I’m sure everyone already knows about the Porkbusters campaign being coordinated by NZ Bear? The aim is to shame Congresscritters into giving up some of the more stupid spending in order to deal with the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and now Rita as well.

As I’m a furriner I don’t actually have a Congresscritter to berate and I also, obviously, don’t have a district or state in which I can identify pork which should be given up.

But looking at it from an international perspective there is still something I can offer. Indeed, this might be something of a shock horror moment for it is spending that the Bush Administration wishes themselves to cut (or rather, make more efficient) and it is the various lobbyists and Congress itself which is preventing it.

Have a look at this in the NY Times:

A Bush administration proposal that sought to deliver a portion of
American food aid more quickly and at lower cost to starving people
around the world appears headed for defeat in Congress, though there is
still a narrow chance a scaled-down version will survive in the Senate.

The
administration asked for authority to use a quarter of the $1.2 billion
food aid budget provided to the Agency for International Development to
buy corn, wheat and other commodities in the developing countries
facing hunger crises, or in neighboring countries, rather than from
American producers.

Now, the government must buy the food in American markets and send most of it on American-flagged ships.

Officials
at the Agency for International Development said that having the
flexibility to buy the food for an African crisis in Africa would make
it possible to respond in some cases in weeks instead of months, feed
more people with the same amount of money and potentially save
thousands of lives.

Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the
agency, said the government would be able to buy twice as much food for
the same money in some situations because of the savings on
transportation. "You can’t eat transportation," he said.

But the
change was dropped from the Senate’s version of the agriculture
appropriations bill expected to be voted on this week, though there is
a chance part of the proposal will be restored. The provision was not
in the House version, passed in June.

The measure ran into fierce opposition from an array of agricultural and shipping interests with stakes in the program.

We know very well that shipping food is often not the correct response to a famine. We also know that US shipping is very much more expensive than that of other nations. And we can also work out that shipping US food from the US to Niger is more expensive than shipping, say, Chadian food to Niger.

Let’s call this what it is, pork, pork on an international scale, and pork which kills people by making an incorrect response to famine even more expensive than it should be.

Great for a few large agricultural companies (Cargill and Archers Midland Daniels come to mind) and for the US shipping companies, bad for the US taxpayer and the starving people they, quite rightly, wish to help.

Another reason to call your Congresscritter then…and while you’re about it, get them to kill the Jones Act as well. They’ll know what you’re talking about.