Proposed Food Aid Reform Needs Bipartisan Support

Noting “[t]he Obama administration’s FY14 budget request included a food aid reform proposal that the administration estimated would allow U.S. food aid to reach an additional two to four million people per year — for roughly what the United States spends now,” Beth Schwanke, senior associate for policy outreach at the Center for Global Development (CGD), writes in the CGD’s “Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog,” “As [my colleague Kim Elliott, a senior fellow at CGD,] previously put it, the administration’s proposal is welcome but still only ‘half a loaf’ of reform.” She continues, “But even the administration’s half reform appears to be too much in the face of strong pushback from maritime interests and some in the farm industry,” adding, “A champion for big reform in the Senate has yet to emerge but the optimist in me says that this kind of smart reform that eliminates enormous waste in the U.S. system is just calling out for a bipartisan push, even if not in the very near term” (6/4).

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