GGR345H5 Chapter Notes -Food For Peace, Peasant Foods, Alfred Von Wurzbach
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1. discounted prices: famine relief, food bartered for strategic raw materials. In the postwar era, the us set up a food-aid program to channel food surpluses to third world. Farmers specialized in one or two commodities and with technological support from the public purse, routinely overproduced. The resulting surpluses subsidized the third-world wage bills with cheap food. It was a substantial transfer of agricultural resources to the third world urban industrial sectors. Under the aid program, wheat imports supplied the burgeoning third world urban populations. Cheap food thus supported consumer purchasing power and subsidized the cost of labor, stabilizing urban politics and improving the third world environment of industrial investments. Usually it was cheaper and easier for govts import wheat to feed their growing urban populations than to bankroll long-term improvements in local foods. Food aid allowed govts to purchase food without depleting scarce foreign currency but it built food dependency .
