Chapter 6


2. Food Aid and Food Security

2.1 General features

Food aid represents the most prominent form of external assistance that, by nature and
intention, is specifically designed to enhance food security. In a broad sense, food aid can be
understood as a resource transfer in kind of food to beneficiaries at concessional terms, i.e.
better terms than available on the market. This may refer to internal food transfers as
presented in the previous Chapter 5, or to international transfers from donors to recipient
countries at better than world market conditions, i.e. food supplies on a grant basis, at
reduced prices, or at concessional credit terms. Food aid terminology is not always fully
clear. For the sake of clarity, we use the term food aid if it involves some kind of external
resource transfer, normally (but not necessarily) in kind of food commodities, aimed at
providing food directly to beneficiaries in the recipient country or to the government in
support of its food security or other development objectives.

In its origin, food aid was predominantly an instrument of surplus disposal, largely
determined in kind and volume by the situation in surplus producing countries, particularly
in North America after the Second World War and, later, also Western Europe. Although the
availability of surpluses is still an important determining factor of food aid transactions up to
the present day, the approach to food aid has substantially changed over the last 40 years (see
Box 6.1). The concepts have been diversified and refined in various respects, such as:

* stronger orientation to the needs of the recipient countries,
* binding commitments of donor countries,
* multilateral food aid,
* different types of uses of food aid,
* food aid as development resource,
* local purchases and triangular transactions, etc.

The main issues with relevance for food security will be discussed in the following sections.

Table 6.1 presents some key global data and characteristics on food aid flows for the years
1991-1995. From a global perspective, the total volume of food aid deliveries had reached a
record level of almost 17 million tons in 1993 but dropped significantly since then (to 12.6
million tons in 1994 and 9.5 million tons in 1995) and is expected to drop further.
Diminishing surpluses in major donor countries, diminishing world wide grain stocks and a
significant increase of world market prices of grain are the main reasons for this
development. The reduction in food aid deliveries affected especially the Eastern European
and NIS (former Soviet Union) countries which had received the major share (40%) in 1993
but, although to a lesser extent, the other groups of countries. Major recipients of food aid
are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa belonging to the group of low-income food-deficit
countries (LIFDC). Within the groups of countries shown, there are large inter-country
variations. In some countries, food aid made up to 100 percent of all grain imports, as, for
example, in Ethiopia during the years 1991 to 1993 when the country made no commercial
cereal imports at all and food aid constituted about 10 percent of total grain supplies (GTZ
1993).


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