The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 143

public-sector foreign assistance by those on the political Right who thought private
markets should always be in the lead. Second was a rejection from the political Left of
any attempt to extend a Green Revolution to Africa, on grounds that it would hurt the
poor and not be environmentally sustainable. Third was Africa's growing need, begin-
ning in the 1980s, for emergency food aid. Africa's food crisis was worsening to the point
that efforts to rush food to hungry people in the short run were crowding out needed
investments in agricultural development for the long run. Between 1980 and 2006, while
US development assistance to African farming was falling by 85 percent, official spend-
ing for food assistance to Africa was more than doubling in real terms, up to $1.2 billion.
By 2006 the United States was spending roughly twenty times as much giving away food
in Africa as it was spending to help Africans do a better job of producing their own food
(Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2009).
The shock of temporarily high world food prices in 2008, followed by the inaugu-
ration of Barack Obama as US president in 2009, led to a promising revival of donor
support, and promised support, for agricultural development. Several months after tak-
ing office, President Obama pledged to ask Congress for a doubling of US agricultural
development assistance, up to more than $1 billion by 2010, and at a summit meeting
of the G8 countries in Italy in July 2009, Obama convinced the world's wealthy nations
to make a collective pledge of $20 billion over three years to promote food security and
agricultural development in poor countries. Not all of the money pledged was new
money, not all would go for agricultural development, and not all would go to Africa
(as the US assistance community faced more urgent nation-building problems in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan), but funding did increase, and for the moment a long period
of official neglect for agricultural development assistance appeared to be ending.
By 2011, however, donor commitments to new agricultural development assistance
had begun to falter. Donors backed of in Europe because of financial and sovereign
debt crises, which had triggered budget austerity across the board. Appropriations
became more difficult in the United States because a domestic “Tea Party” move-
ment shaped the November 2010 congressional election, giving control of the House
of Representatives to (newly) deficit-conscious Republicans. Appropriations for the
Obama administration's new Feed the Future initiative—which focused on agricul-
tural development in Africa—did increase through fiscal year 2012 but faced threats
of cuts going forward (Bertini and Glickman 2012). The motive of donors to provide
assistance to smallholder farmers in Africa rests primarily on a social and ethical
foundation, rather than on commercial or national security advantage, making ade-
quate efforts difficult to sustain.
References
Akobundu, O. 1991. “Weeds in Human Affairs in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for
Sustainable Food Production.” Weed Technology 5 (3): 680-690.
Alston, J. M., P. Pardey, and J. Roseboom. 1998. “Financing Agricultural Research: International
Investment Patterns and Policy Perspectives.” World Development 26 (6): 1057-1071.