Senators: Constraints delay food aid

Associated Press

BIDI BIDI CAMP, Uganda

As President Donald 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 told The Associated Press on Saturday that the U.S. “can deliver more food aid at less cost” through foreign food aid reform.

The United States spent roughly $2.8 billon in 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,” Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee told the AP. “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 Friday toured a food distribution site at the refugee settlement, which holds more than 270,000 South Sudanese who recently 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.