9. The United States: The Realist

For the processes within the United Nations, and the lead role and efficiency of the US diplomats in these processes, see Stokke (2009: 42ff).

For a narrative, see Rostow (1960: 43ff). President Roosevelt dominated the reorientation enterprise, convinced that the fate of the nation was to assume greater international responsibility—that there was to be no return to isolation.

The so-called Truman Doctrine, introduced by President Truman to a joint session of the Houses of Congress on 12 March 1947, had the following justification: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” (http://​avalon.​law.​yale.​edu/​20th_​century/​trudoc.​asp).

For a detailed account, see, inter alia, Rostow (1960: books two and three). The security concern was the predominant one.

The region was hit by a drought that had catastrophic consequences for millions of people who were just emerging from a world war, a revolution, and a civil war. More than 20 million were starving, many had left their homes in search of food, and epidemic illnesses were widespread. It is estimated that several million lost their lives. Herbert Hoover (later President of the US (1929–1933) under the big depression), was leading the operations of the ARA.

This was further specified: “to spread Christianity and democracy, to put an end to the slave trade, to halt the massacres or persecution of racial and religious minorities, to relieve the victims of flood, fire, earthquake, famine, and civil war, to raise standards of living in backward countries. […] After World War II, the government itself entered the international campaign against poverty, ignorance, and disease as a means of combating Communism” (Pratt 1965: 3–4).

After the end of the WWII, the two superpowers—the US and the USSR—brought pressure to bear on the colonial powers to accelerate the decolonization process. The influence of the US administration on its European allies was especially strong. Confronted with the growing East-West divide, however, it was not uncomplicated for the US to keep the balance between ideology and alliance-building.

The UN Secretariat, in close collaboration with delegations from the South—India and Latin America in particular—prepared the ground for the provision of development assistance through the world organization. The breakthrough came in 1948—prepared by ECOSOC-established commissions in response to a mandate given by the General Assembly in December 1946 (UNGA Resolutions 198 [III] and 200 [III]).

President Truman announced a programme “for peace and freedom in four major courses of action”. The introduction to Point Four merits quotation: “[W]e must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people” (quoted in Merill (ed.) 1999: 4).

Analysing the proposal, William Reitzel and colleagues found that it was based on multiple and in some respects contradictory motivations. The executive proposals sent to Congress in mid-1949 “blended a humanitarian impulse to aid the poor and the weak, a policy of promoting a sound and expanding world trade, a recognition of the need to increase supplies of raw material, an intention to counter Communist activity in underdeveloped countries of the world, a wish to act to the greatest possible extent through the United Nations, and to do all of this with the minimum of financial commitment. […] The Congress, however, modified the proposals in ways that diminished their value in relation to the strategy of containment” (Reitzel et al. 1956: 134ff; quotation, 136).

“He [the President] leaned mainly on a combination of humanitarianism and American economic self-interest; he also linked successful economic development to the conditions for peace and the spread of the democratic process. He did not, however, in scale or in urgency elevate the Point Four program to the level of, say the Marshall Plan or national defense policy” (Rostow 1960: 256).

In terms of resources and attention, “the short-run military aspects of the struggle against communism in the underdeveloped areas rose sharply in priority in 1950–1952. Military aid, which had been well under 10 per cent in (fiscal) 1950 and less than a quarter of the total in 1951, was more than two thirds of the total authorization for 1953. And in the underdeveloped areas this aid flowed overwhelmingly to areas of military crisis—to Korea, Taiwan, and to assist the French in the struggle against the Vietminh forces”. This perspective became aggravated during the subsequent Eisenhower administration. During its first term, it “viewed the underdeveloped areas narrowly in terms of the military policy derived from the Great Equation. […] The insight symbolized by Truman’s Fourth Point […] was largely ignored” (Ibid: 257, 331 [quotations]).

