I first learned about USAID in 2017 while I was working at a computer cafe in Ilorin, North Central Nigeria. Educators used to come in to photocopy teaching aids supplied by the agency — mostly materials to help students with reading comprehension. There were never as many packets as children who needed them: as of 2024, the region still has only a 55 percent literacy rate. I made a copy for my cousin.

After that, I began to notice the stars and shaking hands of the USAID logo everywhere, including on some paperwork at a farm where I worked before I went to university to study agriculture. Over the next few years, as I started volunteering with international food and environmental organizations like YOUNGO (the youth arm of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change), I thought a lot about the function of food aid, and USAID in particular. 

Donald Trump began shutting down USAID in January, and the results have been catastrophic. Experts predict surges in disease, malnutrition, and mortality in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions. In Nigeria, nutrition centers in hunger-stricken areas have already closed. But amid this chaos, it is too easy to valorize the work USAID was doing. There should still be room to critically examine American aid and development policy, which has long provided temporary fixes to systemic problems and, as a result, perpetuated recipients’ dependency on help from overseas. Under USAID, food assistance often operated on a tied aid model: aid regularly came with requirements that the food be bought from American suppliers, allowing the U.S. to invest in its own agricultural industry. Food For Peace Title II, a USAID-administered program that in 2020 made up a third of U.S. international food assistance, made a point of distributing exclusively U.S.-sourced commodities, “with limited exceptions.” American soy, corn, and grain producers are now pushing for a version of the program to continue under the Department of Agriculture so as not to lose a major buyer.

When USAID did buy food from outside the U.S., it was often from Western allies. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the U.N. and Turkey brokered a multilateral agreement that allowed grain being exported from Ukraine via the Black Sea to be exempted from attacks and port blockages. The deal protected grain that had been purchased from Ukraine by USAID as part of the U.S.’s efforts to inject money into an ally’s economy at a critical moment. When Russia pulled out of the deal just under a year after its signing, the U.S. claimed at the Security Council that harm was being done to people in Africa. (Never mind that about 65 percent of the grain was going to China, Spain, Turkey, Italy, and the Netherlands.)

This was hardly the only time that food aid has been a proxy in the power struggle between the United States and Russia. Between 2013 and 2019, USAID funded an advocacy program to promote genetically modified potatoes, grains, and cotton in Nigeria and other African countries, as well as smear campaigns against anti-GMO environmental activists. Because genetically modified crops have high yield potential and are resistant to some diseases and weather events, they were touted as a way to bolster African agricultural sectors. Russia, in turn, tried to undermine U.S. influence with its own information campaign, arguing that these crops are instruments of Western institutions and have dangerous health implications. These campaigns have successfully blurred the line between expert opinion and conspiratorial thinking, and it remains difficult to separate health alarmism from science-based concerns. But it is clear that GMOs do conscript farmers as permanent consumers of American and European products. Treaties like the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties protect corporations’ exclusive rights over the genetic makeup of GMOs, which means that farmers must buy new seeds at the beginning of each planting cycle. If they save, reuse, exchange, or sell the seeds in their own countries, farmers can be sued — and have been, at devastating cost. Ultimately, GMOs boost sales for corporations in the U.S. and Europe and erode food sovereignty in Africa, all under the guise of aid.

If the United States had truly been interested in investing in African food security, USAID could have bought grain from countries like South Africa and Tanzania, which are net exporters of maize. Better yet, USAID could have purchased indigenous crops, like tubers and African rice, thereby encouraging farmers to plant more. Instead, by helping prop up an import-reliant food system, USAID consistently bypassed and undermined traditional, sustainable, local food production. As a result, communities became more, not less, vulnerable to everything from climate events to internal conflict, supply chain crises, wars, and inflation.

The state of African farming today was not a historical inevitability — it is itself a result of the regimes that predated the modern era of foreign aid. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial powers forced indigenous people from their land and actively displaced local food plants in favor of crops for export; folk history across different African cultures holds that colonists would burn preexisting farmland. Today, African hunger, though spoken of as an inexplicable tragedy, is still a tool for Western enrichment. USAID promised to feed the starving but instead fed the prevailing system of starvation. Its legacy is a continent rich in agricultural potential yet still perpetually underfed.