The deal reached over the weekend for world trade does not
include proposals to incorporate voluntary food-aid guidelines.
That means that countries, such as the United States, can
continue to pay lip service to the guidelines, but continue to flout them
across a broad front of issues.
Canada has signed on to the voluntary guidelines for decades
and has been abiding by them.
Others who signed on to an extension of the voluntary
guidelines effective last Jan. 1 are Japan, the European Union, Switzerland and
Denmark.
If and when the guidelines are incorporated within the World
Trade Organization agreements, nations will be held to account to implement the
guidelines. They could face penalties for failure to comply.
For the United States this would mean many changes that
would basically require it to shift the focus of its food aid from benefitting
its farmers, shipowners, union members and grain-handling companies to doing
what’s best for the people in need of the food aid.
For example, instead of growing rice across the Southern
United States with billions of federal government subsidies and shipping so
much into poor countries that it undermines incentives to grow food locally,
the guidelines call for donor countries to buy whatever they can as close as
possible to where there is need, but without distorting markets.
The U.S. has often used food aid to dump surplus products so
domestic prices will be held up, but sometimes that food is not appropriate to
the needs and diets of the hungry recipients. For example, surplus skim milk
powder is not very good for lactose-intolerant adults.
The guidelines call for donors to take into account local
diets, appropriate commodities and nutritional needs.
The guidelines also call for the economical use of
resources, such as shipping and grain handling. That would price
U.S.-registered ships and union workers out of many contracts, but U.S. AID requires the government to use U.S.-registered ships and to employ union members.
Ryan Caldwell of the University of Manitoba says the failure
to incorporate the guidelines, thereby putting teeth into the terms, is typical
of the failure of the deal that has been reached to address the goals set when
the negotiations began 12 years ago.
The aim then was to highlight agriculture reforms to reduce
rich-country subsidies and tariff barriers which would make more room for developing
nations to produce more food and earn more export revenues.
There were many studies which concluded that these trade
reforms would be worth many times as much as all of the world relief and
development put together.
