ABSTRACT

Food aid can, under clearly defined circumstances and when properly managed, be an important instrument in an overall strategy for addressing both acute food insecurity and chronic poverty. However, it can also be detrimental to those objectives if not properly managed, or if the humanitarian or poverty-reducing goals of food aid are subservient to other policy objectives. A central part of the challenge of recasting food aid so as to realize its potential as an instrument for satisfying basic human rights and advancing human and economic development lies in exploding many of the popular myths that pervade contemporary policy debates. Having challenged the most important of these myths in the preceding chapters, our task now becomes to articulate a sensible, evidence-based role for food aid in international development and humanitarian policy. This chapter lays out the general strategy we envision for food aid. Chapter 11 then closes by addressing both the imperative of food aid reform and some of the key details of such a strategy and the politics of fruitfully recasting food aid’s role.