{"id":410,"date":"2017-07-15T06:59:08","date_gmt":"2017-07-15T06:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/?p=410"},"modified":"2017-07-15T07:24:45","modified_gmt":"2017-07-15T07:24:45","slug":"food-aid-humanitarian-or-expert-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/food-aid-humanitarian-or-expert-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Food Aid: Humanitarian or Expert Marketing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly after the turn of the century, the developing world shifted from food independent to food dependent. In his book\u00a0The Real Cost of Cheap Food, <\/em>Michael Carolan\u00a0argues that this shift was due to both an inability to compete in the increasingly globalized agricultural market, and strategic bestowments of food aid from developed countries.\u00a0<\/span>From about 1960 on, developing countries began to import wheat in greater and greater quantities at the expense of growing their own food supplies (Carolan). Why the sudden shift away from traditional crops to imported ones? For one thing, farmers in developing countries couldn\u2019t compete with the cheap agricultural products grown in the developed world. Farmers in developed countries had the infrastructure necessary to produce mass quantities of cheap crops (Carolan). In addition to their farmers being priced out of agricultural production, developing countries were also presented with large quantities of wheat imports from the US at a subsidized rate. Faced with food shortages, developing countries accepted these subsidies and began replacing their traditional diet with more and more wheat.\u00a0<\/span>But, why wheat? The US had a surplus of wheat after World War II (Carolan). In order to move the stock without disrupting its market value, it was offered at a subsidized rate in the form of \u201cfood aid\u201d (Carolan). On the surface, this seems like a charitable act. However, it also served to create a wheat dependency in the developing world. Once the supply of wheat began to dwindle, prices for the crop rose. Developing countries, now unable to produce sufficient food to feed themselves, were forced to pay up lest they go hungry. Carolan argues that food aid is a way to drum up demand for a commodity in a new market, even if that market doesn’t have much capital. Once the new market becomes dependent on that commodity, the exporting country can increase the price without the fear of losing buyers. It makes one wonder–is food aid humanitarian, or all business?<\/span><\/p>\n

Carolan, Michael S. The Real Cost of Cheap Food<\/i>. London: Earthscan, 2011. Kindle Edition.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shortly after the turn of the century, the developing world shifted from food independent to food dependent. In his book\u00a0The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Michael Carolan\u00a0argues that this shift was due to both an inability to compete in the increasingly globalized agricultural market, and strategic bestowments of food aid from developed countries.\u00a0From about 1960 on, developing countries began to… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23,11,4,26,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farming","category-food-movements","category-hunger","category-international-trade","category-trade","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}