through wages). There has been some debate on the targeting performance and especially the impact of food aid in East and Southern Africa<sup>4</sup> . In the case of food aid and school feeding programs, we provide summary results from studies looking at who benefits from these programs in two countries. Unfortunately while data on food consumption are available in household surveys for most African countries, and while many countries have food distribution programs (albeit of small scale in many instances), very few household survey questionnaires include questions on who benefits from existing food distribution programs. In West and Central Africa, two exceptions are Burundi and Liberia. The analysis of the surveys for these two countries suggests that while in principle, food aid should be well targeted, in practice it is often difficult to achieve good targeting, especially in post-conflict countries with weak governance. In the case of public works, the results provided are based on simulations rather than existing programs.

Consider Burundi, a country that is suffering from a high level of food insecurity. Zoyem et al. (2008) show that in 2006 more than half of the population had a caloric intake of less than 1,900 kcal per day per equivalent adult, insufficient to meet basic nutritional needs. In the northern region of the country, almost half of the population had a daily caloric intake below 1,400 kcal. In 2005, the WFP distributed food to 1.8 million people. The donations represented 3.4 % of the food consumption value of households. The question is whether such food aid distributions are well targeted to the poor. The analysis of Diang’a et al. (2008) suggests that there are actually few differences in the likelihood of receiving food aid between various groups of households. The share of total food distribution obtained by the poor was actually slightly lower than the share of the poor in the total population. However, the WFP targeting performance was similar to that of health services, falling between the performances of primary and secondary education, and was much better targeted than subsidies for basic infrastructure services such as water and electricity or subsidies for tertiary education. Still, one key reason for the limited targeting performance of the WFP seems to have been that in 2006 the program did not specifically target areas in the North where food insecurity was most severe – which it now does.

Food security also remains a major issue in Liberia. Malnutrition affects a third of the children, and the recent increase in food prices is expected to have a significant impact on the population. Analysis from a 2007 survey shows that almost a fourth of the population (22%) received some form of food aid. School feeding (meals or take home food) was the most common (74% of recipients of food aid), followed

> 4 As noted by Tsimpo and Wodon (2008), Little (2008) suggests that food aid in Ethiopia is limited and poorly timed, so that it does not lead to aid dependency among farmers who benefit from the aid.  By contrast Gelan (2006, 2007) reaches a different conclusion using a CGE model for Ethiopia (on the debate between cash and kind, see also Abdulai et al., 2005).  Different types of emergency food aid have been found to have different targeting performance as well as different impacts on poverty and household income growth by Gilligan and Hoddinott (2007), still using Ethiopian data.  Del Ninno et al. (2007) review the experience with food aid in two South Asian countries (India and Bangladesh) and two East African countries (Ethiopia and Zambia).  Their results suggest that while food aid can be beneficial under certain conditions, it is not in many cases the most efficient tool for addressing food insecurity (for other reviews of the literature on food aid, including in Africa, see Kirwan and McMillan, 2007 and Barrett and Maxwell, 2005).