Self-Interested Altruism and Modern Food Aid

Few issues are as symbolic or as complicated as modern food aid, combining as it does a fundamental humanitarian act with calculated self-interest. These complications, moral as well as strategic, are a central focus of Kristin Ahlberg's Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, which examines the evolving nature of U.S. food aid throughout Johnson's administration. Ahlberg notes several times that “self-interest and altruism are not mutually exclusive,” and Johnson would certainly have agreed (p. 42). Yet while it may be true that altruism and self-interest are not always in conflict, they sometimes are. In her examinations of Johnson's aid programs to India, Israel, and Vietnam, Ahlberg makes it clear that U.S. interests consistently trumped the needs of the hungry. The United States had been formally and informally distributing humanitarian aid for decades by the mid-twentieth century, but food aid took on new uses and meanings in the Cold War era. Ahlberg traces the origins of the Food for Peace program to 1954, when Dwight Eisenhower signed Public Law 480, authorizing the use of farm commodities as foreign aid. In no way envisioning a permanent humanitarian aid program, Eisenhower wanted a temporary means to liquidate U.S. agricultural surpluses that had accumulated with alarming speed since the conclusion of the Marshall Plan and the Korean War

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