Food Aid Projections For The Decade Of The 1990s

This book presents the results of a meeting held by the Board on Science and Technology for International Development. At this meeting, six groups of modelers presented their best estimates of the food aid/food commodity trade picture during the period 1991-2000. These estimates are based on each modeler's own database and own assumptions about trends in global policy, climate, population, and economics.

Since the Colombo Plan in the early 1950s, food aid has been an important and highly visible component of the Canadian development assistance program. Until the early 1970s, however, the Canadian food aid program was little more than a loosely connected collection of disparate programs designed to meet a host of sometimes conflicting objectives. In the wake of the world food crisis of 1972-75, a growing number of groups began to question the developmental effectiveness of food aid. In response, the Canadian government undertook an extensive review and assessment of its food aid program, which resulted in a series of new policy initiatives designed to change both the substance of food aid programs and the manner in which they were administered. These changes marked a watershed in the history of the Canadian food aid program, setting out the fundamental policy themes that have been consolidated and refined in the 1980s and early 1990s.

This book contributes to 1995 policymaking by offering information concerning an array of issues fundamentally important to the U.S. agricultural and food sector. It reviews a set of policy approaches for dealing with these issues, and assesses trade-offs among these alternative approaches.

The increasing liberalization and globalisation of the world economy has not been accompanied by covergence in the various indicators of economic and social development. The papers in this volume go some way towards explaining why the increasing reliance on market forces may lead to greater divergences in economic performance. They also point to the importance for the development process of social solidarity and institutions which encourage co-operative approaches to problem solving.