HONG KONG – Consider it a case of plowshares being drawn instead of swords.
The words were harsh and the accusations pointed last week as the world’s two food superpowers clashed over food aid policies.
The arguing will continue in Geneva through the winter as negotiators try to write new food aid rules as part of a deal to end export subsidies by 2013.
The European Union, promoting a system of giving money for local or regional purchase rather than sending food, accused the United States of using domestic purchases of food aid stocks to “put dollars into the pockets of Kansas farmers.”
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American officials shot back that since the EU switched to money-only donations for local purchases, its level of food aid delivered to hungry people has dropped sharply and poor people are starving because of it. If American food aid was not filling the gap left by the Europeans, world hunger would be far greater. The U.S. currently provides 60 percent of world food aid, officials asserted.
“In the area of food assistance and hunger emergencies, the Europeans are missing in action,” a senior U.S. Department of Agriculture official told a news briefing during the World Trade Organization negotiations last week.
“If we followed their proposal of only money for local purchases, the food aid system would collapse and hungry people would go without.”
For once, development lobbyists, food aid advocates and even United Nations food agencies were siding with the Americans.
“I just don’t understand where the EU is coming from,” Stuart Clark of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank said. “With their rigid proposal, they are setting the stage for a meltdown of up to 60 percent of food aid. It is incredible.”
The food aid confrontation was part of a broader battle between the Americans and the Europeans last week over the future shape of agricultural rules within the WTO.
The Europeans, promising to end their direct export subsidies, were insisting that U.S. food aid is the American version of export subsidies, a way to dump cheap American surplus crops into world markets. It was part of their bargaining position to win some concessions in return for their concession.
The Americans, while agreeing to reform food aid rules and practices to end “commercial displacement” insisted that humanitarian instincts guide their food aid.
They argued that since food aid shipments were just two percent of U.S. exports last year, they are not a major market issue.
“Food aid does not have any impact on food prices,” the USDA official said.
Meanwhile, since the EU converted several years ago from food shipments to financial donations to aid groups, the amount of food European aid actually secured for hungry people has declined by more than half from almost 3.7 million tonnes in 1999 to almost 1.5 million tonnes in 2004, according to figures produced by the U.S.
The Europeans countered that by buying food in the U.S. and using American transportation companies to get it to destinations, more than 60 percent of the value ends up helping Americans.
“That is not a true food aid program,” said EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson. “That is a subsidy program for American business and farmers.”
Clark said the misguided European position could flow from the fact that shipments of food, rather than donations of money to buy food, is not as traditional a part of the European Union hunger response as it is in North America.
