Food Security and Aid Skepticism
June 28, 2012 § 3 Comments
After reading an article in Foreign Policy, entitled ‘Please Don’t Send Food‘, I began to think a lot about misappropriated food aid and its impact on conflict. I’m going to explore this for the next few days and see what we can rustle up to the surface – I think misappropriated aid is probably, for me, the key issue in private sector/aid integration that needs to be addressed. The private sector has a bottom line, and if huge percentages of investment/capital (the aid itself, or the services provided by aid) are exacerbating the problem or being squandered, then aid will continue to be a poor choice for investment.
To the point of conflict exacerbation:
“Looking at a sample of developing countries between 1972 and 2006, economists Nancy Qian of Yale University and Nathan Nunn of Harvard University found a direct correlation between U.S. food aid and civil conflict. For every 10 percent increase in the amount of food aid delivered, they discovered, the likelihood of violent civil conflict rises by 1.14 percentage points.”
How aid comes to act in favor of violent civil conflict:
The qualitative evidence points to aid stealing as an important mechanism. Humanitarian aid is particularly easy for armed factions and opposition groups to appropriate since it is physically transported over long distances, often through territories only weakly controlled by the recipient government. Reports indicate that up to eighty percent of aid can be stolen en route (Polman and Waters, 2010, p. 121). Even when aid reaches its intended recipients, it can still be appropriated or “taxed” by armed groups, against whom the recipients are typically powerless. This misappropriated aid is then used to fund conflict. (Nathan Nunn & Nancy Qian)
So the obvious counterpoint to this article is what can be done in place of food aid? Anything? or is the ability to help and feed some worth the cost? Reforms are obviously needed, as many have pointed out, but with the logistical struggle of aid in the first place and the decreasing financial ability of donor countries to provide funding for better transport and security for the aid, the problem seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
Stuff like this just reinforces my belief that there are no easy solutions to the problems the global community faces, and that good-natured intentions don’t necessarily lead to positive outcomes. However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to help people in bad situations. Measuring the net value of food aid in relation to the costs of increased conflict is especially difficult because they affect populations in different ways. I guess if there was an obvious easy fix to this sort of problem it would have been implemented already. However I would tentatively say that addressing famine is a more immediate issue than conflict and thus that food aid should still go ahead as is, but be followed by greater efforts at peacebuilding and capacity building to ensure stability and resilience to future crises.What this means in specific cases probably depends on the details of those cases.
I agree – I think that policy makers are likely in a lose/lose situation with this – provide aid, increase chance of violent civil conflict. Don’t provide aid, and there would be widespread condemnation (speaking generally). I think there’s a lot of room here for private sector infrastructure and involvement – but of course, they’d have to be willing to be affiliated with the aid groups, which could compromise any neutrality they claimed in more dangerous areas.
[...] article takes a different take from yesterday’s post, which discussed the correlation between aid and the likelihood of violent civil conflict, [...]