Though they sound impeccably benign, food aid projects have come under increasing attack in their twenty-odd years of existence. Jackson's polemic (as he calls it) focuses primarily on field experience with the use of food in development projects and tells a sad story of waste, inefficiency, corruption, hypocrisy and failure. Cathie's broader study blames most of the trouble on producing nations and their surpluses. Whether the failures in food aid are as intrinsic as these authors think they are can be argued, but they make quite a case.
