Notes and sources for “Myth: More US aid will help the hungry”

With kind permission from Peter Rosset of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (or FoodFirst.org as it is also known), chapter 10 of World Hunger: 12 Myths, 2nd Edition, by Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza (fully revised and updated, Grove/Atlantic and Food First Books, Oct. 1998) has been reproduced and posted here. Due to the length of the chapter, it has been split into sub pages on this site.

  1. World Bank, World Development Report 1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), table 18.
  2. The twenty-one rich OECD countries have substantially reduced their aid budgets, which in 1994 reached their lowest point in over twenty years. Earthscan, The Reality of Aid: An Independent Review of International Aid. (London: Earthscan Publications, 1996) 17.
  3. U.S. Agency for International Development, Congressional Presentation Fiscal Year 1996 (Washington, DC: USAID, 1995), table AFD_CP.XLS.
  4. George Shultz, "Foreign Assistance Request for FY 1986," Current Policy, no. 656 (U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Washington, DC, February 19, 1985).
  5. For a discussion of Cold War U.S. aid policies, see the previous edition of this book, Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, World Hunger: 12 Myths (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1986), chapter 10; see also Frances Moore Lappé, Rachel Schurman, and Kevin Danaher, Betraying the National Interest: How U.S. Foreign Aid Threatens Global Security by Undermining the Political and Economic Stability of the Third World (New York: Grove Press, 1987); and Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and David Kinley, Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1981).
  6. See Peter Rosset, "Overseas Rural Development Policy" in Global Focus: A New Foreign Policy Agenda 1997-1998, ed. Tom Barry and Martha Honey (Albuquerque and Silver City: Interhemispheric Resource Center and Institute for Policy Studies, 1997), 55-56; and Michael E. Conroy, Douglas L. Murray, and Peter M. Rosset, A Cautionary Tale: Failed U.S. Development Policy in Central America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner/Food First Development Studies, 1996), chapter 3.
  7. USAID Developments (Summer 1997), 4.
  8. Ibid., 1.
  9. U.S. Agency for International Development, Congressional Presentation Fiscal Year 1996.
  10. U.S. Agency for International Development, Congressional Presentation Fiscal Year 1996; calculated with country ranks from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book 1995 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1995).
  11. Rosset, "Overseas Rural Development," 54.
  12. Conroy, Murray, and Rosset, A Cautionary Tale, 70-79.
  13. Ibid., table 3.1.
  14. Ibid., 76.
  15. Ibid., 77.
  16. Rosset, "Overseas Rural Development"; Walden Bello with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau, Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (London: Pluto Press/Food First Books/Transnational Institute, 1994).
  17. USAID Congressional Presentation Fiscal Year 1996.
  18. U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development, The U.S. Contribution to World Food Security: The U.S. Position Paper Prepared for the World Food Summit (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1996), 4.
  19. U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID Annual Food Assistance Report, 1996 (Washington, DC: USAID, 1996), Budget Annex A-1.
  20. See Li Kheng Poh and Peter Rosset, "New Food Aid: Same as the Old Food Aid?" Food First Backgrounder (Winter 1995), for definitions of the different kinds of food aid. See also Lappé, Collins, and Kinley, Aid as Obstacle.
  21. Rachel Garst and Tom Barry, Feeding the Crisis: U.S. Food Aid and Farm Policy in Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 53.
  22. USAID, USAID Annual Food Assistance Report, 1996, 53.
  23. Rachel Szego, "Cargill, Incorporated: Building a Worldwide Presence," FIAN Fact Sheet (FoodFirst Information Action Network, 1997): 2-3.
  24. See discussions in Lappé, Schurman, and Danaher, Betraying the National Interest; and Lappé, Collins, and Kinley, Aid as Obstacle.
  25. Lappé, Collins, and Kinley, Aid as Obstacle, chapter 12, 95.
  26. Garst and Barry, Feeding the Crisis, 54.
  27. Food Security Act of 1985, cited in Ibid., 210-211, n. 50.
  28. USAID, USAID Annual Food Assistance Report, 1996, Budget Annex, A-9-10.
  29. Ibid., A-1.
  30. Ibid.
  31. Lappé, Collins, and Kinley, Aid as Obstacle, 113.
  32. Rehman Sobhan, Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation: Preconditions for Development (London: Zed Books, 1993), 113-114.
  33. Program on Peacekeeping Policy, United Nations Operations in Somalia, Part II (Washington, DC: Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University, 1994), 2.
  34. See Li Kheng Poh and Peter Rosset, "New Food Aid: Same as the Old Food Aid?"; and Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free Press, 1997).
  35. Poh and Rosset, "New Food Aid: Same as the Old Food Aid?" 5.
  36. USAID Annual Food Assistance Report: 1996, chapter 3, 20, 26.
  37. Michael Maren, "Good Will and Its Limits in Somalia," New York Times, August 27, 1993, A29; also, interview with Michael Maren conducted by Li Kheng Poh on May 12, 1995.
  38. Lappé, Collins, and Kinley, Aid as Obstacle, chapter 15.
