Does food aid cause famines?

Question

This article claims:

While all efforts should be made to get emergency food aid to Africa during this famine, the tradition of US food aid in Africa is actually part of the problem. Giving food to the hungry seems like the epitome of charity, but under the current system it has stifled the growth of agriculture in Africa and helped continue the cash crop system forced on Africa during Colonialism.

This Facebook meme extends the claim to all countries:

This is not limited to Africa, either, and as the first article shows, this "charity" is affected by politics and affects business: Haitian farmers undermined by food aid

The food aid from the USA is also expensive ($2.3 billion in 2010) but not expensive enough to be adequately nutritious: U.S. food aid must boost nutrition for long-term recipients, adopt sturdier packaging

Does food aid cause famines?

Answer 1

Without food aid, farmers cannot survive a famine, and therefore any economic incentive or disincentive is a moot point. The cycle depicted in the chart is false, because it relies on a model of famine that is outdated and incomplete.

The cycle in the graphic depicts a speculative economic model based on famines caused by FAD - Food Availability Decline. Unfortunately, the FAD model does not take into account important characteristics of a famine, the most notable to this question being that agricultural workers suffer famines disproportionately. Farmers are the first to starve and the first to die of hunger. This is because famines work according to the FEE model - Failure of Entitlement Exchange, which replaced FAD as a more complete and accurate model in the early '80s. (Entitlement here being an academic term for "stuff to buy or barter.") What happens is that food and labor are both commodities - and a farmer's Endowment (an academic term meaning stuff he can use to trade or buy) is insufficient to exchange for enough food to survive. A bag of rice is worth X amount of hours of labor - but in times of famine, no amount of labor is going to be enough to exchange for food.

Non-agricultural workers - tradesmen, professionals, merchants and the political class - will usually have enough resources - endowments - to secure a share of a dwindling supply of food, or to import their own supply - entitlements. Farmers, who rely on part of their harvest as their entitlement, cannot do likewise. Similarly, once conditions improve, they need to return to farming to obtain other, non-food entitlements, such as clothing, education, phone bill, etc. - a depressed market due to food aid means poor prices initially after a famine, but that's better than, you know, dying.

This paper (in PDF) includes a good overview of the FEE model, with clear explanations for laymen, as well as various criticism of FEE and the responses to them.

Answer 2

The problem of food shortages in Africa is not Western food aid but the lack of distribution of the food in Africa. We can assume if there is a shortage of food in Africa, the farmers supply cannot meet the demand for food, albeit many who are starving are too poor to buy their food anyway.

From the above question posted if we assume that if food aid was stopped, there would be enough food supply is (I believe) erroneous. Some farmers may be affected, but does the number of farmers forced into poverty equal the amount of starving people in Africa? They are but a fraction of the total demographic. And feeding the poor (without Political strings or extortion from western nations) can only help these nations because instead of spending all day malnourished and seeking food the Africans can be productive in some skill needed in Africa. Once you mobilize the poor with enough food, shelter and medical care then and only then can they enter the fragile economy strengthening it with their participation and production in their various occupations.

You can find more information on this here ==>James Qulligan is an economist who was the the Brant and Nyerere commissions in the 1980's has a more in depth road map to world economic recovery involving these ideas. Look on this website regarding Aid to foreign countries.