“Pre-positioning food stocks has some important advantages besides saving time: it can lower program costs for the food itself (by minimizing purchases during food price spikes) and shipping (by avoiding bunching of shipments). Mostly, however, it’s crazy that the Congress still requires that U.S. food aid be bought here and transported around the world on U.S.-flagged ships,” Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, writes on the “Views from the Center” blog. Elliott discusses a recent event where she was a participant.

“The final question that I posed at the Partnership event was: Since we now have an initiative focused on food security and agriculture as part of development, is there still a role for non-emergency food aid as a tool of development?” (6/13).