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Unintended Consequences

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Some of the unintended effects include labor and production disincentives, changes in recipients’ food consumption patterns and natural resources use patterns, distortion of social safety nets, distortion of NGO operational activities, price changes, and trade displacement. These issues arise from targeting inefficacy and poor timing of aid programs. Food aid can harm producers by driving down prices of local products, whereas the producers are not themselves beneficiaries of food aid. Unintentional harm occurs when food aid arrives or is purchased at the wrong time, when food aid distribution is not well-targeted to food-insecure households, and when the local market is relatively poorly integrated with broader national, regional and global markets. The use of food aid for emergencies can reduce the unintended consequences, although it can contribute to other associated with the use of food as a weapon or prolonging or intensifying the duration of civil conflicts.

Increasing Conflict Duration

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International aid organizations identify theft by armed forces on the ground as a primary unintended consequence through which food aid and other types of humanitarian aid promote conflict. Food aid usually has to be transported across large geographic territories and during the transportation it becomes a target for armed forces, especially in countries where the ruling government has limited control outside of the capital. Accounts from Somalia in the early 1990s indicate that between 20 and 80 percent of all food aid was stolen, looted, or confiscated[1]. In the former Yugoslavia, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) lost up to 30 percent of the total value of aid to Serbian armed forces. On top of that 30 percent, bribes were given to Croatian forces to pass their roadblocks in order to reach Bosnia.[2]

The value of the stolen or lost provisions can exceed the value of the food aid alone since convoy vehicles and telecommunication equipment are also stolen. MSF Holland, international aid organization operating in Chad and Darfur, underscored the strategic importance of these goods, stating that these “vehicles and communications equipment have a value beyond their monetary worth for armed actors, increasing their capacity to wage war”[2]

A famous instance of humanitarian aid unintentionally helping rebel groups occurred during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war in the late 1960s[3], where the rebel leader Odumegwu Ojukwu only allowed aid to enter the region of Biafra if it was shipped on his planes. These shipments of humanitarian aid helped the rebel leader to circumvent the siege on Biafra placed by the Nigerian government. These stolen shipments of humanitarian aid caused the Biafran civil war to last years longer than it would have without the aid, claim experts.[4]

The most well-known instances of aid being seized by local warlords in recent years come from Somalia, where food aid is funneled to the Shabab, a Somali militant group that controls much of Southern Somalia. Moreover, reports reveal that Somali contractors for aid agencies have formed a cartel and act as important power brokers, arming opposition groups with the profits made from the stolen aid”[5]

Rwandan government appropriation of food aid in the early 1990s was so problematic that aid shipments were canceled multiple times.[6] In Zimbabwe in 2003, Human Rights Watch documented examples of residents being forced to display ZANU-PF Party membership cards before being given government food aid.[7] In eastern Zaire, leaders of the Hema ethnic group allowed the arrival of international aid organizations only upon agreement not give aid to the Lendu (opposition of Hema). Humanitarian aid workers have acknowledged the threat of stolen aid and have developed strategies for minimizing the amount of theft en route. However, aid can fuel conflict even if successfully delivered to the intended population as the recipient populations often include members of rebel groups or militia groups, or aid is “taxed” by such groups.

Academic research emphatically demonstrates that on average food aid promotes civil conflict. Namely, increase in US food aid leads to an increase in the incidence of armed civil conflict in the recipient country.[1] Another correlation demonstrated is food aid prolonging existing conflicts, specifically among countries with a recent history of civil conflict. However, it is important to note that this does not find an effect on conflict in countries without a recent history of civil conflict.[1] Moreover, different types of international aid other than food which is easily stolen during its delivery, namely technical assistance and cash transfers, can have different effects on civil conflict.

Community-driven development (CDD) programs have become one of the most popular tools for delivering development aid. In 2012, the World Bank supported 400 CDD programs in 94 countries, valued at $30 billion USD.[8] Academic research scrutinizes the effect of community-driven development programs on civil conflict.[9] The Philippines’ flagship development program KALAHI-CIDSS is concluded to have led to an increase in violent conflict in the country. After the program’s start, some municipalities experienced and statistically significant and large increase in casualties, as compared to other municipalities who were not part of the CDD. Casualties suffered by government forces as a result of insurgent-initiated attacks increased significantly.

