The Road to Hell (36 page)

But ethanol is a government boondoggle, a business venture that can not succeed without public support. And the only beneficiaries of the project are the corporations receiving the tax breaks.

It costs almost twice as much to produce ethanol as gasoline and, according to estimates from the Department of Energy, it sometimes takes more energy to make ethanol than it actually contains. There is no way to make it profitable.

Environmental claims for the product haven't panned out, either. While ethanol can reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it evaporates more quickly than gasoline, increasing emivssions of volatile organic compounds and nitrous dioxide.

Trying to make good on pledges to reduce government waste, the House Ways and Means Committee voted in September 1995 to terminate ethanol's 17-year-old tax break. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, after a call from Dole, had the measure killed.

Andreas gives money to both Republicans and Democrats. He has donated $230,000 to Dole and allowed him to use the ADM corporate jet during the past two decades. And he gave Dole and wife Elizabeth a bargain price on their condominium in Bal Harbour, Florida. (The Andreases also have a condo in the same complex, and the two couples often keep each other company there.) The Andreas Foundation and other interests controlled by Andreas also donated $3 million to the American Red Cross after Elizabeth Dole became president of the charity in 1991.

The Andreas Foundation gave nothing to the Red Cross in the five previous years, but contributed $500,000 in 1991 and another $500,000 in 1992, after Andreas's wife, Inez, was named to the Red Cross board. The balance of Andreas's donation to the Red Cross were contributions inkind: $2 million worth of ADM-produced vegetable burgers to feed the people in Haiti, all tax deductible, of course.

When Bob Dole resigned from the Senate to pursue the presidency in the spring of 1996, the ethanol industry braced for the worst.

Andreas has also given more than $250,000 to the Democratic party since 1994. He co-chaired a 1992 dinner that raised money for President Clinton, and another one in 1994 that brought $2.5 million into democratic coffers. A week later the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that 10 percent of all gasoline must contain ethanol. Clinton has continued to support tax breaks for ethanol that will cost taxpayers an estimated $3.4 billion by the turn of the century.

And it isn't likely that much will come from a current criminal investigation against ADM for price fixing and fraud. Andreas has beaten the rap before. He was acquitted of federal charges of having arranged an illegal corporate contribution of $100,000 to Humphrey's unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign. And later, ADM pleaded no-contest to charges of price fixing in its sales to the Food for Peace program and paid $200,000 in criminal penalties.

Rather than pointing out who really makes money from foreign aid, members of Congress have tended to blame lazy Third World recipients for the vast sums of wasted aid money. The leader of this charge is Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina—himself the king of tobacco subsidies— who has spoken repeatedly about U.S. taxpayers' money going down “foreign rat holesr”

“We have a Congress full of a lot of people who don't want to even hear the words ‘foreign assistance,'” Jay Byrne, a spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development told the
Los Angeles Times
in October 1995. “When they say foreign aid is money going down a rat hole, the fact is that that ‘rat hole' could be their district.”

And most likely it is.

In fact, USAID doles out close to 80 percent of its contracts and grants to U.S. firms—which in turn provide food, supplies, or assistance to recipient nations overseas.

Organizations that lobby on behalf of aid understand that. They know the way to sell aid in Congress is to emphasize what we get from it. Yet these organizations, NGOs mostly, are put in a position to lobby on behalf of multibillion-dollar corporations so they can do their little piece of work and get their relatively tiny slice of the pie.

The grain-trading companies dominate the world of food, and in this scheme of things, the NGOs and charities serve two very important functions. First, they are the primary lobbyists for sending food to the Third World. Sally Struthers and Mother Teresa make better pitchmen than Dwayne Andreas on this account. Second, they are the agents, the contractors who move the food.

Yet even NGOs know that they have to pitch food aid for its domestic benefits. Ken Hackett, director of Catholic Relief Services, selling the idea of food aid to Congress said, “Each food aid dollar has at least a double impact. First, the funds are spent primarily in the United States on U.S. commodities, processing, bagging, fortification, and transportation. This enhances economic activity and increases the tax receipts to the U.S. government. Second, the food is provided to people and countries which cannot afford to import adequate amounts of food on a commercial basis. Finally, when PVOs are involved, we leverage funds and services and gain broad public participation.”

The modern role of the NGO developed in the years following the creation of the Food for Peace program, and much of that early activity took place in Vietnam. The U.S. government found PL-480 to be a handy way to get around agreements limiting the amount of aid funds that could be sent to Vietnam. NGOs were under tremendous pressure to cooperate. As Professor Vernon Ruttan noted, “While cooperating with the government, the PVOs voiced their dissatisfaction with the increasing politicization of their programs. In spite of their reservations they allowed themselves to be used, because they were dependent on government money and supplies; most were willing to do whatever was necessary—including distributing food in situations that were at best questionable and at worst harmful to recipients.”

That was in the early 1960s, and little has changed. CARE, the largest American NGO, has a budget that approaches half a billion dollars annually. More than half of that is in the form of commodities and funds they receive to administer the distribution of commodities.

