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The impact of food aid on world malnutrition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

James N. Schubert
James N. Schubert
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Alfred University, Alfred, New York.
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Abstract

Does food aid enhance or diminish the nutritional status of recipient populations in less developed countries? In proposing that the long-term impact is negative, critics have argued that aid depresses local food production, is maldistributed and mismanaged such that it does not reach the needy in sufficient quantities, or, where effective, that aid merely reduces the death rate relative to the birth rate, permitting more people to survive at the margin of existence. This study explores the long-term impact of U.S. Public Law 480 food aid through a crossnational analysis of aggregate data on aid receipts and change in nutritional status over the period from 1962 through 1974. Alternative hypotheses are tested through least squares methods and.mean difference tests in the framework of a nonequivalent control group, quasi-experimental design. This study supports the following generalizations: food aid is significantly related with improved nutritional status; the greater the aid, the greater the improvement in nutrition; higher aid recipients do not have significantly lower rates of growth in domestic food production; higher aid recipients do not have higher rates of population growth; and food aid may lead to greater meat consumption among higher aid recipients. Negative effects, experienced in some countries at some times, are not systematically incurred by all food aid recipients over time. In general, food aid does improve nutrition.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Spring 1981 , pp. 329 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1981

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References

1 For instance, see the Pearson Commission report, Partners in Development (New York: Praeger, 1969)Google Scholar, which took a mild reformist tone. Harsher criticism was offered by Goulet, D. and Hudson, M. in The Myth of Aid (New York: IODC N. America, 1971)Google Scholar.

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5 Commitment to prevent mass starvation is identified as a norm of the international food regime, while prevention of malnutrition and chronic hunger is explicitly rejected as a system norm. See Hopkins, R. F. and Puchala, D. J., “Perspectives on the international relations of food,” International Organization 32, 3 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Related diseases are marasmus, which involves severe PCM in infants and kwashiorkor, involving protein malnutrition in young children.

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29 Data on calories normed by national requirements are provided in FAO sources. Average regional requirements for protein are provided in The Protein Crisis and data on per capita protein were normed by these requirements. For purely descriptive purposes it should be noted that the protein requirements were adjusted upwards by 15 percent in the source to account partially for distributional inequality.

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32 Indeed, the data are so skewed that the mean falls at the third quartile and is no less arbitrary a point of division than the eighth decile, at $. 11, which was the point selected. The median value, $. 05, is so low that the effects of higher aid are obscured. Tests with alternative cutpoints were run for several of the dependent variables. The difference between the group means increased directly with the value of the cutpoint. The value and significance of “t” also increased directly with the cutpoint up to the $. 11 level. However, for higher cutpoints the degrees of freedom in the high aid group became sufficiently small as to reduce the value and significance of “t” even though the mean differences grew larger. Finally, it was observed that at the. 05 level, for slightly lower and higher cutpoints than the one selected, the interpretation of findings remained unchanged.

33 Data on GNP per capita (1973) and exports per capita (1971) are from the CCPR (SUNY-Binghamton) Cross-National Data Archive. Data on population growth and growth in food production are from the Fourth World Food Survey and are for 1961–1970 and 1970–1976. Data on economic growth are from the United Nations, Statistical Yearbook, 1977.

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35 Because greater change in nutrition is explicitly predicted for the higher aid group, one tailed tests of significance are appropriate. For all other variables, two tailed tests are applied because no differences are predicted.

36 Estimates are 1.37 billion out of a world population at the time of the Reutlinger and Selowsky study, Malnutrition and Poverty, of about 3.5 billion.

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