D. John Shaw relates a fascinating account on the birth of the WFP—the quick move from idea to institution, with George McGovern in a leading role, in close telephone contact with President Kennedy (Shaw 2001: 6ff).

President Kennedy’s prime concern was security—he used the first half of the speech on that theme. Before he again turned to security issues—threats to peace emanating from so-called wars of liberation in Southeast Asia and the Berlin crisis—he devoted two paragraphs (72 and 73) to development, stating: “Political sovereignty is but a mockery, without the means of meeting poverty, illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope. That is why my nation—which has freely shared its capital and its technology to help others to help themselves—now proposes officially designating this decade of the 1960s as the ‘United Nations Decade of Development’” (GAOR 16th Session, 1013th Meeting, 25 September 1961: 58).

Thus, in the preamble of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, the purpose of US development assistance was made crystal clear: “To promote the foreign policy, security and general welfare of the United States by assisting people of the world in their efforts towards economic development and internal and external security, and for other purposes.”

Stokke (2009: 170–172, note 41). France and the UK also filed reservations. The US added that it could not give any assurance that the 1% target for total financial assistance would be met, although it felt that the flow of private resources would respond to mutually beneficial investment policies in developing countries.

In 2005, 2010 and 2015, the performances were 0.22%, 0.21% and 0.17% of the GNI, respectively. In 2005, the performance of Greece and Portugal on this criterion was better than that of the US among DAC countries; in 2010, Greece, Italy, Japan and Korea performed better than the US; and in 2015, Greece, Korea, Portugal and Spain. However, measured in USD, the US has been the largest provider of ODA among the OECD countries except for the 1990s, when Japan topped the list.

In the 1970s, the US ranked twelfth out of eighteen DAC countries; in the 1980s, it ranked seventeenth out of twenty-two DAC countries; in the years 1990–2010, it ranked twenty-second out of twenty-three DAC countries—with only Korea, a new member, behind.

At a time when the US performance was at its lowest in relative terms, a DAC peer review stated: “[T]he peer review community of donors sees the current level of American aid as inadequate to bring to bear in the world the evident capacities of the US development agencies and of the American society more widely. A high level of political leadership would clearly be needed to bring the United States’ foreign assistance efforts to a level commensurable with the United States capabilities and world-wide interests” (OECD 1998: 9). However, advice given by the DAC did not impress US decision-makers. As Carol Lancaster has observed, DAC peer reviews of US aid and their recommendations were usually ignored in Washington and got little attention either from development-oriented think tanks and even less from senior public officials and media. “In fact, no sane government official in Washington would evoke UN targets as a rationale for increasing US aid” (Lancaster 2008: 32–33; quote 32).

The multilateral share of the US ODA in the 1960s was 7.4% (DAC average 11.0%), increasing to 25.7% in the 1970s (DAC 28.5%), 25.9% in the 1980s (DAC 29.7%) and 26.5% in the 1990s (DAC 30.9%). Into the new century it declined—for the years 2000–2006 to 15.0% (DAC 28.3%), and in 2015 15.7% (DAC 26.2%). The US share of total multilateral ODA followed a similar trend—it made up 37.8% in the 1960s, 27.5% in the 1970s, 21.5% in the 1980s, 14.8% in the 1990s, 12.3% in 2000–2006. Sources: Stokke (2009: Tables A.1, A.3, A.7, A.10, and A.13) and OECD (2017: 281 [preliminary data]).

In this chapter, I often find it useful to refer to Carol Lancaster’s sharp observations and judgements. She combined unique insights from “real life” with scholarship, serving in positions within the US aid administration (deputy administrator of USAID), as a politician (deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa [Democrat]); and as researcher and teacher on aid and development (associate professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and director of the Mortara Center for International Studies). Her writing on US aid policy and external relations, therefore, represents an especially valuable source when it comes to the justifications for the policy, the considerations on which the policies were based, and the constraints involved (naturally taking her political alignments above into consideration). She placed herself in the Washington development community (in contrast to the Washington foreign and security policy community), which—although containing advocates of quite different policies and with conflicting priorities—shared a wish to strengthen the “development” purpose of US aid (Lancaster 2007: 102–103; 2008: 52–53).

