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The merits of food aid, which can get seized by armed groups or stolen from refugee camps, have come under scrutiny over the years
By Katie Nguyen
From Biafra in the 1960s to present-day Somalia, armed groups have seized it to feed their ranks and to buy weapons.
Sometimes it gets stolen from refugee camps or taken from aid convoys at checkpoints as a form of tax.
The merits of food aid have come under growing scrutiny over the years as anecdotes from the field and reports by journalists suggest the many ways it can inadvertently fuel conflict.
It'll come as no surprise to sceptics that this view is supported by a new study by two economists from the United States, the world's biggest food-aid donor.
Harvard's Nathan Nunn and Yale's Nancy Qian found that, "an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of armed civil conflicts in recipient countries" – leading the authors of Freakonomics to speculate as to whether the study would have "interesting implications for U.S. policy".
With their research covering non-OECD countries between 1972 and 2006, Nunn and Qian also said that food aid has a more adverse effect on small-scale armed conflicts and in countries with fewer roads – or fewer alternative routes for aid convoys to take to avoid the possible threat of ambush or attack.
The economists point out that aid can still fuel conflict even if it reaches its intended target. Take, for example, the Goma refugee camps, where Hutu militiamen "taxed" civilian populations who had fled there after the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
More interesting perhaps is their finding that the flow of U.S. food aid is linked to the wheat harvest at home.
In years yielding bumper harvests, the U.S. government accumulates wheat to support American farmers. The surplus is shipped as food aid in the following year.
Qian tells me she hopes the study will spur other organisations such as the United Nations to collect other types of data in order to build a fuller picture of the effects that humanitarian aid policies, including food aid, have had.
Although Qian and her colleague focused on the costs of food aid, she said they had been interested in looking at its benefits but data on health, for example, was poor.
"Once they have those results they can then focus and think carefully about how to design better policies in the future – how to target aid, what countries should get aid and when," she said.
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