The Food for Peace program has delivered U.S. agricultural commodities to hungry populations around the world for decades. Now, with USDA taking on a larger role in managing the program, commodity groups are pushing to make those changes permanent in the next Farm Bill. Dalton Henry, the vice president of policy with the U.S. Wheat Associates has more.
“And so with the change in USAID really being eliminated under this administration, it has allowed USDA to go back to playing a much larger role in the actual program side of the Food for Peace program, where they’re not just buying, procuring, and shipping the commodities now, but they’re actually responsible for being able to decide where that needs to go and who they want to work with locally to be able to get that aid in front of hungry people.”
Henry says the changes are also significant for the farmers who help supply those commodities.
“For wheat producers, if we’ve kind of totaled up and we’ve had a lot of ups and downs in recent years with changes in foreign aid, but if we took a longer term average over the last decade or so, we’d look at that as being about 5% of our exports on an annual basis. And so it really is particularly significant for a commodity like wheat. Same would certainly be true for sorghum. And then a number of specialty crops.”
Henry explains that Food for Peace serves a broader purpose by strengthening relationships and supporting stability in regions facing hardship.
“And when we were just in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya late last month, there was a tremendous amount of appreciation and recognition that USDA and the U.S. at large was back to providing basically full funding in terms of in-kind commodities going into those programs. And so it helps to earn that goodwill. It helps to stabilize regions that are facing particularly large challenges. The Kakuma refugee camp where we were is about a 300,000 refugee camp in the middle of nowhere in Northeast Kenya. But it is stable compared to many of the countries around it that are facing a conflict at the moment. In addition to the goodwill that gets generated, if we can create stability at least in terms of food resources, I think that does have tremendous benefits for U.S. foreign policy.”
When questions arose about the future of foreign aid programs during the restructuring of USAID, Henry says growers hoped food assistance would continue and ultimately find a permanent home.
“I tend to think that Americans as a whole are going to struggle with the thought of large swaths of people going to bed hungry at night. I think many of us were always hopeful that we would find an alternative. But knowing that it’s not going to be at USAID, is that going to be at State Department where all the other non-food assistance programs are operated? Or does it make more sense to shift this to USDA, who’s already running a significant piece of the program because of the procurement? As we look to the future, being able to really firmly plant this at USDA is a pretty significant priority for wheat growers.”
Both the House and the Senate versions of the Farm Bill included a provision that would permanently move the administration of the Food for Peace program to USDA. As those discussions continue, wheat growers want to make sure program funding remains focused on moving U.S. agricultural products to those who need them most.
“At its core, Food for Peace represents a feeding program, and we believe pretty strongly that those dollars should be used to buy nothing other than U.S. products to ship abroad. And so I think both versions of the bill aim to place a minimum percentage on program funds that buy U.S. commodities and ship them overseas. And then recognize that… it’s still going to take significant costs for the World Food Program to move that wheat from a warehouse, into a 50 kg bag, and then 1,000 miles across country, and so we want to recognize that, but also say, hey, at the end of the day, this program needs to be about moving food to the places that need it. That’s probably a second really important element of that Farm Bill move for us.”