As the G8 Summit came to a close, we had a bit of a surprise twist in the outcome. There was more movement on food security than we expected and day one of the summit was focused almost solely on that issue, a rarity in recent G8 history. The increased attention was due in part to the stirring outcry from anti-hunger and poverty activists all over the world.

In the weeks before the Summit, Oxfam supporters contributed to the nearly three thousand #DearG8 tweets, keeping the pressure on G8 leaders to help 50 million people lift themselves out of poverty. Our supporters sent thousands of letters to President Obama, to reiterate that message. We also held two media “stunts” during the week of the summit, bringing activists dressed as the G8 leaders to the White House, and then outside the Reagan Building where President Obama unveiled his “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”.

In his pre-G8 speech at the Chicago Council Symposium, and again in his closing remarks, he mentioned the G8 will set a new goal of helping 50 million men, women, and children lift themselves out of poverty through country-led agriculture plans. Since 500 million small farms in developing countries support nearly 2 billion people, supporting those farmers means that their families can earn an income, get an education, and thrive. The goal is spot-on, but the way to achieve that goal doesn’t add up.  Though fulfilling their L’Aquila pledges (which were $7.3 billion per year through 2012), the G8 failed to renew their commitments. Instead, they’ve invited the private sector to pledge $3 billion over 10 years in a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. This is a shrinking response to a growing problem and, even if companies deliver, it still represents 96% decrease in investment from previous public funding levels. At a time when more than 18 million people across West Africa are facing a massive food crisis, we need to recognize that the scale of the problem requires a serious investment that matches the plans from people on the ground. After all, aren’t the world’s small-scale farmers who sell their goods in local markets part of the private sector, too?

On the bright side, G8 countries have made additional pledges of $1.2 billion to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP). Read more about GAFSP here: http://www.gafspfund.org/gafsp. We’re happy to see this important mechanism for country ownership get the funding it deserves.

While it’s reassuring that our leaders are making food security a global priority, we must make sure that we hold them accountable to match the scale of the need and listen to what people in developing countries really need.

Though fulfilling their L’Aquila pledges (which were $7.3 billion per year through 2012), the G8 failed to renew their commitments. Photo: Victoria Marzilli/Oxfam.

Growing crops gives us all an appreciation of people who grow food. Photo: Irit Tamir

Vegetable gardening may be a hobby for us, but it always gives me an appreciation for the people who actually do grow our food. Those people are usually invisible to all of us. We go to the grocery store and see beautiful produce lining the shelves without any real awareness of the process and hard work that it took to get them there.

Ironically, those who work in the food system are often the most food insecure—and that extends throughout the food chain. Here in the US, over 20 million people work in the food supply industry. According to the Food Chain Workers Alliance, 23% of grocery workers are paid less than minimum wage. The Restaurant Opportunities Center found that 10.1 million workers are employed by the restaurant industry, which has some of the lowest wages along with many occurrences of wage theft. The median wage in that industry is only $8.89, which means that over half of restaurant workers earn below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

Farmworkers in particular are vulnerable because they are excluded from many of the protections that cover other workers under US law. For example, agricultural workers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, so they have no right to collectively bargain under federal law (workers in other industries enjoy this right). In addition, they are exempt from many of the provisions under the Fair Labor Standards Act, including overtime provisions.

Most states exclude agricultural workers from the requirement of employers to provide workmen’s compensation insurance—despite the fact that farmworkers have a high incidence of occupational injury and illness. According to the Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States, in 2009 the occupational fatality rate for farmworkers was five times the rate of the average worker; yet in that same period fewer than half of them were covered by workers’ compensation insurance. Bottom line, there are at least 1.4 million farmworkers in this country, and three out of five of them (and their families) live in poverty.

Oxfam is working to bring these issues to light through the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI). EFI is a program that will certify good working conditions at a farm along with better food safety and pesticide practices. The program was created by major food buyers, growers, farmworker groups, and other non-governmental organizations, including Oxfam. Soon, consumers will be able to buy fresh produce and know that it came from a farm that provided a dignified livelihood for farmworkers, with fair and safe working conditions.

In the meantime, if you want your grocery store to join this program, tell them about EFI so we can begin to bring all workers in the food system out from the shadows and where we can see them thrive.

So, a trickle. Is it a trend?

Some activists are showing up at corporate shareholder meetings and trying various lobby and pressure tactics.

