PHA-Exchange> US agricultural and food aid policies

[Aviva]

From: "Ted Greiner" <ted_greiner at hotmail.com>


> UNITED STATES: Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy, a
> leading civil society think tank, said in a Dec. 4 report that despite
> its ''unimpeachable veneer of humanitarianism'' food aid serves as a de
> facto means of product support for U.S. farmers. The United States
> Agency for International Development (USAID) spends more than one
> billion dollars a year buying crops from U.S. agricultural corporations
> and shipping them to the starving people abroad, said Food First. The
> repot said the U.S. and international financial institutions (IFIs) were
> partly to blame for the famine in Africa because they push policies that
> fatten the coffers of multi-national firms at the expense of local
> economies and poor people. The World Bank and International Monetary
> Fund (IMF), backed by the financial and political muscle of the United
> States, have further exacerbated famine in Africa through economic
> structural adjustment!
>  programs, it said. These plans, argues the report,
> force indebted nations to pay down debt by cutting services for their
> citizens, exporting their crops, dismantling their crop reserves, and
> devaluing their currencies.
> 
>  
> 
 Close to 80 percent of the U.S. Agency
> for International Development's (USAID's) contracts and grants go
> directly to American firms.
>  
> Foreign assistance programs have helped create major markets for
> agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports
> and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans".
>