In the mid-1970s, a few DAC countries established a link between democracy, human rights and development cooperation, but then as a negation: respect for these values was considered a condition for a government to be included among the main partners in development. The US was first out—in 1975, the Congress passed legislation to this end (Nelson and Eglinton 1992: 26–27).

A rich literature exists on the follow-up on this commitment over the years, from Lancaster (2007: 79) on the strongly stated commitment of President Carter (Democrat) to human rights; to the much darker picture painted by Gills et al. (1993: 17) of the US policy towards its southern neighbours in the years that followed. The “crusade for democracy” (President Reagan’s speech to the British Parliament in 1982) in Latin America was accompanied by “state-sponsored campaigns of murder, torture and general barbarism. […] At best, the US tolerated, and at worst directly promoted the most grotesque abuses of human rights in recent history throughout Central America”. An analysis of human rights and US foreign assistance from Nixon to Carter concluded: “[W]hether because of ineptness or a decision to recommit to Realpolitik, U.S. foreign assistance continued to flow to regimes that had traditionally received such assistance. It was not a U.S. policy upholding human rights that best predicted U.S. responsiveness on foreign assistance, but rather a nation’s previous level of foreign assistance. While under Presidents Nixon and Ford foreign assistance was directly related to levels of human rights violations, under Carter no clear pattern emerged.” President Reagan saw his role in terms of reassertion of US strength, which in part was to be accomplished “by no longer accepting that human rights violations by ‘friendly nations’ be allowed to weaken American support for those nations in the continuing East-West struggle in which he is engaged” (Stohl et al. 1984: 224, 225 [quotations]). For an excellent study of the US promotion of democracy abroad, with an emphasis on the post-Cold War period, see Carothers (1999).

For decades after the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt was signed in 1978, these two countries became the main recipients of US bilateral ODA—varying around USD1.2 and 0.8 billion per year, respectively—together making up approximately a quarter of total US bilateral ODA (Lancaster 2007: 79). Lancaster added that the “approximately $2 billion per year for these two countries equalled a quarter of US bilateral aid annually through most of the remainder of the century and solidified ‘peace-making’ as a prominent purpose of US foreign aid” (idem).

The support for Israel started earlier. After the so-called Yom Kippur War in 1973, the US began assisting Israel to recover and to rearm. In 1960/61, neither Israel nor Egypt were among the top ten recipients of total US ODA; in 1970/71, Israel was no. 9 on list, while Egypt was not among the top 25. In 1980/81, however, Egypt and Israel topped this list (with 12.6% and 11.5%, respectively, way above the next on the list—India, with only 3.3%); in 1985/86, Israel topped the list (19.1%) followed by Egypt (12.8%) and El Salvador (2.8%); in 1990/91, Egypt topped the list (32.1%) followed by Israel (8.3%) and Honduras (2.4%). The two countries continued to receive generous US aid into the new century. Based on the gross bilateral ODA (official assistance (OA) included for Israel), they ranked among the top three in the period 1998/99 to 2001/02. Egypt, too, stayed among the top three during the following two years, ranked fifth in the following two years and seventh in 2008/09. (Sources: OECD 1985: 314 (for 1960/61); 1988: 228 (for 1970/71, 1980/81, 1985/86); 1992: A-64 (for 1990/91); 2001: 130 (for 1998/99); 2002: 121 (for 1999–2000); 2003a: 119 (for 2000/01); 2004: 103 (for 2001/02); 2006a: 102 (for 2003/04); 2007: 97 (for 2004/05); 2008: 99 (for 2005/06); 2009: 133 (for 2006/07); 2011: 190 (for 2008/09)).

