Senators seeking to ease delivery of U.S. food aid
BIDI BIDI CAMP, Uganda — As President Trump seeks to cut foreign aid under the slogan of “America First,” two U.S. senators are proposing making American food assistance more efficient after meeting with victims of South Sudan’s famine and civil war.
After a visit to the world’s largest refugee settlement in northern Uganda with the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said Saturday that the U.S. “can deliver more food aid at less cost” through food aid reform.
The United States spent roughly $2.8 billion on foreign food aid last year and is the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance. But current regulations require most food aid to be grown in the U.S. and shipped under an American flag.
“It’s taken in some cases six months for those products to actually get here,” said Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. “We have people coming over the border (from South Sudan). They need food. We can actually buy the food cheaper, use our taxpayer dollars cheaper.”
The two senators toured a food distribution site Friday at the refugee settlement, which holds more than 270,000 South Sudanese who have fled the three-year civil war in the East African nation.
The U.N. says South Sudan is part of the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II, with roughly 20 million people there and in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen facing possible famine. Two counties in South Sudan were declared famine areas in February.
In March, Trump proposed a budget that would cut 28 percent of funding for diplomacy and foreign aid, singling out the Food for Peace program that funds a majority of U.S. foreign food assistance.
The budget plan still requires approval by Congress.
Both Coons and Corker defended humanitarian aid, and argued that lifting restrictions on where foreign food aid is grown and how it is shipped would feed more people.