Mark Brennan, Jarrod Goentzel, Prithvi Sundar, MIT Comprehensive Initiative for Technology Evaluation (CITE)
Partner: USAID
Food for Peace began in 1954, and is implemented by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Each year, nearly $2.2 billion is spent on food aid programs around the globe. USAID Food for Peace activities, also known as Title II food aid, accounts for about 80% of that annual budget on average. This study evaluated the cost effectiveness of transportation and storage of food aid commodities.
With a estimated procurement of $600,000, MIT, USAID, and USDA tested a range of packaging options with different commodities, ports, and warehouses. The evaluation included detailed cost analysis based on domestic and foreign field resesarch and quality analysis based on deployment of packaged commodities in prepositioning warehouses for several months. Two major contributions of this evaluation are understanding how packaging interacts with handling and fumigation processes in the current food assistance supply chain, and conceptualizing how packaging can be used as a lever of supply chain design to expand the range of commodities shipped and vulnerable populations reached.
For more information, please refer to the MIT CITE page and the MIT News article.