The UN has come up with another great initiative to address the severe under-nutrition so many African countries are experiencing. The plan seems simple enough since giving incentives to locals will help boost their willingness to cooperate and participate in their country's agricultural development. However, government support is vital to the success of this program. More often than not, governments in the lowest GDP African countries are not investing in their country's infrastructure and development. Other factors are to be considered such as, the geographic limitations of these lands where arid development is significantly challenging. Nonetheless, it is not impossible. Even greater developed countries such as, India and China who are leading the world markets currently face severe under-nutrition and have hundreds of thousands of people who are facing severe hunger. Thus, if governments do not attempt to invest in their own lands and people, external support from the international community will not be sustainable.

Finally! When AFRICARE announced last year that they had concluded that food aid to food insecure areas may actually worsen the problem, and that they would be ceasing these operations except in cases of severe famine, their decision sent ripples throughout the development community. At first blush, AFRICARE seemed to be making a dangerously brash statement by saying they would be reducing the amount of food they sent to undernourished regions. Don't we have a moral obligation to deliver food to people in need? And even though food aid may clearly be an imperfect solution, isn't it the least we can do in recognition of the global inequity between the haves and have nots in this world? AFRICARE said apparently not -- and they were right.

When I was travelling in West Africa in 2003, I had the opportunity to witness first-hand some of the negative impacts of food aid. In rural Guinea, where severe malnutrition is chronic, a regular supply of US-commodity grains steadily undermined local markets, driving down costs to a point where agriculture was not a viable income source for this subsistence village. As a result, what did many people do? They reduced local production. After all, why labor to grow crops you cannot sell while free food makes regular deliveries? Their decision made rational sense, but over the long term, a subsistence economy that is not producing its own food has little chance for survival -- except to continue receiving food aid.

Despite decades of this pattern of dependency playing out, AFRICARE's recognition of this dangerous cost of food aid *was* radical in the development community, particularly because the dominant discourse discourages recognizing the importance of local markets, instead stressing the poverty of a community in the context of a global economy. Political economists have long pointed out that famines are more often the result of crises in food distribution rather than food production, and nowhere has this been more true than in Africa, where numerous countries have weathered severe famines with fully stocked store shelves of grain no one could afford. Locals earned too little for the products they tried to sell on the global market, then could unafford the imports for sale in their village. Several other commenters have noted with surprise that the WFP's Purchase for Progress initiative is "ground-breaking" in any sense. It shouldn't be. It should be common sense. But when the predominant framework used to understand rural Third-World poverty suggests that marketing village-level production for commodity export and importing new products --supposedly creating a place in the global economy -- is the path out of poverty, then this program represents a complete reversal. There is an implict admission in WFP's program that global trade is not the solution to food insecurity, and that admission has dramatic repercussions beyond food aid. That's why it's taken so long for a program like this to evolve, and why it is ground-breaking after all.

But the good news is -- it's here. I agree with other posters that the question of government support will be critical, and again, the question here is whether the old way of doing things may be sufficiently questioned for policymakers to see the benefit of government intervention. After all, the U.S.' successful agriculture industry depends overwhelmingly on government support, and countries of the global South should be expected to provide the same. My main concern is using purchase guarantees as collateral with local banks. This sounds smooth, but as with any loan program for economically fragile households, the devil is in the details. Will these loans be targeted at local food autonomy, or back at non-local markets? What will the rates be on these loans? What role does indigenous farmer knowledge play in this system? Many questions remain unanswered, but the appearance of a major policy shift on food aid is extremely encouraging. Supporting local markets shows real promise for bottom-up poverty alleviation.