Authors /
David Beckmann
David Beckmann is president of Bread for the World.
Hunger is political: Food banks can’t do it all
Americans do a good job of helping people in need directly, as we should. But there is another way to help people in need: citizen activism.
Smarter foreign aid: How to fix USAID
With U.S. funding, nongovernmental organizations have helped immunize millions of babies. Thanks to debt relief, most African children are in school, and in the last six years the number of people receiving HIV/AIDS medicines in developing countries has increased tenfold. Our country provides assistance through the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. But the world has changed dramatically since then. It's time for the U.S. to get smarter about how it delivers foreign aid.
Food fight: How international aid fails the poor
Why would any relief agency reject U.S. food aid? Beginning in 2009, CARE will do just that, forgoing $45 million a year in U.S. food aid because of its disagreement with monetization, the process of selling U.S. food abroad in order to raise needed cash for development projects and administrative costs. CARE maintains that the sale of U.S. food in the fragile markets of recipient countries competes with the sale of food produced by local farmers, causing prices to drop and lowering farmers’ income.
Still hungry
Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America.By Loretta Schwartz-Noble. HarperCollins, 252 pp., $24.95....
Not a Band-Aid: Debunking myths about foreign aid
Fanny Makina, a farmer in Malawi, is tilling her plot of land with a hoe and spade. Next she will plant crops of corn, peanuts, squash, beans and cassava, and mark each row carefully with a stick....
The year of Africa: Getting Congress’s attention
Washington is devoting an unusual amount of attention to Africa this year, and this provides an opportunity to help reverse the trend toward more widespread hunger on that continent....
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