In FY 1969, the US Congress prescribed that one-fifth of the AID programme should go to the three countries most affected by the war in Southeast Asia—South Vietnam, Laos and Thailand (OECD 1969: 165). In 1970/71, Vietnam (South) ranked second among the recipients of US aid, receiving 10.5% of total ODA (OECD 1988: 228). Extensive food aid was involved. Thus, between 1968 and 1973, South Vietnam alone received twenty times the value of food that the five African countries most seriously affected by drought in the Sahel region received in the same period. As Wallerstein (1980: 46) has observed, by 1973, “almost half of all US food assistance was flowing to South Vietnam and Cambodia, as the Nixon administration attempted to circumvent the increasingly stringent congressional limitations on US assistance to the war efforts in Southeast Asia”.

In 2003/04, Iraq received USD2.286 million in US ODA, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (USD804 million) and, ranking sixth, Afghanistan (USD632). During the following three years, Iraq received USD6.926 million, USD8.005 million and USD4.266 million, respectively; and Afghanistan USD1.006 million, USD1.361 million, USD1.1459 million, and USD2.549 million, respectively.

Just for comparison, the countries ranking third as main recipients during the years 2003/04–2008/09 received USD767 million (Egypt), USD750 million (Egypt), USD749 million (Sudan), USD725 million (Sudan), and USD901 million (Sudan), respectively. The aid to Sudan was humanitarian assistance. (Sources: OECD 2006a: 102 (for 2003/04); 2007: 97 (for 2004/05); 2008: 99 (for 2005/06); 2009: 133 (for 2006/07); 2011: 190 (for 2008/09)).

Consultations, naturally, took place when shared responsibility was involved. In the early 1960s, the new Agency for International Development (USAID) was given the main responsibility for most of the development assistance programme. It shared the responsibility for the Security Supporting Assistance/the Economic Support Fund with the Department of State (Ministry of Foreign Affairs); and shared the responsibility for the Food Aid Program with the Department of Agriculture (where the budget was located), the Treasury Department, the Department of State, and the Office of Management and Budget. In addition to the shared responsibility referred to, the Treasury Department had the responsibility also for the financial assistance channelled through the international finance institutions (in the first place the World Bank and the regional development banks) and later also for debt relief. The Department of State had the responsibility for most of the multilateral aid channelled through the United Nations system (such as the UN Development Programme) and a separate fund to support refugees and other special programmes (including drug control)—in addition to a shared responsibility for the programmes referred to above. Then there was the Peace Corps administration. In 2004, a new major aid agency—the Millennium Challenge Corporation—was established to manage the Millennium Challenge Account. DAC peer reviews have repeatedly pointed to the need for administrative reform, providing USAID with a more central role in the development assistance policy and execution (infra, note 29). An overview with comments is provided in Lancaster (2007: chap. 3).

Thus, the Treasury Department established a technical assistance programme on tax and financial policies; the Department of Labour established programmes to combat child labour (in 2003, operated in 53 countries worldwide); and the Department of Health financed research, surveillance and response services in the field of international disease control (Ibid).

The DAC peer review of the US in 2002 observed that “the growing number of official US Government entities that deliver foreign aid (perhaps as many as fifty separate government units) operate with considerable autonomy and have relatively modest systematic opportunity to co-ordinate their respective parts of official aid”. The US was encouraged “to look to USAID leadership to define more explicitly a system that can strategically bring all of these entities together around a common vision and a framework of broadly co-ordinated action. The MCA [the Millennium Challenge Account] presents an opportunity for such strategic and operational reform” (OECD 2003a: 120; emphasis added). The peer review in 2006 found “the continued fragmentation of funding among government institutions, the reduction of total ODA managed by the US Agency for International Development (from 50.2% to 38.8%) and the rapid rise of ODA administered by the Department of Defence (from 5.6% to 21.7%)” among “the most remarkable trends since the last Peer Review” (OECD 2007: 98) The peer review in 2010 returned to the issue. One of the primary recommendations was “to develop and communicate widely on a government-wide strategic framework focused on development results and quality of aid”; to “ensure that foreign aid budgets align with the strategic directions provided by the presidential policy directive”; to “strengthen USAID and broaden its mandate to promote development perspectives in policy arbitrations”; and to “streamline the programming and reporting processing of the 27 United States entities involved in development co-operation and develop practical guidance for their activities in a way that honours the internationally agreed principles of effective aid” (OECD 2011: 199; emphasis added).

