Economic distortions due to food aid Some of the unintended effects of food aid 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. Food aid can drive down local or national
food prices in at least three ways. • 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. • 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. • 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. 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. FFW programs are often used to counter a perceived dependency syndrome associated with freely distributed food. 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. However, the effectiveness of humanitarian aid, particularly food aid, in conflict-prone regions has been criticized in recent years. There have been accounts of humanitarian aid being not only inefficacious but actually fuelling conflicts in the recipient countries. Aid stealing is one of the prime ways in which conflict is promoted by humanitarian aid. Aid can be seized by armed groups, and even if it does reach the intended recipients, "it is difficult to exclude local members of a local militia group from being direct recipients if they are also malnourished and qualify to receive aid." Thus, the impact of humanitarian aid on conflict may vary depending upon the type and mode in which aid is received, and,
inter alia, the local socio-economic, cultural, historical, geographical and political conditions in the recipient countries.
Increasing conflict duration 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. 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. 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" 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.
Rwandan government appropriation of food aid in the early 1990s was so problematic that aid shipments were canceled multiple times. 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. 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. Academic research scrutinizes the effect of community-driven development programs on civil conflict. 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 initiation, some municipalities experienced a statistically significant large increase in casualties, as compared to other municipalities who were not part of the CDD. as a result, casualties suffered by government forces from insurgent-initiated attacks increased significantly. These results are consistent with other examples of humanitarian aid exacerbating civil conflict. 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.
Waste and corruption in humanitarian aid Waste and corruption are hard to quantify, in part because they are often taboo subjects, but they appear to be significant in humanitarian aid. For example, it has been estimated that over $8.75 billion was lost to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the
Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
Non-governmental organizations have in recent years made great efforts to increase participation, accountability and transparency in dealing with aid, yet humanitarian assistance remains a poorly understood process to those meant to be receiving it—much greater investment needs to be made into researching and investing in relevant and effective accountability systems. in Central African Republic and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A 2021 report on the Racial Equity Index indicated that just under two-thirds of aid workers had experienced racism, and 98% of survey respondents had witnessed it.
Contrary practice Countries or war parties that prevent humanitarian relief are generally under unanimous criticism. Such was the case for the
Derg regime, preventing relief to the population of Tigray in the 1980s, and the prevention of relief aid in the
Tigray War of 2020–2021 by the
Abiy Ahmed Ali regime of
Ethiopia was again widely condemned.
Humanitarian aid in conflict zones == Aid workers ==