How effective is global food aid?

• Pages: 161-162

Page 161

Global food aid serves as a critical safety net for poor countries. But does food aid reach those who most need it when they most need it? And, more broadly, has it generally been effective in "smoothing" consumption patterns-that is, averting sharp changes in the overall availability of food? In a new IMF Working Paper, "Foreign Aid and Consumption Smoothing: Evidence from Global Food Aid," Sanjeev Gupta, Benedict Clements, and Erwin R. Tiongson examine the cyclical properties of food aid and evaluate how successful it has been in helping the economies it targets.

For decades, the international community has supplied food aid to developing countries to help them meet shortfalls in their domestic food supplies. This aid has proved to be crucial in averting famine and preventing malnutrition, disease, and associated social problems that, over the long term, exact a heavy economic toll.

Few would argue with the goal of food aid, but is it as effective as it could be? In an examination of the experiences of some 150 developing and transition countries from 1970 to 2000, the authors evaluated whether global food aid did, in fact, stabilize consumption, whether it targeted those countries most in need, and whether ill-timed disbursements of food aid actually had negative fiscal consequences.

Problems with aid disbursement

Research on foreign aid often looks at assistance in the aggregate rather than examine its component parts, such as disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, and food aid. The research that has looked specifically at the food component of aid has tended to concentrate on individual country programs. This new working paper, by contrast, focuses on global food aid and its cyclical pattern.

In particular, the paper assessed the timing of global food aid disbursements and whether they suffered from the same unfortunate pattern identified in earlier research on individual programs-that is, a "procyclical" pattern. Such a pattern implies that food aid falls as the recipient country's food production contracts, which means that less is available exactly when it is most needed.More desirable would be a countercyclical distribution of food aid, which means that food aid increases at the same time food production falls in recipient countries.

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Pitfalls of poor timing

A procyclical pattern to the distribution...