There’s some evidence that the commodities investment play may not be working out so well—speculative bubbles do correct eventually. But most of the biggest players remain serenely unfazed by both erratic performance and potential collateral damage (i.e. food price volatility). Goldman Sachs, under Robert Rubin, pioneered the field of commodity index funds. Goldman has been accused of creating the food crisis. Has Goldman ever answered?

This Friday, G8 leaders are making a big announcement on food security. We expect the launching of a new initiative. Past summits haven’t always had development on the agenda, and the US hosts deserve credit for making sure food security is front and center. Now that the G8 is on the trail to food security, how will we know if they get there?

Although we don’t have all the details of the initiative, here are some key mile-markers to measure the G8’s progress on the new food security initiative. If they can meet these mile-markers on their trail, it will indeed be a great day for nearly 1 billion poor and hungry people:

1.       Does it match the scale of the need?

G8 leaders committed to support developing-country plans for agriculture to the tune of $7 billion a year over three years when they met in L’Aquila, Italy, three years ago. Earlier in Maputo, African governments committed to allocating 10% of their budgets to support agriculture, since it’s how three-fourths of Africans make a living. Experts suggest the global need for agriculture funding is between $60 and $75 billion a year. As much as private sector commitments are welcome, they are usually in the millions of dollars, rather than billions.  There’s no substitute for public investment. If the G8 wants to stay on the trail, the new G8 food security initiative needs to scale up the G8’s public sector investments from $7 billion a year to $10 billion to show forward momentum. At a minimum, the modest funding commitments of L’Aquila should not be eroded.

A new G8 food security initiative needs to be consistent with Africa's plans for agriculture. Photo: Alun McDonald/Oxfam

2.       Is it consistent with Africa’s plans for agriculture?

Just as important as the “how much” test is the “how” test. Efforts to tackle food insecurity work best when they are led by the people and the nations who are closest to the problem. That’s why the G8 committed, through the Rome Principles, to channel their funding through country investment plans for agriculture. While a lot of the G8 countries are on track to meet their “how much” goals, they’re not doing so great on this “how”. A recent ActionAid report suggests that donors are, for the most part, still not funding through country plans. Any new initiative has to be consistent with country plans if it’s to succeed. Unfortunately, this week, we expect the G8 leaders to focus on private sector investment—despite the fact that most country plans don’t include much of a funding role for the private sector. African civil society wants to see a continued commitment to L’Aquila and the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), not a distraction or a shift in responsibility. A new initiative needs to prove it’s part of Africa’s plans to be headed in the right direction.

3.       Does it hold everybody accountable for delivering on promises?

Every year, the G8 puts out an accountability report intended to hold itself accountable for progress. This year, the US hosts are to be commended for making an effort to include not just what the G8 committed, but what it actually delivered. But next year and especially the year after, the accountability report will be measuring progress against the new food security initiative. How does—or should—the G8 hold the private sector accountable for pledges made? They don’t answer to other G8 leaders, they answer to their shareholders. Their pledges are strictly voluntary. For the new food security initiative to succeed, all pledges must have a clear accountability mechanism, or else the initiative will get stuck at the trail head.

4.       Is it based on evidence, with a clear path to poverty reduction?

Governments are often tempted to turn to well-resourced multi-national companies and investors in a period of constrained public budgets. But this faith in the private sector as a panacea is not always based on evidence. There’s not much evidence that using donor dollars to leverage private sector funds delivers results for poor people. A recent report by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group pointed out that less than half of its International Finance Corporation (IFC) projects successfully reached the poor. For a new G8 food security initiative to succeed, it needs to have a clearly-marked path to poverty reduction, one that’s based on the evidence, not on blind faith.

On Friday, G8 leaders will announce a new food security initiative at a special event in Washington the day before they head out to Camp David. Stay tuned this week to hear how they’re faring on the trail!

The amount of food produced and consumed has grown gradually in the last decade, but the amount of investment interest in food commodities has skyrocketed. For the most part, investors and speculators are not actually buying food commodities; they are buying futures contracts and various financial derivatives. Volumes have grown from less than $10 billion to more than $450 billion in a little over a decade. And while commodities markets once were largely composed of speculators who were directly engaged in food industries, financial investors—index funds, hedge funds, etc.—now dominate the markets. The usual explanation of the rapid movement of capital into commodities is that investors were seeking new, safer places to put money now that economic catastrophes have struck dot-coms, the stock market, the housing sector, and even government debt. Commodities, historically, have not been as tied to other economic assets, so are a good hedge; i.e. if the stock market collapses, commodities might not—and vice-versa.