Carol Lancaster relates that “members of Congress are often confronted with aggressive criticisms of aid at public events in their constituencies that make them wary of supporting aid and create incentives for them to criticize it and vote against it”. She identified the White House (along with the Department of State, the Treasury and USAID) as one of the main constituencies for foreign aid inside government (Lancaster 2007: 99–101; quote 100–101). See also infra, notes 52 and 53. However, referring to findings of a PIPA study (Kull et al. 1997), Marc Stern has argued that there existed a gap between actual public attitudes towards aid and “conventional wisdom”. The study found “that the U.S. foreign policy community, including members of the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as journalists and non-governmental experts, incorrectly assumed that the public wanted to cut or eliminate foreign aid. In fact, even in the districts of the most anti-foreign aid politicians, the public overwhelming supports aid in principle, and would spend far more on aid than is actually allotted to it” (Stern 1998: 5).

From a development (and development assistance) perspective, food aid has been controversial from the very start, as demonstrated in an extensive literature on the subject matter to which this author has also contributed (Clay and Stokke 1991, 2000a, b; Stokke 2009: chaps. 8 and 13). Food aid has served many different purposes—beyond the foreign policy cum diplomacy function—meeting other domestic concerns in the food-aid-providing countries, to be referred to in the main text that follows. Food for relief (in various forms) has been least controversial, although this form of humanitarian aid, too, met with strong criticism in the early 1990s when provided in conflict-ridden areas, especially in the Sudan and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. It might function in a way that was inconsistent with the intentions of the donors—even turn into a tool of the oppressors and thereby nourish and prolong conflicts and increase the suffering of victims (inter alia, de Waal 1997; Esman 1997; Prendergast 1996; Slim 1997; Stokke 1997).

Bilaterally, food aid for development has been provided as food in kind directly to recipient governments (which, in some instances, were permitted to sell it on the domestic market) or indirectly, channelled through US NGOs who have used it in various ways in their development projects. In this way, US NGOs became stakeholders in, and strong supporters of, this form of development assistance (along with US farmers and food commodity producers—and the administrative and political institutions involved).

Food in kind has been provided, inter alia, as food-for-work in labour-intensive projects; in school feeding programmes and supplementary feeding programmes, including mother and child health programmes; and to improve a recipient country’s balance-of-payments situation (reducing commercial food imports). It has been “monetized” (sold on the local market of the recipient country by the government to be used for other purposes, including funding of development projects). It follows that food aid in kind is a cumbersome way of providing development assistance. There is a distinction between commodity food aid and finance for food. In the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, a new trend—of buying food aid commodities in developing countries (triangular transaction or local purchases)—got underway. This applied in the first place to North-European donor countries (and the EU). However, in contrast, the traditional cereal exporters (Australia, Canada, France and the US) continued to provide what was in effect tied food aid from their domestic markets.

In general, food is an unreliable resource, as is food aid—depending on and reflecting shifts in donor priorities. Even more decisive, it depends on fluctuations in the agricultural supply situation in donor countries and international food market conditions. The price of food and, accordingly, the amount of food available for a certain sum of money, is volatile. Add to this that all kinds of food aid have transaction costs, not least in terms of shipping and administration, although both the flexibility and transaction costs are less when food aid is provided in cash than when it is provided in kind.

