1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug and Georgetown professor and former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios join the chorus advocating for U.S. food aid reform in this joint Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Specifically they state: “Congress should amend the Farm Bill to allow up to 25% of the appropriation for USAID’s food-aid program to be used to purchase food locally” instead of insisting, as the bill currently does, that the U.S. only purchase and ship U.S.-grown food.

A couple more excerpts:

The U.S. government currently buys grain and other foodstuffs from American farmers for free distribution in poor countries…

Ocean shipping costs are 20%-30% of the food-aid budget; and it takes on average over four months to order, buy, ship, offload and transport food by ground. In a famine, people can die waiting for the food to arrive.

Other problems arise. One food shipment sunk in a storm off the coast of Asia in 1996. In 2006, two food shipments were hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Hurricane Katrina nearly shut down much of the foreign food-aid delivery system in the Mississippi Delta…

Seventy-five percent of USAID food aid goes to Africa, the most food-deprived region of the world. More robust agricultural growth there will help in a period of rising food prices. More prosperous African nations will become better trading partners, expanding imports of U.S. agricultural commodities, machinery and technology. Any near-term losses will lead to longer-term gains for the American economy.

Read the full article here.