stated purpose of delivering those staples to hungry people abroad. But whether USDA can run an international food aid program without staffing up is an open question, even for Tanner of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers.
“I think they're on a short leash right now,” he said of the USDA. “They have a couple years to make sure that they have the staff and the way to implement it, that that is effective. And I hope that they do it right. That way it becomes secure and something that both farmers and those in need can count on."
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