Such factors may partly explain why food aid as part of total ODA declined from 25% in 1965 to 16% and 11% in 1975 and 1985, respectively, and down to 4% in 1995 (Clay and Stokke 2000a: 28). Ten years later (in 2005), when total ODA amounted to USD60.6 billion, total food aid amounted to USD3.9 billion—3.4% of total ODA (Stokke 2009: 671–672, note 4). The changes and trends within this policy area are explored in the edited works referred to above, and in a rich literature over the years, referred to in the chapters included in these volumes.

This note on food aid is deemed necessary as a background for the discussion that follows on the drivers of the US development assistance policy and the role of food aid in that setting.

Mounting US surpluses were the immediate background for adopting these guidelines, which, although not legally binding, carried considerable influence (FAO 1954; for the evolving norms created after 1953, see also FAO 1972; 1980).

For a brief account of the antecedents of US food aid, see Wallerstein (1980: 26–30). He found one common characteristic of these various initiatives up until the end of WWII: “The food was conceptualized and packaged as an ad hoc, limited-duration response to sudden and acute crisis situations. Moreover, there was generally little or no attempt made to institutionalize the assistance as a regular government function. But, with the advent of the European Recovery Program [the Marshall Plan] at the close of the war […] all this changed” (Ibid: 31–32).

Wallerstein (1980: 34ff) maintains that ultimately it was the support of the US agricultural community—“as embodied by its principal lobbying group, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF)—that assured the eventual passage of PL.480”. PL 480 institutionalized the first formal US food aid programme on a permanent basis in 1954.

Surplus agricultural products were subsidized and could be sold below international prices. The establishment of the US Export-Import Bank was part of this design: it subsidized exports and provided loans on concessionary terms to foreign buyers along with other mechanisms of a similar kind to transform government food stocks into “food aid”. It was the farmers and food producers in the recipient countries who picked up the bill for an agricultural policy designed to maintain the income of US farmers and food producers. From a development perspective in which food security based on each country’s own efforts is valued, the effects might well be negative for the recipient countries. In emergency situations, however, this aid served an important humanitarian relief function.

Under the Lend Lease Act (1941), about USD6 billion in food aid was provided to European allies. The Surplus Property Act (1944) and the Agricultural Act (1949) authorized the Commodity Credit Corporation to sell stockpiled surpluses in the international market below market prices. Surpluses were also used for disaster relief under special legislation in India (1951) and Pakistan (1953), making possible the sale of such surpluses for local currencies. In 1951, the mutual Security Act (PL 82-165) contained a new budgetary provision under which food aid was provided (Shaw 2001: 29–30).

Ten years later (in 1964), US bilateral food aid was reaching 18 million tons a year at a cost of USD1.6 billion (Ibid: 32).

Calculations based on Shaw (Ibid) for cost of food aid and Stokke (2009: Table A.1) for total ODA in 1964.

As observed by Wallerstein, although the traditional justification of removing agricultural surpluses remained predominant, the incoming Kennedy administration also saw this as an opportunity to boost a new and dynamic image of itself and the US, turning its food aid into a foreign policy instrument. President Kennedy’s multilateral food aid policy was marked by a dual set of concerns, namely a unilateral interest in redistributing the international responsibility for food aid while retaining the capacity to dispose of US agricultural surpluses and a broader interest in building an international institutional capacity to allocate food aid for economic and social development. He wanted to shift thinking at the operational level from a philosophy of surplus disposal to recognition of the political and economic value of food aid (Wallerstein 1980: 167–170, 181ff).

For an overview and discussion of the role and performance of the WFP as a provider of food aid, see, inter alia, Stokke (2009: chaps. 8 and 13); Clay and Stokke (eds.) (2000)—especially the chapters by Faaland et al. (2000), Schulthes (2000), and Clay and Stokke (2000b).