  39. Poh and Rosset, "New Food Aid: Same as the Old Food Aid?" 4; Tony Jackson with Deborah Eade, Against the Grain: The Dilemma of Project Food Aid (Oxford: OXFAM, 1982), chapter 8.
  40. Michael Maren, "Good Will," A29. See also Michael Maren, The Road to Hell.
  41. "Military Aid Legislation," Arms Sales Monitor, no. 36 (February 1998): 1; U.S. Agency for International Development, The USAID FY 1998 Congressional Presentation, Summary (Washington, DC: USAID, 1998).
  42. Congresswoman MacKinney at "Joint Hearing Before the Committees on International Security, International Organizations and Human Rights and International Operations," House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 103rd Congress, November 9, 1993 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), 4.
  43. "Introduction: A Second Chance," pp. 1-7 and Barry and Honey, Global Focus, 5.
  44. Ibid.
  45. David Isenberg, "Arms Trade" in Barry and Honey, Global Focus, 94.
  46. See Douglas L. Murray, Cultivating Crisis: The Human Costs of Pesticides in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 110-112.
  47. See Joseph Collins with Frances Moore Lappé, Nick Allen, and Paul Rice, What Difference Could a Revolution Make? Food and Farming in the New Nicaragua, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Food First Books, 1985); and Peter Rosset and John Vandermeer, Nicaragua: Unfinished Revolution: The New Nicaragua Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1986).
  48. See Conroy, Murray, and Rosset, A Cautionary Tale, chapters 1 and 3.
  49. Joint Ministerial Committee of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on the Transfer of Real Resources to Developing Countries (also known as the Development Committee), Aid for Development: The Key Issues (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1985), 41. In the section of this report entitled, "Aid and the Poor," the Development Committee concedes that "rural development programs have usually been unable to benefit 'the poorest of the poor,' i.e., the lowest 20 percent or so of the rural income distribution."
  50. "A Synthesis of AID Experience: Small-Farmer Credit, 1973-1985," USAID Evaluation Special Study no. 41, (Washington, DC, October 1985) 11.
  51. Conroy, Murray, and Rosset, A Cautionary Tale, chapter 2.
  52. Ibid., 37; see also Peter Rosset, "Sustainability, Economies of Scale and Social Instability: Achilles Heel of Non-Traditional Export Agriculture?" Agriculture and Human Values 8, no. 4 (1991): 30-37.
  53. Conroy, Murray, and Rosset, A Cautionary Tale, 39.
  54. Ibid., 41.
  55. Ibid.
  56. Marc J. Cohen, "United States" in The Reality of Aid 1996: An Independent Review of International Aid, ed. Judith Randel and Tony German (London: Earthscan, 1996), 194.
  57. Erik Leaver and John Cavanagh, "Controlling Transnational Corporations" in Barry and Honey, Global Focus, 41.
  58. Ibid.
  59. World Bank, World Debt Tables, 1994-95 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1996).
  60. Ibid.
  61. Richard Lawrence, "Clinton's New Plan for Africa" Journal of Commerce (February 15, 1996), 6-A.
  62. So-called in the U.S. policy document titled Comprehensive Trade and Development Policy for the Countries of Africa, quoted in Tetteh Hormeku, "US-Africa Trade Policy: In Whose Interest?" in African Agenda (Accra, Ghana: Third World Network Africa Secretariat, 1997).
  63. The Growth and Opportunity Bill in the U.S. Congress establishes a series of criteria that condition eligibility of a country to "benefit" from these policies to its performance of a series of "free-market" reforms. These criteria include World Trade Organization membership; promotion of free movement for goods, services, and factors of production in and out of the country; and protection of property rights (Hormeku, "US-Africa Trade Policy," 6).
  64. See Hormeku, "US-Africa Trade Policy," 4, 5.
  65. See, for example, John William Templeton, "Africa Needs a Seat at the World's Economic Table," San Francisco Examiner, June 9, 1997.
  66. George Kourous and Tom Barry, "Export-Import Bank" in Barry and Honey, Global Focus, 33.
  67. Cohen, "United States," 194.
  68. Kourous and Barry, "Export-Import Bank," 34-35.
  69. Janice Shields, "Overseas Private Investment Corporation" in Barry and Honey, Global Focus.
  70. For a recent attempt to estimate the magnitude of capital flows from Southern to Northern countries, which far outweigh total North-South flows, see Martin Khor, "South-North Resources Flows and Their Implications for Sustainable Development," Third World Resurgence, no. 46 (1994): 14-25.
  71. United Nations, World Economic and Social Survey 1997 (New York: United Nations, 1997), table A. 36.
  72. See Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor, revised and updated edition (New York: Grove Weidenfeld/Food First Books, 1990).
  73. Oxfam International, "Oxfam International Calls for Action on Multilateral Debt," press release (Washington, DC: Oxfam International, February 20, 1996).
  74. Debt payment figures from United Nations, World Economic and Social Survey 1997, table A. 37; direct foreign investment and development assistance figures from World Bank, World Debt Tables 1995 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995), table 1.
  75. 50 Years Is Enough, 1025 Vermont Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC, 20005, USA, [email protected].

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