According to the General Accounting Office in fiscal year 1993, NGOs distributed almost 1.2 million metric tons of U.S.-donated food aid, not including emergency aid, to fifty-eight countries. PVOs sold about 13 percent of the Title II commodities in 1993 to generate currency to pay costs associated with direct feeding projects and to conduct nonfood projects. The GAO has noted that NGOs tend to distribute food first, and examine the consequences later:

Humanitarian organizations have become comfortable in bed with the grain companies. Their survival and growth depend on it, but they must realize how the humanitarian instinct has become perverted by its partnership with domestic special interests. Humanitarians speak eloquently about the need for relief of hunger in the Third World. Yet most of the food aid they hand out—about 90 percent—is not emergency aid for starving people. (In fact, by law at least 76 percent of the commodities provided under Title II must be used for nonemergency development activities.) When food aid is criticized, their response is, “Do you suggest we let people starve?” It seems they've learned much from their partners in agribusiness, who see starving people as little more than another market for their products.

Hubert Humphrey's response to such accusations was: “So what's wrong with this?” Perhaps Somalia would have given Humphrey an adequate answer to the question. That, of course, might not bother some of the more cynical advocates of food aid. Crippled societies are just another marketing opportunity for those looking to get rid of free food. As long as there are aid workers willing to risk their lives to move the commodities, or the world is willing to send troops to move the food, anarchic societies are not an obstacle.

*
Quoted in Vernon W. Ruttan , “The Politics of US. Food Aid Policy,” in
Why Food Aid?
ed. Vernon W. Ruttan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

*
Quoted in
Supermarketer to the World
, by E. J. Kahn Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1991). The book turns the now-embattled CEO into a legendary crusader for justice and capitalism.

*
Quoted in
Oxy-Fuel News
, May 20, 1996.

FEEDING THE FAMINE

Mark Huband reporting for
The Guardian

At 3 p.m. the first relief flight appeared over the newly-liberated airport. It was a UN World Food Programme flight: the first for weeks to arrive at Mogadishu international airport. It circled for over half an hour to give Mitchell, the WFP man on the ground, time to ensure that all the television cameras were trained on the aircraft's WFP insignia. It landed. It slowly edged its way along the tarmac. It taxied for 20 minutes. It usually takes five minutes to maneuver from the runway to the airport apron but the UN had to get its publicity just like everybody else. Mr. Mitchell was heard saying with elation how he had secured more live television broadcasts for WFP than his “rival” UN agency, UNICEF.

L
ate in the evening, after the last American troops had left Somalia in March 1994, I sat with a group of Western journalists in a room at the Sahafi Hotel conducting a postmortem on our own performance. There was a sense among us that though the battle for Somalia was far from over, our role as reporters would be very much diminished from then on. No Americans meant no interest in this story from America. Without American papers buying stories from Somalia, the reporters would move on. The
economics of journalism would prohibit the kind of day-to-day coverage that had been conducted for the previous sixteen months.

On that last night, one of the reporters in the room raised a question: Did we, the press, do the right thing bringing the troops in here? Among the assembled journalists, all experienced Somalia hands, not one raised an eyebrow about the pertinence of the query. The discussion that followed indicated that these journalists, though perhaps deluded about the extent of their power, understood quite well that they had raised the level of horror high enough to provoke an international military response.

To say that journalists in Somalia conspired in some organized way to do this would be wrong. Rather, reporters got caught up in the gathering momentum of their own stories. By the time U.S. Marines hit Mogadishu's beaches, Somalia, a journalistic backwater even by African standards, was the world's biggest story.

In the weeks preceding the arrival of U.S. forces, when every local TV news anchor in every American city was struggling to pronounce the names of towns like Jalalaqsi and Baidoa, conditions within Somalia actually were improving. Remarkably, the problem that supposedly required military intervention was becoming less of one every day. But the journalists in Somalia—or their editors at home—proved incapable of altering the terms of the story they had often simplistically shaped, a tale in which the United States had to do, as
New York Times
columnist Anna Quindlen put it, “the moral thing,” i.e., send in the troops. Seen for what it was, Somalia was as much a story about the media as it was about the famine in that country. Specifically, it was a story about how journalists helped feed a famine and create a crisis demanding international attention.

Famines and wars differ from natural disasters in that it's usually easy to see them coming. For editors and reporters, a decision has to be made about when to report the story. “Famine on the Horizon” is a nonstarter. Even in times of relative peace and prosperity, people in Somalia, and all over the continent, die of diseases related to malnutrition. But like “Famine on the Horizon,” the Somalia story is filled with economic and political intricacies that can't be photographed or quickly explained by a TV news correspondent reporting in front of dying people.

Occasionally, pieces are written that delve into the root causes of famine. Michael Hiltzik of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote on September 24, 1992, that famine is a “man-made” phenomenon that “can be created by misguided government policies that restrict the movement of food or disturb traditional practices.” But for the most part, reasoned reportage such as this is buried amid the more marketable emotional story.