These results are consistent with other examples of humanitarian aid exacerbating civil conflict.[9] One explanation is that insurgents attempt to sabotage CDD programs for political reasons – successful implementation of a government-supported project could weaken the insurgents’ position. Related findings[10] of Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov further demonstrate that a successful community-driven development program increased support for the government in Afghanistan by exacerbating conflict in the short term, revealing an unintended consequence of the aid.

Dependency and Other Economic Effects

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One of the economic cases against aid transfers, in the form of food or other resources, is that it discourages recipients from working, everything else held constant.[11] This claim undermines the support for transfers, as heated debates over the past decade about domestic welfare programs in Europe and North America show. Targeting errors of inclusion are said to magnify the labor market disincentive effects inherent to food aid (or any other form of transfer) by providing benefits to those who are most able and willing to turn transfers into leisure instead of increased food consumption.

Labor distortion can arise when Food-For-Work (FFW) Programs are more attractive than work on recipients’ own farms/businesses, either because the FFW pays immediately, or because the household considers the payoffs to the FFW project to be higher than the returns to labor on its own plots. Food aid programs hence take productive inputs away from local private production, creating a distortion due to substitution effects, rather than income effects.[11]

Beyond labor disincentive effects, food aid can have the unintended consequence of discouraging household-level production. Poor timing of aid and FFW wages that are above market rates cause negative dependency by diverting labor from local private uses, particularly if FFW obligations decrease labor on a household’s own enterprises during a critical part of the production cycle.This type of disincentive impacts not only food aid recipients but also producers who sell to areas receiving food aid flows.[12][13][14][15][16]

FFW programs are often used to counter a perceived dependency syndrome associated with freely distributed food.[11] However, poorly designed FFW programs may cause more risk of harming local production than the benefits of free food distribution. In structurally weak economies, FFW program design is not as simple as determining the appropriate wage rate. Empirical evidence[17] from rural Ethiopia shows that higher-income households had excess labor and thus lower (not higher as expected) value of time, and therefore allocated this labor to FFW schemes in which poorer households could not afford to participate due to labor scarcity. Similarly, FFW programs in Cambodia have shown to be an additional, not alternative, source of employment and that the very poor rarely participate due to labor constraints.[18]

Furthermore, food aid can drive down local or national food prices in at least three ways.

  1. First, monetization of food aid can flood the market, increasing supply. In order to be granted the right to monetize, operational agencies must demonstrate that the recipient country has adequate storage facilities and that the monetized commodity will not result in a substantial disincentive in either domestic agriculture or domestic marketing.[19]
  2. Second, households receiving aid may decrease demand for the commodity received or for locally produced substitutes or, if they produce substitutes or the commodity received, they may sell more of it. This can be most easily understood by dividing a population in a food aid recipient area into subpopulations based on two criteria: whether or not they receive food aid (recipients vs. non-recipients) and whether they are net sellers or net buyers of food. Because the price they receive for their output is lower, however, net sellers are unambiguously worse off if they do not receive food aid or some other form of compensatory transfer.[11]
  3. Finally, recipients may sell food aid to purchase other necessities or complements, driving down prices of the food aid commodity and its substitutes, but also increasing demand for complements. Most recipient economies are not robust and food aid inflows can cause large price decreases, decreasing producer profits, limiting producers’ abilities to pay off debts and thereby diminishing both capacity and incentives to invest in improving agricultural productivity. However, food aid distributed directly or through FFW programs to households in northern Kenya during the lean season can foster increased purchase of agricultural inputs such as improved seeds, fertilizer and hired labor, thereby increasing agricultural productivity.[18][20]

Changed consumption patterns

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Food aid that is relatively inappropriate to local uses can distort consumption patterns.

