Kabul, Afghanistan – Few things symbolize the success of American agriculture like the big, white bags of wheat, stamped “USA,” that sit beside cloth-covered bowls of bread dough in a mud-walled United Nations bakery. American farmers produce so much food that a lot of it is given away to prop up U.S. commodity prices. It ends up in places like this. The wheat is used to make traditional flat bread that is distributed at 32 U.N. bakeries to the poorest of Afghanistan’s 3 million people. “It’s a great honor for us to put food aid to such good use,” Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said as she handed out the bread during a recent tour of Kabul.
But food aid is expensive for U.S. taxpayers. Shipping wheat to Afghanistan over the past year has cost $330 a ton in freight charges alone, nearly twice what the grain was worth, according to U.S. Agriculture Department records. Such giveaways not only are expensive, they also can have unintended consequences in poor countries such as Afghanistan, where a glut of wheat has driven down local grain prices at a time when the government wants farmers to stop growing opium poppies, a more lucrative crop.
“Whenever we provide food aid to a country, we essentially diminish their own agriculture,” said Neil Harl, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. Afghanistan’s agriculture minister, Sayed Hussain Anwari, said that the country’s transitional government will halt food imports “in order to let our prices go up and the farmers to receive a fair amount of money.” Anwari said he wants the U.N. to buy food in Afghanistan rather than bring in donated products.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. government pours in money as well as food. The Agency for International Development plans to spend $42 million during the 2004 budget year to fix the country’s farm sector, up from $3 million in 2003. The agency has set up loan programs for farmers and organized demonstration projects to show farmers better uses of seed, fertilizer and pesticides.
Afghanistan historically has been self-sufficient in food production and was once a major exporter of dried fruits, nuts, wheat, cotton and livestock. Now nearly 4 million of the nation’s 25 million people depend on food aid. Officials say two decades of war and several years of drought plunged the country into famine in the 1990s, and much of the country’s farmable land was turned over to opium production
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