US Senate plan moves toward long-term food aid
By Missy Ryan
WASHINGTON, Dec 17 (Reuters) - A new Senate plan would steer more U.S. food aid funds to development projects that attack the root causes of hunger, a move critics say comes at the expense of critical aid to the world's most vulnerable.
Senators approved a host of modest changes on Friday to U.S. food aid programs, the world's largest, as part of a sweeping, $286 billion agriculture law that will set everything from crop subsidies to food stamps for five years.
Congressional negotiators must reconcile the bill with another passed by the House of Representatives in July, and send to President George W. Bush, who has threatened to veto legislation he say brings new taxes and insufficient reform.
In one key change, the plan would set aside $600 million a year, about half the amount appropriated in recent budgets for emergency food aid, to provide a third more support for programs to improve farming techniques in poor countries or teach mothers about childhood nutrition.
Ellen Levinson, who heads an alliance of aid groups that receive U.S. commodity donations and sell them in developing countries to fund those programs, said the change would help wean chronically hungry countries from dependence on food aid.
The bill "sets the stage for more effective and efficient programming over the next five years by assuring more predictable levels of assistance for both chronic hunger and emergency needs," she said.
But Emmy Simmons, a former official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, predicted "severe tensions" as longer-term development programs compete with those aimed at acute needs in nations devastated by drought or war.
"It will severely reduce funding available for emergencies," Simmons said, even if the final compromise bill contains an earmark for longer-term aid that is closer to the $450 million passed by the House.
But Levinson said other changes in the bill would make it easier for officials to dip into emergency funds.
ADMINISTRATION PLAN SNUBBED
The Senate bill also sidesteps an entreaty from the Bush administration, which this year revived a long-sought plan to allow up to a quarter of emergency food aid to be bought in the developing world instead of shipping U.S. crops overseas.
The plan was billed as a way to make assistance more efficient, especially important in an era of soaring crop prices and steep fees for shipping grain across oceans.
A government watchdog found this year that overhead consumes about 65 percent of U.S. emergency food aid funding.
But the idea got little traction on Capitol Hill.
The Senate bill instead contains a much smaller pilot plan for local and regional purchases that was shepherded by Agriculture Committee chair Tom Harkin. It was shifted before the bill was passed to the State Department budget.
"There are questions about how much more (local purchase) could be supported without upsetting markets and causing shortfalls in fragile African economies where production is not steady and a drought could cause shortfalls," Levinson said.
The pilot plan, however, could remain a gesture.
"It's tucked away in a space where it's never going to get funding," said Emily Alpert, a policy advisor at Oxfam America, an aid and advocacy group.
(Editing by Russell Blinch and David Gregorio)
