Oxfam America president Raymond Offenheiser’s op-ed on food aid is cross posted from the Atlantic.

Abdoulai Mohamed is a 60-year-old small businessman in Turkana, Kenya. Abdoulai did not follow the traditional pastoralist way of life as generations of his family had done before. Instead, he took out a loan and set up one of the first shops in his community, selling basic food staples like corn and flour.

When drought spread across the region in 2011, Abdoulai and his wife, Asinyen, gave food to their customers on credit, allowing many poor farmers to borrow what they needed to get by. As the crisis worsened some struggled to settle these debts, and it was difficult to keep the store’s shelves stocked without paying customers.

But thanks to a program funded in part by USAID, which helps make food available by assisting local businesses and ensuring food supply chains are intact, many of these outstanding balances were repaid, and families were able to buy the food they needed. This program has helped more than 5,500 drought-stricken families survive, keeping the local economy alive with food flowing from local farmers through local businesses and into poor households.

Abdoulai’s story is one of community perseverance, but it is also an untold story about the effective role US assistance and Washington can play. In a sense, Washington and the Horn of Africa are very much alike. From afar it is hard to know that there are any success stories to be told. In the Horn, where millions have been impacted by famine and conflict, news reports consistently highlight the suffering and sorrow. From Washington, we hear only the tales of endless dysfunction and partisan warfare.

Surely both places have problems. But as I’ve witnessed first-hand, the view from up close is much more complex. I’ve seen unimaginable ingenuity and generosity as communities work together to tackle crises and find hope in disaster. Because of the support of the American people and the hard work of a few unsung heroes, Abdoulai and Asinyen got the tools and opportunity to forge their own solutions. Now they and many others are weathering this crisis and have real hope for their children to pursue a better future.

Sadly, Washington does not always work this way. Too often our aid programs suffer from the same insider games by DC operators that Americans complain about. Take the US food aid program. Helping hungry people during food crises is an essential part of US foreign policy; it reduces instability around the world and protects the most vulnerable communities from catastrophe.

But right now special interest lobbyists are working to impose rules and regulations that benefit themselves, cost lives, and waste taxpayer dollars. Under our current program a group of lobbyists and trade organizations, representing businesses and industries that stand to profit from aid dollars, have convinced Congress to write the rules to work in their favor.

These rules require that food aid be purchased from preferred growers in the US and shipped from the US on preferred ships instead of finding the best prices and sources of food that will save the most lives at the lowest cost. This red-tape is not about empowering people like Abdullah to help themselves, it’s about big business cashing in. The result is that less food gets to hungry people when they need it. Because of these rules up to 32 cents of every $1 spent on food aid goes to waste.

Some will hear this and say that the US should get out of the aid business altogether. They are wrong. America is better than that. We cannot turn a blind eye on the millions of people whose lives are on the line and expect to live in a safe and stable world.

But we do need to heed the lessons of our own successes. The hard truth is that if we want our aid programs to work, we are going to have to stop treating them like corporate welfare. We need to cut the red-tape that prevents aid agencies from buying food aid locally and regionally from farmers in developing countries. This will require courage from legislators to stand-up to powerful lobbyists and keep their hands out of the food aid cookie jar.

This month Congress will take up the issue as part of negotiations over the Farm Bill. That will be their opportunity to do what Abdoulai and Asinyen have done for Kenya and prove that our perceptions about Washington are wrong.

This guest blog was written by Porter McConnell, policy and advocacy manager, Aid Effectiveness Team, Oxfam America

As part of a broader reform effort to make US foreign aid more effective, USAID is peeling away layers of bureaucracy, bit by bit. The latest casualty in this battle against obscure and painful regulations that get in the way of helping people help themselves? A little thing called the Source, Origin, and Nationality regulation, or S/O/N. The S/O/N led USAID to buy much of the goods it needed in the field from the US, and submitting to a lengthy waiver process when this was impractical or costly. After a year-long public consultation, reforms to this clunker of a rule went live this week.

Now that USAID has used its authority under law to change the S/O/N rule, it can buy the goods it needs not just from the US, but also from the country where the good is being used, or another low income country with a competitive price. But wait, isn’t buying American a good thing, you ask? Well, not always. If it’s ten times as expensive and takes months to get there, it’s probably not the best use of taxpayer dollars, especially when delay could cost peoples’ lives. Also, if your goal is to help people in poor countries help themselves, you probably want to support the local small businesses that employ those people, so they can feed their families, and be less dependent on our aid, right? In that case, buying American is shooting ourselves in the foot.

