Under Title II of the Food for Peace Act, the United States provides agricultural commodities to address famine and food crises in foreign countries. Between fiscal years 2007 and 2012, the United States spent about $9.2 billion to provide emergency food aid to 57 countries through its cooperating sponsors, such as the World Food Program, Catholic Relief Services, and Save the Children Federation. The United States annually spent between $1.1 billion and $2.0 billion to purchase and deliver about 1 to 2 million metric tons of emergency food aid to recipients in foreign countries. U. S. agencies spend the largest percentage of food aid funds to procure and transport commodities within the United States, and second largest on the transport, storage, and handling of commodities in recipient countries. Figure 1 illustrates this distribution of spending for fiscal year 2012. USAID and cooperating sponsors spent the third largest percentage of funds on ocean freight contracts to transport commodities across the ocean. USAID directed the remaining funds to cooperating sponsors to develop and manage programs and deliver commodities from discharge ports to landlocked recipient countries. Of the emergency food aid funds directed to cooperating sponsors, the World Food Program administered over 80 percent, while other cooperating sponsors administered the rest. USAID and cooperating sponsors contracted with seven ocean freight forwarders to act on behalf of USAID and its cooperating sponsors to manage ocean transportation logistics throughout the shipping process. USDA and USAID jointly manage Food for Peace emergency food aid procurement. USDA procures commodities for the program and USAID or its cooperating sponsors procure ocean transportation for the commodities. The agencies use a three-phase procurement process: (1) acquisition planning (reviewing and responding to food requests), (2) contract formation (procuring commodities and transportation), and (3) contract administration (delivering commodities and overseeing the process). See figure 2 for an overview of the process to procure packaged and bulk commodities and ocean freight. USAID’s standard procurement process for emergency food aid is to procure and ship commodities in response to a request from cooperating sponsors for a specific food emergency. However, USAID may also preposition commodities in domestic and overseas warehouses located near regions of the world with historically high emergency food aid needs. Using this approach, USAID requests commodities from USDA and ships them to a warehouse before a need for the commodities is identified. For the commodities shipped to warehouses, ocean freight vendors submit invoices directly to USAID for payment, and USDA retains ownership of the commodities until cooperating sponsors pick up the commodities from the warehouses, according to USDA. As a result, commodities in these warehouses remain on USDA’s accounting ledger as inventory assets until cooperating sponsors make requests and take possession of the commodities for their programs. Since USAID contracts for the management of its domestic and overseas warehouses, USDA requires USAID to provide it with information on the type, amount, and value of commodities in each warehouse’s inventory. In addition, USAID can divert commodities originally destined for a prepositioned warehouse to respond to a cooperating sponsor’s emergency food aid request. When diversion occurs, instead of delivering commodities to a prepositioned warehouse as planned, ocean freight vendors deliver to an alternate port that is specified on the ocean freight contract or to a cooperating sponsor at the same foreign port as the warehouse. As a result, the ship, foreign port, ocean bill of lading, and cost of ocean freight can change from what was originally agreed to under the initial ocean freight contract. The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, which procures commodities for USDA’s domestic food aid programs, funded most of WBSCM’s design and currently manages the system. WBSCM replaced USDA’s ordering, procurement, and inventory systems, some of which USDA considered costly and outdated. These systems did not electronically manage the entire food aid procurement process, provide accurate inventory accounting, or track commodity shipments in real time. USDA also could not use the systems to electronically process invoices and payments. USDA expected WBSCM to integrate supply chain activities of up to 40,000 users, process requests for 4.5 million metric tons of domestic and international food aid each year, manage electronic contracting for commodities and freight, track inventory, pay vendors, and process claims. USDA intended that all stakeholders including those participating in international food assistance would use WBSCM as a supply chain management system. To do so, WBSCM uses data entered during earlier steps of the process to complete some of the later steps. Therefore, information needs to be entered in a sequential order for the later functions of the system to work correctly. USDA developed the business case for WBSCM in 2003 and awarded the contract for developing the software in October 2006. To identify the international food aid procurement functions, USDA established an interagency project team that included representatives from USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) and Foreign Agriculture Service and USAID’s Food for Peace and Transportation Offices. The interagency team started to develop the system’s technical requirements for the food aid programs in 2007. Agencies began the initial testing phase of WBSCM in November 2009, and USDA began a phased rollout of WBSCM in June 2010, focusing primarily on domestic food aid procurement. USDA and USAID disagree about the usefulness of WBSCM to manage the entire emergency food aid procurement process. Although USDA created WBSCM with input from USAID, the system had deficiencies when it was implemented in April 2011. Since August 2011, USAID has not been using WBSCM as intended to procure ocean freight for bulk commodities, manage commodity inventory in preposition warehouses, or track food aid shipments. USAID manages its part of the procurement process using other systems not connected to WBSCM. USDA officials assert that, since March 2012, the agency has made significant improvements to WBSCM that would address many of the problems that led to USAID’s discontinued use of the system’s functions to procure bulk commodity ocean freight, manage commodity inventory, and track food aid shipments. WBSCM had deficiencies when it was implemented in April 2011, so USAID gradually discontinued using it to procure ocean freight for bulk commodities, manage commodities for prepositioned warehouses, and track food aid shipments between August 2011 and June 2012. When USDA, USAID, and several international stakeholders, such as USAID’s cooperating sponsors and freight forwarders, started to use WBSCM, they immediately encountered significant problems. The USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service reported in an April 2011 memo that WBSCM might not be ready to handle complex international food aid procurements involving multiple delivery points and commodities. In June 2011, USAID informed USDA in a letter that its stakeholders found WBSCM time consuming to use. In addition, USAID stated that the system’s process to procure international bulk ocean freight was not compatible with USAID’s process and recommended that neither agency use WBSCM to procure bulk ocean freight. For example, USAID informed USDA that WBSCM could not account for key information—such as current market conditions, available funding, alternate foreign ports, and available ships with sufficient cargo space—that USAID needed to negotiate with vendors when procuring ocean freight for bulk commodities. In addition, USAID and its stakeholders experienced substantial performance problems and indicated that the system was cumbersome and not user friendly. In a July 2011 memo, USDA acknowledged deficiencies in WBSCM and stated it was working to fix problems. For example, the USDA memo acknowledged USAID’s difficulties in using WBSCM to procure bulk freight. Moreover, freight forwarders that manage ocean freight logistics for the cooperating sponsors identified concerns they had about the additional workload WBSCM required of them. For example, they noted in June 2011 that WBSCM required them to enter data historically completed by stevedores (contractors who load or unload commodities) at U.S. load ports, which increased the freight forwarders’ workload and created confusion about what commodity was being delivered, loaded, and unloaded at U.S. load ports. Furthermore, WBSCM’s initial inability to track food aid shipments, such as recording when a shipment had been diverted before the commodities arrived in a foreign location, posed a problem for freight forwarders. As a result, the freight forwarders experienced unnecessary delays in coordinating information with ocean freight vendors and providing these vendors with required instructions for shipping and unloading cargoes. As a result of difficulties in using WBSCM, USAID discontinued using it for certain functions. In August 2011, USAID issued a memo to cooperating sponsors, freight forwarders, ocean transportation providers and their brokers stating that, effective immediately, all bid offers for bulk ocean freight transportation shipped under the Title II program did not need to be submitted through WBSCM. USAID also decided it would not use WBSCM to manage its prepositioned commodity inventories. At that time, a USAID official informed USDA that USAID had a number of issues with WBSCM that needed to be addressed for it to effectively manage prepositioned commodity inventories using the system. The official further stated that until these issues were fixed, USAID would continue to work outside WBSCM to manage these inventories. In response to concerns expressed about WBSCM, USDA and USAID announced the formation of an interagency team in November 2011 to address international stakeholders’ concerns with WBSCM. At that time, the WBSCM program manager acknowledged that USDA had been unable to implement timely solutions for the problems that the international stakeholders had faced and that WBSCM had been designed with insufficient input from the international stakeholders. During November and December 2011, the agencies held meetings to identify needs and priorities, created an action list, and assigned individual USDA and USAID officials to specific tasks on the list. Despite these efforts, USAID and international stakeholders continued to have concerns about using WBSCM.