ABSTRACT
To some people food aid is as close to an ideal form of aid as we are likely to find in an imperfect world. It achieves a happy union between the interests of the recipients and those of farmers in the donor countries, and it is a way of channelling assistance direct to the starving millions who need it, while bypassing the rich elites in developing countries (ldcs). The evidence of recent literature (although not necessarily of opinion polls) is that this view is rapidly losing ground to its polar opposite: that food aid is particularly pernicious since it exists largely to help sustain inefficient agricultural policies in developed countries (dcs) and to increase the leverage that its donors can exert on poor countries, and that furthermore it not only fails to benefit the recipient adequately to compensate for these costs but it actually puts ldc farmers out of business, leads their children to adopt exotic tastes that can be satisfied only by imports, and enables their governments to neglect agricultural reform.
