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The United States provides more than half the food aid that feeds hungry people around the world, but its programs are plagued by inefficiencies that have sharply reduced the amount of food being provided and have slowed deliveries, the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress on Wednesday.

23rd March 07 - Celia W. Dugger, Herald Tribune

Rising shipping, transportation and logistical costs have been taking an ever larger share out of the $2 billion in annual spending on food aid in recent years, contributing to a 43 percent decline in the amount of food delivered over the past five years, the GAO found.

Such costs, along with administration, are now consuming almost two-thirds of spending for the main food aid program, Food for Peace, leaving only slightly more than a third of the budget to buy food.

As a result, the United States is feeding about 70 million people a year instead of the more than 90 million it fed five years ago. 

"It's stunning," Thomas Melito, the GAO's director of international affairs and trade, said in an interview on Wednesday. "You have to squeeze the transport and logistics costs down to increase commodities shipped to feed people. I mean, that is the purpose of the program."

The GAO found that flawed planning and contracting practices, as well as inadequate coordination among various U.S. agencies and insufficient oversight of food aid programs, had hampered the quality, timeliness and amount of food aid.

It also documented that ocean shipping was eating up a larger share of the food aid budget as the costs of moving each metric ton of food had soared to $171 last year from $123 in 2002.

In contrast, the United Nations World Food Program, which is not subject to United States restrictions on shipping, pays only $100 to ship each metric ton.

A complex set of laws and regulations contribute to the higher United States shipping costs. Among those provisions is one that requires that three-fourths of all aid be shipped on United States-flag vessels that employ American crews and charge higher rates than foreign-flag ships.

But the bigger picture — and one not addressed by the GAO's report to the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday — is that Europe, Australia and Canada are moving away from shipping their own homegrown food to Africa and Asia, and are increasingly giving cash to buy food in developing countries that are as near as possible to areas hit by hunger crises — an approach that eliminates ocean shipping charges.

United States law still requires that virtually all food given as aid be grown in America.

But for the third year in a row, the Bush administration is asking Congress to allow the government to use up to a quarter of the budget of the main food aid program to buy food in developing countries.

William Hammink, who heads the Food for Peace office at the United States Agency for International Development, told the senators on Wednesday that such an authority would make it possible to provide food much more quickly in a crisis and to save more lives.

Congress killed the proposal in each of the past two years. Senators at the hearing on Wednesday did not seem to have warmed to the idea.

Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, said she was not confident that the government could ensure that it would not buy commodities from America's competitors in Europe and Australia. But Hammink had testified that the government would buy food only in developing countries. "That's something that's a commitment," he said.

An unconvinced Senator Lincoln, who described herself as a rice farmer's daughter, said, "If you want to see safe, affordable and abundant food supply in the United States, somebody's got to stand up for our growers."

The Agency for International Development has sought to speed delivery of food to poor countries by stocking food at warehouses in three locations. But the GAO found limitations to the strategy.

Food is now stored in warehouses in Lake Charles, Louisiana; in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates; and in Djibouti, in East Africa, with the aim of faster response times.

But many ocean carriers lack service in Lake Charles and have to truck the food to Houston before shipping it, adding 21 days to delivery times.

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