Here are just a few ways that it can get complicated:
When the organisation allows male heads of households to instruct their wives, often with children on their backs, to unload the lorries while they sit in the shade and watch. Carrying a child on their back and 20kgs of maize or 24 litres of oil on their heads.
When it’s so badly organised that despite turning up at midday and unloading the lorries themselves, the beneficiaries are sent away at 5pm empty handed because the distribution is running so late the organisation doesn’t think they can complete the distribution before dark.
When you leave the tons of unloaded food on a playing field overnight and it rains.
When the organisations use food ‘aid’ from the United States rather than African sources, an arrangement which sustains the economically unviable production of oil and maize by heavily subsidised American farmers and floods the naturally competitive African markets, depressing local prices and undermining livelihoods.
When the food aid actually encourages people to remain in the camps rather than leave, or encourages them to split their families leaving their children behind, unsupervised, to ensure the family don’t loose their entitlement.
When the distribution of food in schools, used to incentivise school attendance, target children and raise performance levels, actually takes up so much of the school day children end up under-performing because they can’t get through the curriculum in time.
When men steal the food distributed to their household, in order to trade it in for alcohol.
At least there wasn’t a stampede I supposed, although reassuringly the distribution supervisors did tell that they have training in crowd control and have ‘big sticks to beat people with’ if things get heated.
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