In the continuing saga of government's right hand not knowing what its left hand is doing, the Agriculture Department has come under fire for planning to donate 500 metric tons of surplus U.S.-grown peanuts to Haiti. The intent is noble: to feed protein-rich peanut snacks to some 140,000 Haitian schoolchildren who might otherwise suffer malnutrition.
However, the U.S. aid represents subsidized foreign competition for Haiti's peanut growers, who are struggling to supply the local market, with support from U.S. charities, such as the Clinton Foundation, as well as--you guessed it--the U.S. Agency for International Development. There's a petition on the White House website calling on the USDA to call off the peanut aid to protect Haiti's farmers.
It's a classic dilemma: give Haiti peanuts and its children eat for a year; teach Haiti to grow peanuts, and the impoverished nation might feed itself long-term. The USDA points out that the amount it plans to supply Haiti represents only 1.4 percent of annual production, and that local farmers, beset by a recent drought and other issues, lack the wherewithal to meet the school lunch program's needs in the short run anyway. Nevertheless, Haitians have bitter memories of the way U.S. rice imports displaced their once-flourishing local farms in the 1980s, and they fear a repeat.
One thing is clear: the irrationality of U.S. farm subsidies, which skew the U.S. government's options to begin with. The heavily lobbied but, to laypersons, incomprehensible provisions of the 2014 farm bill incentivize growers in several Southern states to increase land devoted to peanuts rather than other crops, even when peanut prices dip. The result has been production of a huge unmarketable surplus, which the government is committed to take off farmers' hands at a hefty loss to taxpayers.
Editorial on 04/28/2016