As concluded earlier, as the largest contributor to the WFP, the US used the power of the purse to influence WFP policies: as the sole donor, the US insisted on having a say on the uses of the means it provided—“they had to be in conformity with the principles and objectives of U.S. bilateral food aid” (Stokke 2009: 289 (quote), 299, 437). Earlier, in the second part of the 1970s, however, when the US was no longer able to dominate the multilateral arena through the sheer weight of its resource contribution (it found “its proposals outvoted—and its wishes ignored—within the WFP governing council”), the US “attempted to compensate to some degree for the loss of direct leverage by regulating the size of their multilateral food contributions. The strategy here is to apply indirect pressure on the WFP to accede to the donor’s wishes or face the possible reduction—or outright withdrawal—of pledged resources. Donors have occasionally been forced to resort to this strategy in self-defence against what they considered the tyranny of the voting of the Group of 77” (Wallerstein 1980: 222, 234–235).

The countries that came closest at that point in time, using the variable of food aid as a percentage of total ODA, were Ireland (4.2), Canada (4.0), Australia (3.9), Norway (3.9) and New Zealand (3.5). For the major DAC countries—France, Germany, Japan, and the UK, the share was less than 1% (Clay 2007).

Evaluating the effectiveness of food aid, an OECD study concluded that some donors were providing more and more of their food aid in forms that reduced the transaction costs. By 2005, several of the countries with the most cost-effective programmes (Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) had formally untied all their food aid or applied the least restrictive procurement rules. In contrast, some of the main providers of food aid, including the US, continued to provide direct food aid, which is more costly than alternative commercial transactions. According to this evaluation, the least cost-effective food aid was provided by Australia, Belgium, Canada and the US (OECD 2006b: 61–64). In the US, the status of tying was regulated by legislation: it was required that 50% of commodities should be processed and packed (value added) before shipment and that 75% of the food aid managed by USAID and 50% of the food aid managed by the US Department of Agriculture should be transported by vessels registered in the US (ibid.: 51).

OECD (2011: 199). Furthermore, it should “build on its comprehensive approach to development and make use of the 2010 presidential policy directive to ensure more systematic scrutiny on the impact of United States domestic and foreign policies on developing countries” (idem).

For an excellent analysis of the disincentive effects of food aid, see Maxwell (1991), reviewing the literature on the topic. Based on three case studies (from Ethiopia, Senegal and the Sudan), he concluded that in all three countries “the warning lights were flashing to indicate the possibility of disincentive effects”. In general, “the case studies support the view that food aid needs to be integrated into an overall food strategy if disincentives are to be avoided and the full potential of food aid incentives realised” (Ibid.: 86).

In the discourse on food aid, the additionality argument represents a major justification for the provision of food aid: food aid in kind (surplus food) would result in more resources being transferred to developing countries. This applied especially to the major food-producing countries. As noted, however, during the late 1980s and later, more and more countries contributed food aid—committed under various food aid conventions—in cash, not in kind, thus weakening the additionality argument. For the US, however, the argument still held true into the new century, particularly because of the way food aid is organized—channelled through voluntary organizations and monetized to finance their development projects (for a discussion, see Clay and Stokke 2000b).

Observing that USAID did not publish the amount or portion of its aid channelled through NGOs, Carol Lancaster noted that it was likely to be substantial. “When I was in USAID in the early to mid-1990s, the policy office found that around 25 percent of development assistance (one of the types of US bilateral aid) was implemented by NGOs, translating into 10 percent of US bilateral ODA. In 1995, Vice President Gore, at USAID’s urging, announced that in the future 40 percent of that aid would be channelled through NGOs.” Lancaster added, however, that it was not clear that USAID ever reached that goal (Lancaster 2007: 250, note 70). In 2015, 26.2% of the bilateral ODA went to and through civil society organizations—the DAC average was 16.9% (OECD 2017: 280).