Food aid is usually exported from temperate climate zones and is often different than the staple crops grown in recipient countries, which usually have a tropical climate. The logic of food export inherently entails some effort to change consumers’ preferences, to introduce recipients to new foods and thereby stimulate demand for foods with which recipients were previously unfamiliar or which otherwise represent only a small portion of their diet.[11]

Massive shipments of wheat and rice into the West African Sahel during the food crises of the mid-1970s and mid-1980s were widely believed to stimulate a shift in consumer demand from indigenous coarse grains – millet and sorghum – to western crops such as wheat. During the 2000 drought in northern Kenya, the price of changaa (a locally distilled alcohol) fell significantly and consumption seems to have increased as a result. This was a result of grain food aid inflows increasing the availability of low-cost inputs to the informal distilling industry.[21]

Natural resource overexploitation

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Recent research suggests that patterns of food aid distribution may inadvertently affect the natural environment, by changing consumption patterns and by inducing locational change in grazing and other activities. A pair of studies in Northern Kenya found that food aid distribution seems to induce greater spatial concentration of livestock around distribution points, causing localized rangeland degradation, and that food aid provided as whole grain requires more cooking, and thus more fuelwood, stimulating local deforestation.[22][23]

The welfare impacts of any food aid-induced changes in food prices are decidedly mixed, underscoring the reality that it is impossible to generate only positive intended effects from an international aid program.

  1. ^ a b c Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. “US Food Aid and Civil Conflict.” American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1630–1666., doi:10.1257/aer.104.6.1630.
  2. ^ a b Polman, Linda. 2010. The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? New York: Henry Holt and Co. (pp. 96-104)
  3. ^ Barnett, Michael. 2011. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (pp.133-147)
  4. ^ Polman, Linda. 2010. The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? New York: Henry Holt and Co. (pp.115-199)
  5. ^ United Nations Security Council. 2010. “Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1853.” http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/467A5CB05AD7E446492576EA0004325D-Full_Report.pdf
  6. ^ Uvin, Peter. 1998. Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. (pp.90)
  7. ^ Thurow, Roger, and Scott Kilman. 2009. Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. New York: PublicAffairs. (pp.206)
  8. ^ Wong, Susan. 2012. What Have Been the Impacts of World Bank Community-Driven Development Programs? Washington, DC: World Bank Social Development Department.
  9. ^ a b Crost, Benjamin, et al. “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.” American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1833–1856., doi:10.1257/aer.104.6.1833.
  10. ^ Beath, Andrew, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikopolov. 2011. “Winning Hearts and Minds through Development Aid: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan.” Center for Economic and Financial Research at New Economic School Working Paper 166.
  11. ^ a b c d e Barrett, Christopher B. “Food Aid's Intended and Unintended Consequences.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006, doi:10.2139/ssrn.1142286.
  12. ^ Jackson, T. and Eade, D. (1982) Against the Grain: The Dilemma of Project Food Aid. Oxfam.
  13. ^ Grassroots International (1997) Feeding dependency, starving democracy: USAID policies in Haiti. Visited September 25, 2005. http://www.grassrootsonline.org/haiti_food_security.html
  14. ^ Lappe, F. M. and Collins, J. (1977) Food First. Ballantine Books.
  15. ^ Molla, M. G. (1990) Politics of Food Aid: Case of Bangladesh. Academic Publishers.
  16. ^ Salisbury, L. N. (1992) Enhancing Development Sustainability and Eliminating Food Aid Dependency: Lessons from the World Food Programme, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University.
  17. ^ Barrett, C. B. and Clay, D.C. (2003) Self-targeting accuracy in the presence of imperfect factor markets: evidence from food-for-work in Ethiopia. Journal of Development Studies, 39 (5), 152-180.
  18. ^ a b Barrett, C. B. (2001) Does food aid stabilize food availability? Economic Development and Cultural Change, 49 (2), 335-349.
  19. ^ Ralyea, B. with the FAM Working Group (1999) Cooperating Sponsor Monetization Manual. http://www.foodaidmanagement.org/mtznman.html
  20. ^ Bezuneh, M., Deaton, B.J. and Norton, G.W. (1988) Food aid impacts in rural Kenya. American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 70(1): 181-191.
  21. ^ Barrett, C. B. and Maxwell, D.G. (2005) Food aid after fifty years: Recasting its role. Routledge, New York.
  22. ^ McPeak J.G. (2003a) Analyzing and assessing localized degradation of the commons. Land Economics, 78(4): 515-536.
  23. ^ McPeak, J.G. (2003b), Fuelwood Gathering and Use in Northern Kenya: Implications for Food Aid and Local Environments, USAID Global Livestock CRSP Research Brief 0301-PARIMA.
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