Food Aid Data - What's on the Menu?

This afternoon I read a blog entry (http://sarahburnett.blogspot.com/2010/07/wanted-data-quality-standard-for-open.html) from a data quality expert in England that commented on the need for standards for accuracy and reliability in goverment-provided data. This blog reminded my of a presentation that I gave at the food aid conference in Kansas City in 2007 entitled "Apply (Free) Government Data to Your Advantage".

The jist of the presentation can be summed up in four points:

- Where is the data?
- What does it tell us?
- How can we use it?
- New challenges

This presentation came at the time of the implementation of the FBES (i.e. online ocean carrier bid system) and the "new challenges" related to some fundamental data reporting changes as USDA moved from a two-round to a one-round bid system.

Very little has changed with the USDA/USAID data in the past three years: some forwarders are publishing freight awards in Excel; the Trade Secrets clauses has made USDA and USAID very prickly about releasing any additional FOIA data than what they proactively publish.

However, I am again holding my breath to see what changes, if any, well accompany the pending WBSCM. We'll see.

News from the annual food aid conference

Earlier this week the annual food aid conference was held in Kansas City, MO. The conference is normally held in April so everyone was dealing with extreme heat when venturing out from the Westin for a morning run or an evening dinner.

One change that appears minor on the surface but is reflective of a larger trend was the insertion of "Development" into the official title of the conference: International Food Aid & Development Conference. This change was reflected in an ever increasing focus on the NGO overseas operations and discussions of public-private partnerships. Long gone are the days when there was open and boisterous debate on arcane applications of cargo preference rules, the merits of monetization of commodities, and instructions on freight and commodity bid mechanics.

There was talk of the Obama administration's Feed the Future (www.feedthefuture.gov) vision for the food aid programs. It sounded to me that essentially the strategy is to work on achievable improvements instead of research and difficult to execute strategies.

I am by nature a numbers guy and I was disappointed to hear very little talk about what to expect in the year(s) ahead. It sounds like the expectation is that volumes will be relatively constant (adjusting for commodity and freight cost fluctuations). The intention is to generally focus on 20 countries (4 in Latin America, 4 in Asia, and the balance in Africa).

USDA distributes statistics on volumes and spend for the previous fiscal year. This year I've compared fiscal year 08 to 09 and found the following:

• Food aid metric ton volumes dropped about 34,000 mt or 1% from 2.84 million MT in '08 to 2.81 million MT in '09.
• There was 70,000 metric tons more of packaged commodities in '08 than '09, raising from 34% of total tonnage to 37%.
• The average commodity cost per metric ton dropped from $463.15 to $340.32 - a 27% decrease.
• The average freight cost dropped from $198.23/mt to $161.44/mt - a 19% decrease.

To me, this is a neglected story of the conference: the recovery from the commodity price and fuel crisis that plagued the market a couple of years ago. The tax payers' money is stretching farther, achieving more. I suspect that this program will always be impacted by macroeconomic issues well outside of the control any of the conference participants. It is still important to work to make this program more efficient and effective but perhaps it is more critical to work proactively towards action plans and collaborative responses for when something on a global basis knocks the wind out of it. It has happened before and it will inevitably happen again.