How Food Aid Reform Could Save Millions Of Lives

Over half of what the U.S. spends on food aid goes to shipping costs, overhead, and markups for shipping regulations and purchasing from US growers. By reforming two food aid regulations--the requirement that food aid be purchased from U.S. sources and the monetization of food aid--the lives of over 17 million people could be saved. Oxfam America and American Jewish World Service are calling on Congress to address these inefficiencies and have released a report and infographic that focuses not only on the cost reductions, but the human impact as well. The paper is brief (6 pages) and worth reading, but the key findings are:

• Targeted reform to U.S. food aid programs could have enabled life-saving aid to reach up to 17.1 million additional hungry people at no additional cost to taxpayers or about the same number of people reached by U.S. emergency food aid for 17 of the 18 countries African countries served for all of 2010.
• Current regulations and red-tape on U.S. Food Aid programs addressed in this paper cost taxpayers up to $491 million per year.
• For monetization alone, if losses associated with this practice had been eliminated, 2.4 million more hungry people could have benefited from U.S. food aid in 2010.
• Conservative increases in the use of LRP by the U.S. to the global average, or 50% of food aid purchases, would have enabled U.S. food aid to reach 7.3 million more hungry people in 2010. If losses from the practice of monetization had also been eliminated, up to 9.8 million more hungry people could have been reached.

By taking part in this e-action and letting Congress know that their voters support these sensible reforms, we can change how the U.S. delivers food aid, bring food to devastated areas up to 14 weeks faster, and potentially save millions of lives.