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Today’s guest blog post is written by Jim French. He is a farmer from Partridge, KS who also works on agriculture policy for Oxfam America. A longer version of this post was published today in McClatchy.

The telephone rang at 6:30am. It was my wife, “We had twenty four hundredths of rain last night.” I savored every word as if they were drops slowly soaking into parched earth.

Abandoned corn in Reno County, KS. Photo by Jim French.

The extreme drought has taken its toll on the region’s agriculture.The winter wheat harvest was lessened by thirty to sixty percent. Rain fed corn has mostly been abandoned or cut for feed. Rangeland grass has long stopped growing.

And yet in the midst of this severe drought, one doesn’t see mass migrations of rural folks.

Why? Since the depression there has been long-term government investment in programs that ensure agricultural resiliency through resource conservation and insurance. Like most farmers who suffered crop losses in June, my crop insurance helped compensate for the loss of income. Moreover, land grant research and extension services have helped spread better farming practices, which have prevented some of the worst consequences of drought.

In short, the US agriculture system is prepared to manage extreme situations, allowing us to avoid the type of mass migrations that destabilize governments and lead to famines elsewhere in the world.

This is not the case in East Africa where another historic drought is taking place. Thousands of Somalis have crossed into refugee camps in Kenya – a country that is also suffering from lack of rainfall. Officially declared a famine by the UN, at least 12 million people are at risk and many are dying each day from hunger. Because of the drought and failed infrastructure, over 135,000 people have fled Somalia into neighboring countries, creating new stresses for governments and exacerbating conflicts.

Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya where refugees from Somalia arrive everyday. Photo by Linda Ogwell/Oxfam.

We know there must be an immediate response. The UN estimates that $2.1 billion is needed to stave off a major humanitarian catastrophe. However, in places where chronic drought or the other extremes of climate can have a major impact on food security, there must be longer range investments to build local capacity and economic opportunity to prevent future crises.

Most of those displaced by drought rely on agriculture and food production to earn a living. But official development assistance for agriculture dropped 75 percent during the last three decades. Faltering public investments in developing country agriculture is undoubtedly an underlying cause of the current crisis and has undermined long term food security in many poor countries.

In the last two years, the US has made commitments on the global stage for investments that would help developing nations build resilience to these extremes and improve food security and self-reliance through small holder agriculture. These commitments would be less than what we now pay in wasteful farm subsidies and tax breaks for oil refiners to blend ethanol – spending that contributes little or nothing to US agricultural resiliency. And they will create powerful savings in the level of food aid that is needed and will help prevent the mounting national security costs that humanitarian crises create.

Whether in the US, Africa, or in any agricultural region, farmers will face uncertainty. The future will certainly hold greater risks as climate change increases, markets become more volatile, and resources more constrained. Planning for that future and investing in resiliency means a more secure world and a place where hope for rain is not a matter of life or death.

Note: Oxfam aims to reach 3 million people with a variety of support, including food aid, clean water, and veterinary care for animals. We are drilling and repairing wells and distributing fuel vouchers to ensure that pumps on the wells can keep operating—even if people have no money. We are also campaigning to change the root causes of this crisis. Find out how you can support our efforts.

María Antonia León, El Salvador. “Before, I needed $15 weekly to buy the household necessities. Now I need $40, just for food.” Credit: Edgar Orellan

When international food prices reached an all-time peak earlier this year, many clamored to understand the drivers of this alarming trend. Oxfam dove headfirst into the discussion, pointing out the politics behind the food price crisis, and calling for reforms that would help prevent the most vulnerable from catastrophe.

But often missing from these conversations was a real understanding of how the food price crisis is playing out in communities across the globe. It may be easy for the average person to understand the impacts of higher food prices in their own life, but sometimes the big picture is too remote or complex to comprehend. That’s why we created the food price pressure points map, to provide a snapshot of how global prices are hitting home in some of the most vulnerable communities around the world.

Other groups like ActionAid and the Environmental Working Group have done fantastic work to describe the link between biofuels policies and rising prices and show just how vulnerable some countries are to price volatility. We hope our map adds to their great work, and advances this dialogue by providing new insight into the consequences of a broken food system. We also created this map to give people an easy platform to take action. That’s why we made it easily embeddable, just like a YouTube video. We encourage you to steal it, use it, and share it. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Want to put the map on your website or blog? Just go here to copy and paste the code to add this map to your own site.