Vive l'Afrique

WSJ had an article today on food-aid and Bush’s plan to (shock) allow food aid dollars to be spent buying food from local farmers directly.

Current U.S. food-aid programs have powerful support among American farmers and agribusinesses. They have long supported overseas aid as long as it was their own grain being shipped overseas, not cash. Rebecca Bratter, director of trade policy at U.S. Wheat Associates, the export development arm of the U.S. wheat industry, said, “We support more money for food aid, but we don’t support the local and regional purchase option. It compromises the efficiency of the U.S. food aid program.”

Instead of “It compromises the efficiency of the US food aid program,” I think she may have meant, “It compromises the ability of K Street and American wheat farmers to extract rents from the US government at the expense of the poor for whom the aid is intended.”

In her defense, food aid in the form of hard cash is especially riddled with corruption problems. It’s a shame that a choice has to be made between supporting corruption domestically and supporting corruption abroad.