The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday that CARE is taking a big step on the contentious issue of food aid, "walking away from about $45 million a year in federal funding, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help."

CARE had been, until this announcement, the biggest beneficiary of the practice of "monetization," in which "the U.S. government buys the goods from American agribusiness, ships them overseas on mostly American-flagged carriers and then donates the goods to the aid groups. The groups sell the products in poor countries and use the money to fund their anti-poverty programs there."

Many aid groups participate in monetization, which, its defenders argue, helps a lot of poor people by increasing the funds that charities have to work with -- despite being inefficient and suppressing local agriculture by flooding the market with U.S. products sold well below cost. Monetization's defenders "say they will not stop converting American food into money unless Congress replaces the lost revenues with cash."

I think CARE made the right decision. A bedrock principle of good development is to "do no harm." If an organization must finance the good it does by first doing harm, perhaps it ought to take a hard look at its priorities. Even if aid organizations can do a lot of good with the income they receive from monetization, there is still a pernicious side-effect: the process prioritizes their own goals, forcing the poor to depend on their programs rather than enhancing the ability of the poor to be self-sufficient. Plus, it plays right into the farm lobby's hands:

Peter Matlon, an agricultural economist based in Nairobi and a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, said converting American commodities into cash for development was a case of "the tail wagging the dog," with domestic farm policies in the United States shaping hunger-fighting methods abroad.

Bravo, CARE.