Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

Make Food Aid Work for All

This past fall, Congress allowed the U.S. Farm Bill — the legislation that governs the vast majority of our country’s food and agriculture policies, including international food aid — to expire.

If our elected leaders refuse to move the process forward, funding for emergency food aid will run out in 2013. This doesn’t only jeopardize tens of millions of men, women and children around the globe who rely on this aid in times of crisis; it also delays implementing meaningful changes that will help create long-term global food security.

The U.S. supplies half of all international food aid. According to U.S. law, the overwhelming majority of that aid must be purchased and processed stateside and 75 percent of it must be shipped on U.S.-flagged vessels. These requirements may please the shipping conglomerates and agribusiness giants that profit from them, but they come at the expense of hungry people.

Studies by government and university researchers show that purchasing food aid in recipient countries — or providing cash and vouchers to enable people there to do so — gets help to hungry communities an average of 14 weeks faster and at less cost, while also supporting local farmers in the developing world. Simply put, it’s faster, cheaper and more effective at reaching communities in crisis now and building communities free of hunger in the future.

Read the Forward’s package, Dear Mr. President, policy Prescriptions for the Second Term.

Yet, our existing food aid policies expressly forbid the consistent use of these successful interventions. Instead, our one-size-fits-all model wastes more than half of each food aid dollar for a staple commodity like wheat, subsidizing corporations here as opposed to supporting local food production abroad.

The U.S. gives less than 1% of its GDP for development and humanitarian assistance. Food aid is a tiny portion of the massive farm bill package. But reforms to this sliver of policy can mean the difference between life and death for millions of people worldwide.

Timi Gerson is the director of advocacy at American Jewish World Service.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.