The world is suffering the worst global food crisis in a generation, with shortages and record food prices spawning unrest in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. The United Nations has identified 36 countries in crisis, 21 of them in Africa. In Haiti, the poorest of the poor are said to be eating a muddy concoction of dirt, oil and sugar as a meal of last resort.

Shouldn't that be enough to get the U.S. Congress to change protectionist policy that does nothing but serve the self-interest of American agribusiness and shipping? It hasn't yet.

Americans are a generous people and America is a generous nation. Bush administration officials went to the world food summit in Rome last month with nearly $2 billion in new emergency food aid having just been allocated by the House and Senate.

But that aid carried bureaucratic strings requiring that nearly all of it be U.S.-grown food shipped on U.S.-flagged vessels. Those strings dramatically increase the costs and the length of time it takes for the food to reach starving people. If the aid were instead in the form of cash grants to buy food closer to the nations that desperately need it, the same amount of money would buy twice as much food, months faster. Not to mention the fact that the regionally purchased food would help farmers in those nations and boost development so that they could better help themselves.

The European Union has changed its policies in recent years in favor of cash grants. So has Canada. President Bush has repeatedly asked Congress for a modest change in the law to allow up to one-fourth of the budget of the main U.S. food aid program to be used to buy food from local or regional farmers during emergencies. He did so again in his State of the Union speech early this year and renewed the proposal as the food crisis deepened this spring.

To absolutely no avail with this Congress. Not even a $25 million pilot program offered by the administration could win approval. An alliance of shipping and agricultural interests has fought back the Bush plan each time, arguing that it would weaken the incentive for American growers and shippers to participate in the aid program, thus making less emergency food aid available.

Balderdash. That argument can't stand up to the fact that the Bush plan would affect less than half of 1 percent of U.S. agricultural exports — hardly a disincentive to participate in a program of emergency aid.

The severity of the current food crisis is due to myriad supply-and-demand factors: demand pushed to record levels because of growth in places such as China and India; supply down because of drought, protectionist policies of other countries, and the rapidly increasing diversion of foodstuffs such as corn to produce ethanol instead of food.

It is shameful that the U.S. Congress refuses to eliminate this one protectionist barrier that could mean fewer people would have to eat mud in a futile effort to survive.

Reprinted from The San Diego Union-Tribune.

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