Some analysts argue that this investor rush into commodities has inflated food prices. But the dominant view is that this financial activity on futures contracts and derivatives doesn’t really affect prices directly—that “market fundamentals” of supply and demand are still what determines the price of corn on Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Part of the challenge is finding a way to test the question. The accelerating financial activity is not in physical hording or dumping of agriculture commodities, but in trading futures contracts and “derivatives” of these contracts—some of them quite exotic, obscure, or unregulated. The analytical tools to measure the impact of speculative activity on prices are not well developed. Attempts to do this have usually found no impact—or found mixed results. But it’s also true that the methods have been flawed—only able to capture parts of the market and activity—and good data is not always available.

Now comes a contribution from researchers at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They tried to investigate commodities trading at shorter intervals than the standard daily rate (i.e. were prices up or down each day?). Instead, they look at data measuring trades at one second, 10 seconds, 5 minutes, and one-hour. They analysis tells an interesting story, shown in this graph (Source: VoxEU.org):

What it measures is the correlation between commodities futures prices and stock market futures. And what it shows is that starting in 2008, at the height of the food price crisis—and at the moment of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, something changed. Before then, commodities futures and stock market futures had low correlation; close to zero. After that point, they have begun to move together more closely; closer to 1, which would be perfect correlation.

So, what does this tell us?

Well, I’m not totally sure. And this is just one study. And, you could certainly ask whether this tool—measuring the correlation of short-term movements between commodities futures and equities futures—is useful.

But here are some possible implications:

The authors say that “high-frequency trading strategies, in particular the trend-following ones, are playing a key role.” They argue that the “financialization” of commodity markets is impacting price determination—that if prices were set based on supply/demand fundamentals, there shouldn’t be a correlation with equities. Commodity prices should be affected by seasons, weather, demand, etc. not by changes in stock market prices. They find similar correlations over a range of commodities—including non-food commodities. So—they argue—the shifting “financialization” is changing price formation.

They argue that linking commodity markets to financial actors and stock markets in this way means “commodity markets are more and more prone to events in global financial markets and more likely to deviate from their fundamentals.”

The linkage also undermines the purpose of many financial actors in investing in commodities; to hedge against other markets, like the stock market. The idea that they are increasingly correlated will mean that commodities won’t be safe if the stock market crashes.

If true—and if, indeed, caused by the high frequency trading—this might also add the arguments in favor of measures like the financial transaction tax, which could help to mediate or reduce this linkage and risk.

This piece is part of a series of blogs by leading NGOs to call attention to a range of issues that should be raised at the G8 summit at Camp David in rural Maryland from May 18-19.

My country, Niger, has consistently been one of the world’s poorest countries. And in the last decade, we’ve been hit by a series of food crises—in 2005, in 2010, and today—pushing us further and further into poverty.

With only three months of rain every year and virtually no available irrigation, our farmers struggle to grow whatever they can from our parched earth. Increasingly erratic weather patterns are making things much worse, with droughts leading to extreme floods and vice versa.

Crisis after crisis has had a devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Even minor shocks are having an increasingly severe impact on the lives of the poor, as coping mechanisms reach their limits. Many, especially, men, left their families in search of food and work, leaving women to fend for their children alone. Others have sold their possessions and taken on debt, often at very high interest rates, so they can feed their families.

In pastoral areas, even families who anticipated the crisis by selling off their animals in time only benefited from a few additional weeks’ worth of food. But then they were left with no source of further income.

This hunger threatens the survival and development of our youngest children, as well as the health, livelihoods and survival of the adults. It threatens the future of my country.

But we can fight back against this lethal cocktail of climate change and extreme poverty. In fact, we created a plan on how to fight hunger in my country, both in the short term and in the long term, so we can finally pull ourselves out of this cycle of crisis.

Improving access to credit for famers, so farmers can buy seeds, fertilizer and tools to fertilize their crops, will definitely help. Investing in the resilience of farming communities in the face of climate change is crucial. Prioritizing programs that get people working, such as cash for work or food for work programs, will deliver. As will partnering with farmer groups and investing in their capacity to fight for the rights of farmers and involving farmers in the strategies to fight hunger.

