Two days ago US President George Bush announced increased food aid to assist with a global food shortage, partly caused by increased dedication of land to biofuel crops world-wide and in America $5 billion annually in domestic subsidies for bio-fuel production.
THE PRESIDENT: In recent weeks, many have expressed concern about the significant increase in global food prices. And I share this concern. In some of the world's poorest nations, rising prices can mean the difference between getting a daily meal and going without food.
To address this problem, two weeks ago my administration announced that about $200 million in emergency food aid would be made available through a program at the Agriculture Department called the Emerson Trust. But that's just the beginning of our efforts. I think more needs to be done, and so today I am calling on Congress to provide an additional $770 million to support food aid and development programs. Together, this amounts to nearly $1 billion in new funds to bolster global food security. And with other food security assistance programs already in place, we're now projecting to spend nearly -- that we will spend nearly $5 billion in 2008 and 2009 to fight global hunger.
However this aid appears to come with an US export promotion component, increased pressure to allow US free trade across the globe, a push for abolition of tariffs and wider acceptance of GMO technology and crops.
The Emerson Trust of course deals only in US commodities, so that most of the extra $200 million will not boost the domestic economies of struggling countries but will flow back to benefit American agriculture.
As the trust also appears to use commodity releases to compensate for food crop shortages in the US, it would seem that its own large food bank may contribute to the global problem in the first place.
The US Government Accountability Office was critical in 2007 of the wasteful nature of the US food aid program and the fact that non-government organisations receiving American grain act as grain traders in poorer countries and sell-on the scarce resource to fund their own programs.
Over the past four years at least $500 million worth of food aid has been sold-on in this way.
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