Food for Peace, the U.S. Agency for International Development-run foreign food aid program, sounds like a win-win situation if I ever heard one. After all, certain celebrities aside, who doesn’t like food? And, most politicians aside, who’s got a thing against peace?

Indeed, everything seems quite cheery: The government buys domestically grown food, gives it to private aid organizations and pays American shippers to ship the stuff to impoverished countries. The government, its public image glistening, is happy. The farmers are happy. The aid organizations are happy. The shippers are happy. On second thought, it’s not just win-win; it’s win-win-win-win!

Wait, did I forget something? Government...farmers...aid organizations...shippers...oh right, impoverished countries. But aren’t they winning, too?

Yes, they are. But they aren’t winning enough. In 2000, they “won” 5.3 million metric tons of food. In 2005, it was 4 million. This year, it’s 2.4 million. At this rate, our bioethanol-hungry selves will be snatching corn from the hands of the world’s hungry by the end of the decade.

Regardless of future blackmail opportunities, the present state of affairs is bleak. With food and fuel prices steadily rising, the costs of buying food and getting it overseas have crippled the food aid program. In 2002, we provided food for 105 million people. By last year, that number had decreased to 70 million. According to the United Nations, there are still over 850 million starving people in the world today, and that number is not decreasing.

Shipping American food around the world as is stipulated by current law wastes money and time. Dumping American food on the heads of foreign farmers debilitates local agriculture. The solution has long been apparent: Use the food aid budget to buy food from poor foreign farmers (instead of using American commodities to deprive them of their livelihoods). You don’t have to be a Stanford student to figure this out; the Bush administration came up with it two years ago, suggesting that during crisis situations, up to $300 million of the $1.3 billion food aid budget be available to buy food locally instead of shipping it there.

Yet, Congress has been all too willing to let Bush take the moral high ground, consistently killing his proposal for the past two years. The farm bill, which is up for Congressional reauthorization every five years, was passed by the House in late July. It made plenty of additions to existing agricultural subsidies but didn’t touch food aid.

Bush’s proposal was finally resurrected as a pilot program on Thursday, when the Senate Agricultural Committee approved its version of the farm bill. While the idea is the same, the scope is microscopic: Instead of $300 million, the committee approved $25 million per year for the new program. But even this policy, which would have affected less than 2 percent of the food aid budget, was immediately and forcefully denigrated by agribusiness and shipping interests. The farm bill, with the food aid reform proposal included, is up for debate in the Senate next week. With industry interests screaming at Washington (as usual) and the starving poor silent (as usual), one can only hope that policymakers keep their ears closed and listen to their consciences.

When President John F. Kennedy named the Food for Peace program in 1961, he said, “Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want.” That may be true, but it would be imprudent of us to forget that food is food. The purpose of food is to feed people, not America’s ego. Whether through exposure to Keynesian economics or negotiation cliches, we’ve fallen in love with the expanding pie theory: If you grow the pie, then everyone gets a larger piece of it. From closely observing the waistlines of many Americans, I have come to a conclusion. We don’t need more pie. We don’t need to win, or win-win-win-win. Indeed, maybe the right thing to do would be to lose: Lose our money, lose the support of domestic agribusiness and shippers, and buy food abroad from farmers who could really use the money for people who could really use the food. And maybe we could remember that losing once had a kinder, nobler name: Giving.

Sarah Johnson ‘09 is the Foreign Policy Fellow of the Roosevelt Institution at Stanford and is majoring in International Relations with a minor and honors in Ethics in Society.