US urged to purchase more food aid in recipient regions

As the United States Congress debated an omnibus farm bill (passed on July 27) , it considered a small change that advocates say could make a big difference to the world's hungriest people : allowing the federal government to buy some food in Africa to feed the famished, rather than shipping it all overseas from America.

The Bush administration, with odd-bedfellows support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies. But even so, its proposal would not have prevented the paradoxical deepening of hunger here during
a long-term project to combat hunger in the harsh, arid reaches of northwestern Kenya.

Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.

The result : American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.

Through sheer grit, the 2,000 families finished the irrigation system last year and are successfully farming. But long-term projects to help Africa's rural poor feed themselves are chronically under financed, charities say. Across Africa, the US is more likely to give people a fish "caught in America" that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the US has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.

And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project.

Such efforts are dwarfed by the epic scale of the need. Viewed from a prop plane buzzing like a mosquito overhead, the irrigated land here shimmers as a tiny oasis in a vast landscape. With the guidance of the charity organisation World Vision, which implemented the project, the families hacked an irrigation system from the barren landscape with machetes, hoes and shovels, clearing 1,000 acres and digging 99 miles of canals along the Kerio River.

The success is noteworthy, but the families' sacrifices also illustrate the risks of an American food aid system that is designed to benefit domestic agribusiness and shipping interests and enmeshed in an intricate framework of farm subsidies. Members of Congress who favor the current system say the support of influential commercial groups is needed to sustain political support for food aid. They warn that ill-timed purchases of food in Africa in times of scarcity could send food prices higher, harming poor consumers.

But critics in Congress contend that the United States could feed far more people more quickly if it could buy surplus food in Africa. It might also help boost the incomes of African farmers, by providing a market for their crops, they say.

The Bush administration is now trying to change the law so that up to $300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies.

The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid. Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee's version of the farm bill includes no such pilot scheme. The committee chairman, Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members, "They're still of the mode that this should be American products we're using our tax dollars to provide them."

Mr. Peterson's district got $367 million in corn subsidies in 2005, according to government data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.

The success of the Kenyan irrigation scheme was all the more extraordinary given this desiccated region's history as a graveyard for well-intended foreign aid efforts to help the Turkana people, mostly nomadic herders, escape punishing cycles of drought, hunger and death.

The participants themselves credit a man who gave them fortitude when they faltered : Daniel Mwebi, a Kenyan engineer who managed the project here for World Vision. From 1992 to 2004, he lived for much of each year in this remote place, far from his wife and children. He said he had been determined to avoid the mistakes of earlier aid projects that relied on heavy earth-moving equipment and diesel-run pumps that required costly fuel, expertise and maintenance.

So he designed a very basic system and trained the Turkana in the masonry, carpentry and welding skills they needed to keep it running. The earthen irrigation systems, built in two US-financed projects, are powered only by gravity and the sweat of the local people.

What Mr. Mwebi could not have anticipated, however, was how the workings of the American food aid system would deeply complicate that plan, which USAID financed for $4 million over five years.

NYTimes