We have a plan, but now we need help putting it into action.

Three years ago at the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy, the world’s richest countries made a promise: if poor countries came up with good plans to help poor farmers grow more and earn more, rich countries would help make it happen. Donor countries, including the United States, have helped, but it’s been too little and too late.

As President Obama prepares to host this year’s G8, I hope he remembers the initiative he kicked off at L’Aquila and gets G8 leaders to step it up and deliver. We kept our end of the bargain, but we’re waiting on theirs. If they can muster the courage to prioritize this extremely important issue, they not only can help us in Niger, but they have the chance to lift 50 million people out of hunger and poverty through agriculture. With such an amazing payoff, isn’t it worth a try?

Join us on May 17 for an interactive discussion on Twitter with global hunger expert and author of Enough and The Last Hunger Season, Roger Thurow.

What is a Twitter town hall? The Twitter town hall is meant to be an interactive Q&A session that anyone can participate in from anywhere!  Follow #G8chat to get an expert’s take on global hunger and how we can work towards solving it at this year’s G8 Summit.

How can I participate? Just log in to your Twitter account (or sign up if you haven’t already) and then follow the #G8chat hashtag for all the tweets. This will automatically refresh with new tweets from the chat as they come in. The conversation will begin promptly at 11am EST and will run for one hour. Jump in anytime with a question or comment, in 140 characters or less, but remember to include the #G8chat hashtag so that we can find your question! Roger Thurow @RogerThurow will answer your questions about hunger, poverty, and how we can work towards a solution. The chat will be moderated by @OxfamAmerica. Also joining us will be @ChicagoCouncil, @GlobalAgDev, and members of Oxfam America staff.

About Roger: Roger Thurow is a senior fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. For thirty years, he was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He is, with Scott Kilman, the author of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, which won the Harry Chapin Why Hunger book award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award. His new book, The Last Hunger Season: a year in an African Farm Community on The Brink of Change, will be released on May 29, 2012. He is a 2009 recipient of the Action Against Hunger Humanitarian Award. He lives near Chicago.

Oxfam has long argued that US cotton subsidies damage lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers in developing countries at a high cost to American taxpayers(see also this study). Unfortunately, subsidies for US cotton producers included in the Senate Farm Bill proposal continues this trend rather than reverses it.

In 2002, Brazil, joined by Chad, Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali, and Senegal  (C4+1), brought actions against US cotton subsidies in the WTO. These nations claimed that as a result of cotton programs in the United States, especially programs that paid American cotton farmers to increase production as market prices went down, the market was rigged against producers in other nations that counted on an unbiased market. In 2009, Brazil won a case in the WTO equivalent of trial against US cotton subsidies. As a result, the US government—taxpayers—now make annual payments to subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry at a level of almost $150M per year. The payments are intended to be made until US cotton subsidies are removed.

Fanta Diarra next to her cotton crop in Mali. Macina Film/Oxfam.

In 2011 and 2012, National Cotton Council worked with Congress to draft a cotton subsidy program for the industry that they claim will resolve the distortion that led to losing the WTO case in the first place. Their proposal is called the Stacked Income Protection Plan (STAX). In general, STAX provides insurance against even modest losses of revenue resulting from poor harvests or low prices. With highly subsidized producer premiums, it is taxpayers who are on the hook.

Will this readjustment of the cotton program satisfy the complaints of Brazil and the West African cotton producers? Not according to Brazil: In a recent letter to Congress, Robert Azevedo, Brazil’s Representative to the WTO, wrote, “From the data we analyzed… the STAX proposal would likely result in the highest level of trade distortion of all the proposals examined by us. … In our view, no farm program can be WTO-compliant and cover ‘shallow losses’—thereby insulating farmers from market forces—to the extent foreseen in the aforementioned NCC proposal.”

Making matters worse, in a sleight of hand that may seem innocuous, the STAX program will fall under a section of the Farm Bill that will shield cotton from payment limitations, conservation compliance rules, and the individual producer transparency that is required for farmers growing corn, soybeans, or any of the other “program” crops supported through Farm Bill spending. Shielded from these requirements and safeguards, cotton producers basically get a free pass from the oversight and responsibility that comes with other subsidies.

