Food aid: Types of Food Aid

Food aid

Food aid: History and Origins

Food aid: Trends in Food Aid

Food aid: Food Aid Policy Debates

Classically there have been three kinds of food aid. Program food aid, for almost 40 years the largest single category, is subsidized deliveries or free grants of food on a government-togovernment basis. The recipient government usually sells the food and uses the proceeds for many purposes not necessarily for food assistance or anything to do with addressing hunger. The main purpose of program food aid has been to provide budgetary support or balance-of-payments relief for recipient governments. 

Project food aid provides support to field-based projects in areas of chronic need through deliveries of food, usually on a grant basis, to a recipient government, a nongovernmental organization, or the U.N. World Food Programme. The recipient agency then uses the food either directly in projects such as mother and child health, school feeding, or food-forwork projects that provide an employment guarantee using food for wages, or by ‘‘monetizing’’ the food aid selling it in the recipient country market and using the proceeds for project activities that require cash as an input rather than food. 

Emergency or humanitarian food aid consists of deliveries of free food to populations affected by conflict or disaster, with a host country government, the World Food Programme, or a nongovernmental organization acting as the distributing agency.