http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN20331313

“The U.S. shipping industry cautioned Congress that a proposal to buy U.S. food aid from farmers overseas, which the White House contends will help save lives when hunger strikes, will drain aid budgets and could even make things worse for the world’s poor.”
“The coalition of shipping firms and industry groups hit back against mounting criticism of Congress’ opposition to the Bush administration proposal, which would free a quarter of emergency food aid funds from purchasing rules requiring U.S. crops and, mostly, U.S.-flagged ships be used in donating aid.”
“I’m a ‘buy American first’ guy myself,” Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said earlier this month. “But the reality is, we can respond faster, we can respond better, and we can take care of people better in an emergency situation by buying locally.”
“According to a government watchdog, overhead eats up about 65 percent of money spent on U.S. emergency food aid. “
“More and more donors have been shifting aid toward cash in recent years, while the United Nation’s World Food Program is working to procure more food aid in poor countries, hoping to build steady demand for crops and help poor farmers.”
“The shipping sector is skeptical. Local suppliers do not store and allocate their commodities across harvests and, emergencies being what they are, aid agencies do not time their purchases to soften the impact on local markets,” the coalition said.
“The coalition said proponents of local purchase ‘promise great things, but little is said about the risk,’ suggesting donors could fall prey to corrupt officials, unscrupulous traders, or drive up prices in already troubled economies.”
“Instead, the shippers believe such purchases will benefit countries with already robust farm sectors like South Africa.”
“They also suggested that, in the case of emergencies, food aid could be diverted from other destinations, and pointed to growing ‘pre-positioning’ of aid stocks in places like Dubai.”
“Spending hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars on our agriculture competitors is not only bad policy, but bad politics,” they said.