At the House Agriculture field hearing held in Dodge City on April 20, Little River, KS farmer Kendall Hodgson said that he “would ask the Committee to be mindful of WTO compliance. We like to think of ourselves as a nation that follows the law. We stand to lose more by noncompliance than to gain. I understand the realities of the Brazilian threat of a WTO suit concerning our cotton program and our subsequent payments to Brazil to keep that suit from happening but this is something of a black eye for our farm programs that only invite criticism from our detractors.” Hodgson, a diversified farmer, reminded legislators that when cotton violates trade agreements, it jeopardizes markets for all producers.

The proposal put forth by the National Cotton Council—and adopted by the Senate Agriculture Committee—has no intention of correcting the wrongs created by earlier cotton programs. In fact, on top of shunning any kind of accountability to resource protection and to taxpayers, the current proposal makes no modification to the worst component of trade distortion: the marketing loan program. And farmers like Kendall Hodgson in Kansas, and cotton farmers in West Africa will continue to be at risk because the cotton industry refuses to play fair.

So begins Michela Wrong’s gripping book, It’s Our Turn to Eat, the story of John Githongo’s effort to uncover corruption inside the administration of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. The book tells the story of how Githongo risked his life and livelihood to help make his country more just and accountable to average Kenyans—and the challenge that entrenched corruption poses for development.

Caption: John Githongo participates in a policy workshop on country ownership in Washington, DC. Credit: Oxfam.

Githongo is a compelling figure and a true hero—the very type of person you would expect the United States to seek as a partner in fighting corruption and injustice in developing countries. But too often, the United States makes it hard for anti-corruption fighters to actually do their job. The problem is that Congress is still too often focused on avoiding corruption in developing countries, rather than actually working with others to do something about it. In this effort to avoid the risk of corruption, the US government has often bypassed local organizations and governments rather than working with them, missing opportunities to help local watchdogs root out corruption and strengthen democratic institutions, reducing waste, fraud, and abuse for the long-term.

Thankfully, USAID is seeking to fix this problem. A new reform called “Implementation and Procurement Reform,” or IPR, is designed to help countries deliver for their own people and help people hold their governments accountable. The agency plans to spend 30% of its funds through local actors, whether they’re local nonprofits, businesses, or governments, by 2015 (up from 11% in 2011). After assessing public financial management systems to manage for risks, USAID will boost its funding through host country systems to reach 25 country governments directly; they will cut out the middleman by hiring 576 local nonprofits directly instead of spending through contractors.

USAID officials say they are moving cautiously but deliberately to change their practices.  But Congress is still nervous; recently, several Members wrote to USAID asking for more information about these reforms. Githongo and his peers are more enthusiastic; this week, Githongo and fifteen other anti-corruption and human rights activists sent an open letter to Congress, expressing support for USAID’s reforms. They write:

“USAID is strengthening its ability to partner with us by eliminating large, inflexible contracts and by working more directly with local governments, businesses, and civil society organizations like ours. These are crucial requirements for fighting corruption and defending human rights . . . Bypassing local organizations and governments defeats the purpose of aid, which is to help countries help themselves.”

It might seem strange that anti-corruption activists would support direct funding of this sort flowing to their countries. But they support it precisely because they know that Washington can’t solve developing countries problems for them. As Githongo says:

“Ownership is ni sisi. It is up to us. It is us who own our problems. And it is us who will come up with the solutions.”

You can add your own voice to that of these anti-corruption heroes. Send a note to your Member of Congress asking them to stand with anti-corruption activists around the world.

Far less scrutiny has been placed on the section of the Farm Bill containing provisions for food aid programs. Over the last several months, Oxfam has sought to shine a light on these issues as a core component of the US response to global hunger.  We’ve argued that the current program is badly outdated and in need of repair.

So, after round one of what is sure to be a bruising, multi-round fight on food and farm policy for the next five years, whither food aid reform? Here’s a quick run-down of what’s included in the food aid provisions of the Farm Bill:

1. Local and regional purchase (LRP): Buying food closer to the source of need seems like a no-brainer since independent analysis has already shown that in many cases it is faster and cheaper than purchase and shipment from the US. Oxfam supported the integration of LRP into the core food aid programs. Instead, the Committee chose to reauthorize a stand-alone program (basically making the existing pilot program permanent) with funding up to $40 million per year. This cap is too low, especially considering that over the life of the current Farm Bill, spending on food aid has averaged $2.3 billion annually. But keeping LRP in the bill is a step in the right direction.

