Using Food as a Weapon

December 2, 1999

Using Food as a Weapon

By MICHAEL MAREN

he Clinton administration is set to end a longstanding prohibition against using humanitarian aid for explicit military ends. The target is Sudan, and the plan is to supply American food to the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, which has fought a civil war with the country's Islamic fundamentalist government for more than a decade.

Predictably, relief organizations like CARE U.S.A. and World Vision have criticized this notion as a perversion of the "humanitarian principles" that guide aid efforts. But these protests are based on the convenient fiction that there is such a thing as purely humanitarian aid.

Regardless of the motives of those doling it out, handing out food is never a neutral act. This is especially true in a war zone like southern Sudan, where food is a weapon more essential than bullets and guns. While Americans might like to think of food aid in terms of pennies collected by schoolchildren, from the combatants' perspective it's a critical part of the supply chain.

Choosing to deliver food to one side in this conflict would at least be taking a moral stand against the abuses of the Sudanese government. Delivering food to both sides, as humanitarian groups have done in Sudan for 10 years, is at best a refusal to acknowledge the strategic value of aid. At worst, such efforts have contributed to prolonging a conflict that has claimed nearly two million victims.

In Sudan, food can only flow with the consent of the men with the guns. Each side directs the flow of foreign aid to solidify popular support in its geographic stronghold, and each side cuts off the supply to cities and towns friendly to the enemy. This has helped create the stalemate. The humanitarians are in effect catering a war.

The Sudan aid authorization, which was included in Congress's final budget bill at the urging of the State Department and National Security Council officials, is an open acknowledgment of what has long been a hidden truth behind food aid. From the beginnings of the federal Food for Peace program in the late 1950's, food aid has been viewed in Washington as a political weapon, a stick disguised as a carrot. South Vietnam was one of the first beneficiaries of the program.

In most cases, however, the United States has not been explicit about its goals. In the early 80's, American officials looked the other way as much of the food they were providing to Ethiopian refugees in Somalia through charities was channeled to guerrillas fighting the Marxist government in Addis Ababa. (Almost all American food aid, even that distributed by private groups, comes courtesy of the government.)

Likewise, in 1989 evidence surfaced that Saddam Hussein had been converting Agriculture Department food aid into cash and weapons. The Bush administration chose not to cut off the supply until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.

And in 1994, American food delivered to Rwandan Hutu refugees living in camps in Zaire ended up in the hands of the militant radicals and was converted into military supplies as part of a plan to re-invade Rwanda. Though it was not the intention of United States to support the Hutus, once the supplies arrived in Zaire, there was no way of stopping the flow to the militants.

Most often, civil conflicts are relatively short-lived, and the aid effort ends before it causes a serious military imbalance. But after 10 years of war, Sudan has come to the point where humanitarian groups must confront the difficult truth that their charity may be making things worse.

This is not to say that the administration's giving food to the Sudanese rebels would necessarily improve the situation. The rebels, like the government, have committed atrocities, even starving villages into submission. But the charities have no business claiming the moral high ground. If they are able to see the flaws in the administration proposal, they should be able to see that similar flaws undermine their own efforts.

Michael Maren is the author of "The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity."