WASHINGTON - The US government's soaring budget
deficit, as well as unanticipated crises and natural
disasters in poor countries, is resulting in sharp cuts
to the US overseas food-aid program, the world's
largest, according to relief and development agencies
affected by the reductions.
The administration
of President George W Bush, which budgeted nearly US$1.2
billion for its Food for Peace program for fiscal year
2005, has projected a shortfall of nearly $700 million
due to unexpected humanitarian crises, such as the mass
displacement in Darfur, Sudan.
Private relief
agencies have been told by the US Agency for
International Development (USAID), which oversees Food
for Peace, that it lacks the resources to meet some
existing commitments. As a result, dozens of longer-term
development programs stretching across the Third World,
from Nicaragua to Nepal, will now be delayed, suspended,
or canceled altogether.
"Millions of people will
be affected by this," said Ken Hackett, president of
Catholic Relief Services (CRS), whose programs in
Indonesia, Africa and South and Central America have all
been affected by the cuts. "By taking away this safety
net, we will be abandoning them."
The situation
is described by some as "robbing Peter to pay Paul",
because funds and food that were allocated to support
development programs, in which food aid is a key
component, are being sacrificed to meet the demands of
more dire emergencies.
"Devastating long-term
development programs that address the underlying causes
of hunger is, in our view, not the best way to solve the
problem," said Ina Schonberg, an aid expert at Save the
Children.
She added that programs to reduce
chronic malnutrition - a contributing cause in 50% of
all deaths of children under the age of five - in
Mozambique and elsewhere will be seriously undermined by
the budget shortfall.
CRS, CARE, World Vision
and Save the Children, along with the United Nations
World Food Program (WFP), are the largest distributors
of US food aid.
The budget crunch comes against
a backdrop of growing pessimism about the world hunger
situation. In 1996, the World Food Summit in Rome
pledged to cut the Earth's chronically hungry people by
50% by 2015 - from 800 million to 400 million. That
target was later included among the Millennium
Development Goals agreed on by all of the world's
leaders in the year 2000.
But a study released
by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization this month,
"The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2004", found
that the number of hungry people actually increased over
the past two years, from 842 million to 852 million.
The WFP, the world's largest multilateral
food-aid agency, feeds only about 100 million of those
people, according to Jordan Dey, the agency's spokesman
in Washington. "The challenge has been much greater than
the resources available," he said. "There's always more
we can do."
The amount of food aid from donor
nations has also fallen in recent years, according to
Ellen Levinson, director of the Coalition for Food Aid,
a Washington-based group that represents 16 major US
relief and development agencies.
"The Europeans
have cut back tremendously to food aid in the past
decade, and that means that during these unusual
emergencies, there aren't other donor countries that are
filling the gaps," she said. "So the pressure comes back
to the US, which then is forced to divert aid for
development programs into dealing with emergencies."
The United States has long been the world's
biggest single donor of food aid, traditionally
providing 35-40% of projected emergency needs worldwide,
including about 50% of the food aid distributed by the
WFP.
When the Bush administration first
requested $1.2 billion for the Food for Peace 2005
account, it allocated $468 million of the total to
emergency needs.
But as a result of the crisis
in Darfur - where some 1.6 million people have been
displaced by fighting and a brutal counter-insurgency
campaign - flooding in Bangladesh, locusts in West
Africa, continued food shortages in Afghanistan and
drought in Ethiopia and Eritrea, USAID estimates that
some $1.3 billion will be needed to meet those needs.
It is this shortfall that is pushing USAID to
perform what one official called "triage" on long-term
development projects that were originally supposed to
receive $715 million in food aid.
"Unless
something changes rapidly and a supplemental
[appropriation] is approved, the situation is extremely
serious," said CRS vice president Sean Callahan. "It
looks like programs could be cut by 50% or even
canceled, if no additional resources are forthcoming,"
he said.
The agencies are working with a
bipartisan group of lawmakers in both houses of Congress
to try to get more food released from the Agriculture
Department's special stockpile, called the Bill Emerson
Humanitarian Trust (BEHT), and to get lawmakers to
consider an emergency supplemental appropriation as soon
as possible after Congress convenes in January.
A letter drafted by Republican Senator Sam
Brownback and signed by up to 24 other senators will be
sent to Bush this week urging the White House, whose
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reportedly
resisted releasing further BEHT resources because of the
budgetary impact of re-stocking it, to prevail on OMB in
the first case, and support a generous supplemental bill
in the second.
The Bush administration's
spending and tax cuts in the past four years have
transformed a $236.4 billion budget surplus into a $413
billion deficit.
The costs of the delays and
cancellations that have resulted form the shortfall are
considerable. CRS estimates that more than 5.5 million
vulnerable people will be severely affected, including
about 1.2 million schoolchildren from poor households,
many of whom receive their main source of nutrition
through school lunches; nearly 1.6 million AIDS orphans,
disabled people and those with AIDS and other chronic
diseases and more than 1.2 million mothers and infants
who receive supplemental nutrition.
"It takes
more than food to fight hunger in the long term,"
stressed Schonberg, who said Save the Children had
food-aid-related development projects that are now at
risk in 14 countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh,
Bolivia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Malawi,
Mozambique, Nicaragua, Sudan, Tajikistan and Uganda.
