Will wonders never cease

The wonder in this case is that even the Bush administration can't be wrong all the time. As reported by the New York Times for Saturday,

the law in the United States requires that virtually all its donated food be grown in America and shipped at great expense across oceans, mostly on vessels that fly American flags and employ American crews — a process that typically takes four to six months.

For a third year, the Bush administration, which has pushed to make foreign aid more efficient, is trying to change the law to allow the United States to use up to a quarter of the budget of its main food aid program to buy food in developing countries during emergencies. The proposal has run into stiff opposition from a potent alliance of agribusiness, shipping and charitable groups with deep financial stakes in the current food aid system.

The article presents a number of objections to the change from Congressional, corporate, and nonprofit sources, objections ranging from the perhaps reasonable through the patently ridiculous before landing at the transparently greedy. It's a rather short flight.

Get past the let's just call it questionable claim that "American food is safer and of higher quality" than that available locally and the condescending hand-wringing over the risks of stolen cash and "badly managed" local programs and you get to the real nub:

Agribusiness ... defend[s] the idea that federal spending should benefit American business and farming interests, as well as the hungry. Without support from such interest groups, food aid budgets from Congress would wither, they say.

“It would be at extreme risk of being diminished,” said Paul B. Green, a consultant to the North American Millers’ Association, a trade group for the milling industry that counts Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Horizon Milling, a joint venture of Cargill and CHS Inc. among its members.

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Cargill, along with Cal Western Packaging Corporation, have for the past three years sold the federal government well over a billion dollars in food to be used in relief programs, over half the total. Shipping companies, which also oppose the proposed change, were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move the food overseas.

The claim of "diminished" support if the White House's proposed change goes through was echoed by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, who said last year that

decoupling food aid from American maritime and agribusiness interests was “beyond insane.”

“It is a mistake of gigantic proportions,” he said, “because support for such a program will vanish overnight, overnight.”

This despite that fact that, according to James Kunder of USAID, the proposal would affect less 0.5% of US agricultural exports and that the agency estimates that under it, the US could feed a million more people for six months and save 50,000 additional lives every year.

So let's be clear here, completely clear: These voices in industry and in the Democratic Congress - I'll repeat that for the blind partisans among us, the Democratic Congress - are saying in so many words that US support for aiding the hungry, the poor, the needy, the destitute, is contingent on there being enough bucks to be made in the process. That unless wallets enough are fattened enough, the rest of the world can just go somewhere and die. It's hard to imagine a clearer or colder celebration of selfishness.

And make no mistake about it, people are dying as the result of this greedhead callousness. The same NY Times article opens by describing the plight of people in Zambia who are among the half-million people who are facing the prospect of their food rations, supplied by the the United Nations World Food Program, running out in the next few weeks. In some places, rations have already been halved to stretch them out.

Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.

But again, due to the opposition of largely corporate interests, the US government cannot offer cash assistance. Even in an emergency. Even as people face starvation. Even as they begin to die.

While we congratulate ourselves on our generosity and goodness.

Footnote: Oxfam is among groups supporting the proposed change, arguing it will not only enable the US to feed people more quickly in emergencies, it can help alleviate poverty in poor countries by supporting local farmers. The Zambian office of the World Food Program, which imports food during lean years, buys locally-grown corn during good years - and in so doing has injected more than $1 billion into local economies since 2001.