Food Aid Projections for the Decade of the 1990s (1988) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
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The premise of the meeting was that recent efforts to estimate global, regional, and country-specific food trade and food aid needs are sufficiently advanced to warrant a systematic review of the various methodologies, and a comparison of the resulting projections, in the hope that it would yield valuable findings for those concerned with alleviating world hunger. To this end, representatives of the following organizations met in October 1988 under the aegis of the National Research Council to compare food aid projections and methodologies: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAG)
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Hunger-reducing food aid: food commodities or cash supplied to recipient countries that not only stabilizes prices but also, through targeting, increases the food intake of historically hungry populations. Neither of these definitions specifically includes emergency food aid, nor would they pick up commodity imports subsidized under export promotion programs.
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Financial aid instead of food aid, it is believed, would enable donor countries to dispense with complex and cumbersome systems of administering food aid, and allow free market forces to operate more efficiently, in the expectation that in the Tong term this would give greater impetus to economic growth in recipient countries, removing more quickly the need for assistance with food imports. In fact, however, food aid programs historically have operated in just this self-correcting fashion.
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A diet for everyone in the world consisting of about 30 percent animal products doubles the need for primary agricultural products significantly above what is currently produced in the world. This variation due to dietary composition is much larger than the potential differences in projected demand due to different population growth projections.
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Food aid influences nutrition and health. It is not a question of total food quantity per se, nor average supply and demand per se, but rather how food prices are determined and the extent to which the incomes of populations at risk are insufficient to afford adequate food.
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Assuming a perfect targeting of food aid to poorest households suffering from such deficiencies, and further assuming that each metric ton will result in a net increase in consumption within those households of one-half of each metric ton targeted to such households because of an estimated 50 percent substitution "leakage" factor, 3~36 MMT of grain would have to be targeted on these households. This would result in a net increase in market demand of 15-18 MMT among the targeted population and the use of the other 15-18 MMT to meet market demand so as to stabilize, but not reduce, local food prices, while saving foreign exchange expenditures.
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allocated to countries in most need, might still not reach the people targeted, since they are left unaffected by many current food aid modalities. The targeting task requires additional resources and mechanisms of distribution through food for work, food stamps, or entitlement measures, all of which target food beyond those currently included.
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It is felt that overall, though there may be local or even worldwide shortages for which emergency food assistance will be needed, there is no indication that historic upward production trends will be reversed during the coming decade. Other External Factors Among other types of shocks considered that might affect global food production during the decade of the 1990s were those principally linked to relations among the great powers, including the possibility of the "nuclear winter" of war.
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