Food Aid Reform in the Farm Bill  A number of my Cato colleagues
have offered good criticisms of developments related to the
latest farm bill here, here, here, here, here, and here. (That’s
a lot of “heres,” but farm subsidies deserve a lot of
criticism!) But there is one possible element of the farm bill
that would actually count as “reform”: a proposal to take some
of the protectionism out of food aid.  I discussed this issue
here and here. As I noted, the way these programs work is that
when giving aid to help with food shortages abroad, ”[i]nstead
of simply giving money to people to buy food from the cheapest
source, the U.S. government buys food from U.S. producers and
requires that it be sent overseas on U.S. ships.” Not
surprisingly, that’s not a very efficient way of doing things.
As noted in an article in the Guardian newspaper“50% of the US
food aid budget is currently spent on shipping costs.”    To
address this problem, a food aid reform act has been introduced
in the House, and would eliminate th