Ready-to-use therapeutic food aid runs afoul of USG laws
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
ARTICLE: "The Plumpy Crusader: A new resource offers hope for the hungry, but Congress still holds the keys to food aid," by Katie Paul, Newsweek, 30 March 2010. Link
Nice story of tilting-at-windmills type who is trying to make Plumpy'nut a routine part of America's aid flow to Gap situations of malnutrition:
As Navyn Salem starts up the machines for the first time at her factory in Providence, R.I., this month, she has all the anxieties of any new business owner: whether the equipment will work, who will buy her products, how to cover her employees' benefits, and how to raise the profile of Edesia, the food-manufacturing producer she's launching. To that list, add a few more unconventional ones: how to make Edesia the first successful nonprofit provider of ready-to-use therapeutic (RUTF) food aid in the United States, how to revolutionize treatment of childhood malnutrition, and how to transform decades of counterproductive U.S. humanitarian aid policies, which place fiercely protectionist requirements on the food products that can be sent abroad during emergencies.
PlumpyNut.JPG.jpeg The insane holdup:
There's just one problem: while the United States is the largest donor of food aid in the world, spending some $2 billion on it each year, practically none of that money has been allowed to go toward the miracle foods--by law. Statutes in the U.S. farm bill require that food-aid money be spent on food grown in the U.S., while at least half of it must be packaged in the U.S. and most of it must be transported by U.S. shippers. So while RUTFs are now manufactured on the cheap in dozens of developing countries like Niger, Ethiopia, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, right nearby where they eventually need to be distributed, U.S. food aid still comes in the form of imports from afar. For one thing, it's incredibly inefficient: about 65 cents of every dollar that USAID's Food for Peace, the largest aid program, spends on food aid ends up going to overhead as a result (that's $600 million that could be saved each year through local purchase, according to the Government Accountability Office). What makes it practically farcical is the fact that those exports come primarily from the biggest U.S. commodities--wheat, soy, and corn--which don't have the nutrients needed to treat malnourished kids. RUTFs do. But the law is clear, and USAID couldn't fund their purchases.
Just another classic example of how messed up our foreign aid is. |
