Does food aid stabilize food availability?

Improving food security and health and nutritional outcomes around the world will require dampening the extraordinary variability in per capita food availability in low-income economies. Improved food productivity and commercial international trade appear far more useful than PL480 food aid in achieving that objective. The small volumes, opaque allocation mechanisms, and bureaucratically cumbersome procurement procedures behind PL480 have made food aid a relatively ineffective instrument of either stabilization or redistribution. While there are surely particular emergencies and distribution modalities through which food aid can play an effective role in stabilizing and improving food availability at the micro level of individual communities, households, and individuals, both commercial trade and more rapid domestic food productivity growth appear more effective in stabilizing developing national food availability in the regular course of development. Perhaps if food aid were targeted entirely toward relieving food insecurity it could be a more effective instrument. But food aid has long been intensely political, serving many masters. So long as that remains the case, food aid is unlikely to stabilize per capita food availability effectively.