Carol Lancaster has observed: “Despite differences among them [the constituencies for aid outside government] on development strategies during the 1980s and early 1990s (especially regarding the emphasis on structural adjustment versus direct action to reduce poverty), development-oriented NGOs, together with groups of business-oriented coalitions formed in the mid-1990s, were able to help block further cuts in foreign aid. In the context of the US political system, the aid lobby was relatively weak—but at times of crisis or with a compelling issue, it could increasingly act with political effect” (Lancaster 2007: 103).

A quote from Barry Goldwater—to the right in the Republican Party—may be illustrative: “The American government does not have the right, much less the obligation, to try to combat poverty and disease wherever it exists […] the Constitution does not empower our government to undertake that job in foreign countries, no matter how worthwhile it might be. Therefore, except as it can be shown to promote America’s national interest, the Foreign Aid program is unconstitutional” (Goldwater 1960: 95; emphasis in original; quoted in Lancaster 2007: 95).

The Roper Organization reported that the response to the question of whether the spending on foreign aid was too much, too little or about right, 76% answered “too much” in 1973; 67% three years later; and around 60% during the remainder of the 1970s (Lancaster 2007: 246, note 28). During these years, the ODA of the US was 0.21% of GNP in 1973; 0.26% in 1976; and between 0.27% and 0.2% during the rest of the decade—substantially below the DAC averages. Similarly, during later decades: a study organized by UNDP on public opinion in relation to foreign aid in DAC countries showed that public support for foreign aid in the US was 50% in 1982 and 45% in 1995, respectively, far below the DAC averages of 78% and 80%, respectively, for these two years. The US also ranked last among DAC countries when it came to public support for foreign aid (Stern 1998: Table 1).

An overview of the expenditures on information and development education in 2001–2002 by the OECD countries may illustrate the point. In 2001, the US used USD0.003 per capita on these activities. Topping the list, the Netherlands, in contrast, used USD1.95 per capita, and the other frontrunners followed suit—Denmark USD1.85, Norway USD1.67, and Sweden USD1.66 (OECD 2003b: V-14, Table 4).

Carol Lancaster illustrated the point by observing that without the Cold War rationale, the priority of aid diminished considerably in the foreign policy community. “I base this statement on my experience in a central position in USAID [deputy administrator] in the Clinton administration [Democrat]. There was opposition in the White House to even mentioning aid in the president’s speeches, there was no one in the National Security Council in the Clinton administration responsible for aid issues, and there was little attention paid to aid issues in the foreign policy think tank community (e.g., the Council on Foreign Relations)—all manifestations of a lack of interest in this instrument of foreign policy” (Lancaster 2007: 85). She pointed out two exceptions among the senior officials at that time—the Vice President Al Gore and the First Lady Hillary Clinton. See also supra, note 30.

However, there were a few exceptions to this general trend. “Presidents have on occasion become engaged in efforts to increase and reorient US aid—typically for programmes addressed to urgent diplomatic concerns or issues of domestic political importance. […] On rare occasions, presidents have intervened to further developmental goals, as with the support of President Bush for the Millennium Challenge Account. When presidents exert themselves for foreign aid, their preferences trump other priorities or opposition within the administration and usually, with Congress” (Lancaster 2007: 100–101).

The trends in the aid-tying of DAC countries, as reported by OECD, are described in Chap. 4 (supra, this volume). However, a substantial part of their ODA (technical assistance, food aid) has not been included in the OECD statistics. The US stopped publishing data on tied aid in 1996. Lancaster (2007: 102 and note 67) refers to estimates of between 70% and 80% that were tied to purchase of US goods and services, adding that aid-tying “has long been a means for USAID to fend off pressures for a more direct allocation of aid for export promotion” (Ibid: 249). See also supra, note 43.

In 2015, 55.5% of the US ODA was untied (exclusive administrative costs and in-country refugee costs), down from 62.5% in 2014. The DAC average in 2015 was 78.1% (OECD 2017, preliminary data).