A successful US food aid program needs agriculture investment, experts say

If the Trump administration really wants to focus the United States’ development and foreign affairs efforts on “trade, not aid,” it would be wise to continue funding a broad range of investments in agriculture and resilient food systems abroad. That was the consensus from a panel of three food and agriculture assistance experts at a Monday Devex Pro Briefing on the future of U.S. food and agricultural aid. A “trade, not aid” approach would see the U.S. prioritizing business partnerships over traditional foreign assistance, particularly in Africa. Yet cutting funding for agricultural development programs undermines this goal as a thriving agriculture sector relies on functional infrastructure, research, and innovation. But that message on the merits of agricultural development assistance, while widely accepted by those within the food systems community, does not seem to have broken through amid the U.S. Congress’ recent passage of a $9 billion rescissions package, staff cuts at the State Department, and negotiations on the White House’s budget request for the coming fiscal year. Six months after U.S. President Donald Trump took office for his second term and took a sledgehammer to U.S. foreign aid, emergency food aid and some nonemergency programming appears to have been preserved. But long-running USAID programs such as Feed the Future — which had a roughly $1 billion annual budget to reduce global hunger and poverty by investing in agriculture and food security — were completely canceled without much review and saw all their staffers cut. There has been little indication that the State Department will take up any of the program’s previous aims as it reconstitutes what remains of the U.S. Agency for International Development. International food programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have also seen cuts. The Millennium Challenge Corporation — which contributed to food security through U.S. investments in infrastructure projects such as roads linking farms to markets — also appears to be on the chopping block. Even Food for Peace Title II — a program administered by USAID which shipped U.S.-grown wheat, soybeans, corn, and other commodities abroad as food aid — is poised to see massive cuts. “The team at the Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security [that managed Feed the Future] that I led actually never had an opportunity to brief anybody, any senior officials, on what Feed the Future was, what it accomplished, or what the risks of cutting it were,” said Dina Esposito, a former USAID assistant to the administrator and Biden administration political appointee who departed in January. A few country-level Feed the Future programs remain in some form in Guatemala, Senegal, and Ethiopia, while all the others have been stopped. “We know what happens when the U.S. and other developed countries disinvest in ag development,” said Stephanie Mercier, senior policy adviser at the Washington-based Farm Journal Foundation. “That’s what happened in 2007, 2008 when we had a huge spike in global prices, and it adversely affected those people in developing countries that had seen the slowest growth in ag productivity.” The “trade, not aid” policy pertains to U.S. relations with the African continent under the Trump administration. But what it could move toward instead is a “trade and aid” model, Mercier added. Lower-income countries are already a major market for U.S. agricultural commodities, with two-thirds of those goods going to those nations, she pointed out. “But in order for us to generate more trade, we need to make sure that those economies are strong and healthy. And in order to do that, you need to invest in helping those farmers become more productive, invest in the kind of infrastructure that allows them to make some money and be able to buy that additional chicken for feeding their kids at dinner,” she said. There have been a few bright spots for advocates of food and agricultural assistance amid the aid cuts, however. Around 40 former USAID food aid experts have moved to the State Department from USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. The rescissions package passed last week asks for the Feed the Future innovation labs — partnerships with American colleges and universities on a range of agricultural research from crop pests to climate-resilient seeds — to be restored, though it does not allocate any funding for that, and many of the employees who worked on the labs have been laid off. And Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, has pushed forward a bill to shift the Food for Peace program to USDA so that its work isn’t lost amid USAID’s demise. And for the record, DaNita Murray, executive director of the South Dakota Corn Growers Association, pointed out that U.S. farmers — many of whom are supporters of Trump — have a vested interest in ensuring U.S. food aid continues. They benefit both from the U.S. government purchasing their commodities to ship abroad as food aid, and from the innovation that comes out of U.S. investment in agricultural research in areas such as climate change, better seeds, and livestock health. “While it may not always appear that way, and we all have problems, there is a core of support for food aid amongst farmers and ranchers at the grassroots level in the United States. Please don’t mistake that,” Murray said. Maintaining some programming, such as emergency food for crises, while cutting longer-term agricultural investment is a little bit like keeping the wing of a plane and getting rid of the rest, Esposito said. “But it doesn’t fly if you don’t include all the parts,” Esposito said. For Espositio, former USAID staffers brought expertise in areas of food security, “which I am really confident will have to re-emerge as foreign policy priorities just because they’re so correlated — not just to malnutrition, but to instability and to prosperity around the world that Americans benefit from.”