Tony Durham, Senior media officer (emergencies)

"All the stuff we are looking at is cloned fruit, it's patented, it's intellectual property," Frederick Kaufman observes as he looks around an American market.
 
The author of 'A Short History of the American Stomach' is witty and entertaining on camera, and a heavyweight thinker on the planet's food issues. And he writes an ace blog
 
So how come the Youtube video below, as of Saturday, was still unrated and had received only a pathetic 109 views?

I know of a 21-second clip of snow falling that has had more Youtube views than that - 457 at the latest count (I know, because I posted it. )

The reason we at ActionAid are suddenly interested in Frederick Kaufman is that he has now tackled the subject of food aid. And he happened to mention ActionAid in his Harpers magazine cover story on the subject.
 
The NGO orthodoxy is that food aid should be bought in local markets, not shipped long distances from the US and other rich countries. Local sourcing is faster, cheaper, and boosts the local economy. That's pretty much the point of view expressed last week by the US General Accounting Office, which has been critical of official US aid policies.
 
You may remember this persuasively-written piece by Alex Renton, on how the US dumps its surplus food on countries like Malawi.

The result was that small Malawian farmers could not sell their record maize crop . The price was too low.
 
To cut a long story short, the World Food Program and the Gates Foundation have now embraced the NGO orthodoxy. Instead of dishing out food, they will sometimes pay cash to local producers, even giving them forward contracts.
 
But Kaufman thinks this free-market solution encourages what markets often encourage: speculation.
 
I think he could be right, at least when a big player like the WFP is dishing out the cash.
 
Speculation is not confined to Wall Street. In an earlier blog I mentioned how local merchants in Assam hoarded rice during the 2007 floods
 
So which is right: cash, which inflates prices? Or food, which undermines them?
 
Theoretically it should be possible to pump in the right blend of cash and food to ensure that local prices remain stable. This must have occurred to at least one economist already. And another economist has probably already pointed out why it won't work.
 
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