Suchergebnisse

Examines how changes in specialists' orientations have brought about corresponding policy changes, 1954-90.

The principles and norms adopted by the regime governing food aid in the 1950s have changed substantially during the subsequent three decades. Explaining the changes necessarily includes analyzing the efforts of an international epistemic community consisting of economic development specialists, agricultural economists, and administrators of food aid. According to the initial regime principles, food aid should be provided from donors' own surplus stocks, should supplement the usual commercial food imports in recipient countries, should be given under short-term commitments sensitive to the political and economic goals of donors, and should directly feed hungry people. As a result of following these principles, the epistemic community and other critics argued, food aid often had the adverse effects of reducing local production of food in recipient countries and exacerbating rather than alleviating hunger. The epistemic community (1) developed and proposed ideas for more efficiently supplying food aid and avoiding "disincentive" effects and (2) pushed for reforms to make food aid serve as the basis for the recipients' economic development and to target it at addressing long-term food security problems. The ideas of the international epistemic community have increasingly received support from international organizations and the governments of donor and recipient nations. Most recently, they have led to revisions of the U.S. food aid program passed by Congress in October 1990 and signed into law two months later. As the analysis of food aid reform demonstrates, changes in the international regime have been incremental, rather than radical. Moreover, the locus for the change has shifted from an American-centered one in the 1950s to a more international one in recent decades.

The role of the state in providing food subsidies to consumers has a long though sometimes ignoble history. In ancient Egypt, wheat prices were maintained by government storage schemes (chapter 13), and the value of cheap, ample food supplies for political stability was evidenced in the "bread and circus" era of the Roman Empire. However, detailed policy calculations connecting subsidies to production and nutritional status confront contemporary government leaders with ever more complex and confusing policy considerations (chapter 2). ; PR ; IFPRI1 ; DGO

Da die Nahrungsmittellücke in den 90er Jahren immer größer werden wird, muß die Lebensmittelhilfe an Afrika gesteigert werden. Gezielt angewendet, können negative Folgen für die afrikanischen Bauern (z.B. Preisverfall) vermieden werden. Nahrungsmittelhilfe sollte umso großzügiger gewährt werden, je entschiedener sich die Regierungen Afrikas um einer bauernfreundlichen Politik durchringen. (DÜI-Spe)