2. More cash: Currently, NGOs implementing development programs using food aid (think, for example, of integrated nutrition programs with a food distribution component) can request up to 13 percent of their program costs in cash. But the needs of these programs often far exceed that 13 percent threshold, leaving aid groups struggling to find the cash they need to run their programs. The upper limit is now set at 35 percent. This isn’t high enough to satisfy need, but is a big step forward nonetheless.

3. Selling less food aid?: To get around the problem of not having enough cash to run programs, NGOs routinely sell food aid, a wasteful practice especially given how expensive it is to ship it  on US-flag vessels (a requirement of current legislation). Selling food aid in developing countries usually generates less funding than it cost to buy the food in the first place. The rate of return on these sales, known as “cost recovery rate,” has been documented at 58 percent for USDA and 76 percent for USAID. What this means in practice is tens of millions of dollars are lost that could otherwise be used to reach millions of people, 2.1 million people per year by one recent estimate. In the proposal adopted last week, this practice gets some discipline: “monetization” cost recovery will be required to meet or exceed 70 percent of the cost of purchase and shipment from the U.S. The architecture of this provision is solid, but the 70 percent floor set for cost recovery is too low. If we’re serious about reducing waste in the US food aid program, the rate of return on food aid sales should be 80 percent at a minimum.  This would be a true compromise as many, including Oxfam, have advocated for eliminating the practice of monetization altogether. Strong monitoring of market impacts of monetization to make sure this activity is not harming local agriculture markets is also missing from the legislation and should be incorporated.

4. Non-emergency food aid:One of the trickier issues in the bill turned out to be the earmark for NGOs to use food aid in development programs. In the last Farm Bill, a special carve-out was created to ensure that non-emergency programs get a portion of the food aid budget.  The problem is this earmarking ties USAID’s hands in times of crisis, making it difficult for them to meet urgent needs and spend money as effectively and efficiently as possible. The Senate Farm Bill proposal now provides for the earmark to fall within a band of between 15 and 30 percent of the total food aid budget, with a floor of no less than $275 million. This gives USAID more flexibility in determining how much of a limited aid budget should go to meeting emergency needs and how much to provide for non-emergency activities. This is a reasonable compromise between the position of many aid groups—including Oxfam—calling for maximum flexibility, and those groups calling for a hard earmark of $450 million (groups, by the way, who have been strangely silent on reforms needed to make food aid less wasteful).

5. And some welcome surprises: Two other issues of note in the Farm Bill are:

• A call to focus on improving nutritional quality; and

• A proposed pilot program for food resilience.

Both provisions carry the name of the late Representative Donald Payne, an advocate of Africa and development and sponsor of legislation to make US food aid more nutritious. Current Senate legislation picks up where the last farm bill left off in terms of promoting a greater focus on nutritional quality of food aid and incorporates provisions from Payne’s legislation. Additionally, the Donald Payne Horn of Africa Resilience Program would, if enacted, provide up to $10 million annually to link short and long-term responses to food insecurity in the Horn of Africa to reduce vulnerability and increase household and community coping capacities.

The reforms proposed by Chairwoman Stabenow (D-MI) and Ranking Member Roberts (R-KS) represent a solid basis for rethinking US food aid. The proposal represents an evolution, not a revolution, in the program, but a welcome move toward greater accountability of foreign aid resources.

The Agriculture Committee’s opening gambit paves the way for deliberation by the full Senate as well as the House Agriculture Committee, which has recently embarked on Farm Bill hearings. House Chairman Lucas (R-OK) has already made clear he has a different opinion about what US agriculture needs. And the House Committee’s recent proposal, cutting $33 billion over 10 years out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), puts it on record attacking the nation’s largest domestic food assistance program. The question is which direction are they heading with international food assistance?

Post Script

Last week, Oxfam America’s “Food Games” video premiered during the ad breaks on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” as part of our push to get food aid reform on the Senate agenda. The video, an irreverent (some say creepy) look at how Washington plays with food aid, has also garnered more than 46,000 views on YouTube. Everyone from Mashable to Marion Nestle to Djimon Hounsou and the ONE Campaign has taken a peek, helping to promote Oxfam’s call to fix food aid so that up to 17 million more people can eat during times of crisis.

As my colleague, Gawain, blogged about at the launch, “Food Games” has been a departure for us…a “gamble,” as he puts it. Tell us what you think.