Is Food the Answer to Malnutrition? - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 418

One important caveat is worth highlighting in considering the calls for overhauling
the Food Stamp Program to make it an effective nutrition program. There is evidence
that the use of food stamps is an effective antipoverty measure (Winicki, Gundersen,
and Joliffe 2002; Rank and Hirschl 2009). In fact, the recession that began in 2008
served to highlight the importance of food stamps as a safety net. Therefore, I want to be
clear that any critique of the Food Stamp Program in reference to achieving nutritional
objectives must be considered in the context of how well it achieves other goals, such as
protecting the poor during periods of economic downturn.
The story of the Food Stamp Program having conflicting objectives wherein nutrition
has been accorded secondary importance is, in fact, quite similar to comparable initia-
tives in the international arena. Perhaps, the most egregious example is the much her-
alded and sometimes vilified U.S. PL 480 Food for Peace Program. Like the Food Stamp
Program, Food for Peace was an outgrowth of the food surpluses that resulted in part
from the distortions in agricultural markets and incentives that arose from generous
subsidies to producers in the United States and Europe. A broad constituency that con-
sisted of farmers, corporations who owned the shipping lines that transported the grain
under federal regulations that stipulated the use of U.S. vessels, and nongovernmental
agencies charged with programming and distributing the food represented a powerful
lobby. The original motivation of the food aid program was unambiguously to facili-
tate surplus disposal and market development, not to improve the nutrition of the poor.
Additionally, food aid programming has a long, and some would argue, sordid history
of being driven by foreign policy objectives that rewarded our friends and punished our
adversaries (Gustafsson 1976; Wallensteen 1976; Wallerstein 1980).
Over the past few decades, changes in the legislation governing food aid has resulted in
some needed reforms, including eliminating some of the more overt mention of political
goals, such as prohibitions against food aid going to communist countries. Likewise, the
diminution of global surpluses over the past decade has reduced the importance of the
food aid program's surplus disposal objectives (Uvin 1992; Hopkins 1992). Food aid ship-
ments have also declined dramatically, and the role of, and advantages of relying on, multi-
lateral aid agencies, such as the World Food Programme of the United Nations has reduced
markedly the size of the Food for Peace Program and bilateral U.S. food aid programming.
Beyond the fascinating story of the politics and evolution of food aid policy, the most
essential point is that origins of food aid were tied to the extensive interference of gov-
ernment in food markets, market failures that led to enormous surpluses in developed
countries, and the pursuit of food and agricultural policies in the United States which
contributed to policies that discriminated against agriculture and farmers in developing
countries where crippling distortions in food markets were endemic. Indeed, hunger
and the humanitarian crises were side effects of the very policy distortions that food
aid encouraged and helped perpetuate; and ironically, these market failures were used
to advocate for the legitimacy of food aid to address the malnutrition, which, in part,
resulted from the same policy failures to which food aid had contributed. The vicious
circle arose wherein food aid only exacerbated bad policies and delayed needed reforms
in the food and agricultural sectors that discriminated against producers.