April 2, 2014 By The Blog

Foreign Aid at Work: US MRE meals given to Ukraine being sold illegally online

A new report shows that on the same day the U.S. Congress agreed on guaranteeing the Ukrainian government a $1 billion loan, U.S.-provided emergency meals began to appear online for sale.
The meals — called Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs — were provided by the federal government to help Ukrainian soldiers last month. Twenty-five thousand cases were sent total which is approximately 300,00 meals.
Ukrainian military supplies salesman Vlademir Belonog last week posted U.S. MREs for sale on an online auction site according to a report by TIME Magazine.
When confronted about the prohibitive language which appear on the food packets themselves — each packet reads “U.S. Government Property, commercial resale is unlawful” — Belonog said “What can I tell you? These things are easy to get, and they’re for sale all over the place.” He claimed the MREs he was selling were not the ones recently provided by the U.S. Government.
However, consider the following from TIME‘s Simon Shuster:
As Ukrainian and Russian media have been quick to point out, several Ukrainian websites started hawking American MREs by the caseload — and on the cheap — just as the U.S. government began delivering them to Ukraine as part of a nonlethal-military-aid package. It has been impossible to confirm whether this aid was simply taken out the backdoor of Ukrainian army warehouses and sold. Alexei Mazepa, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, denies that this was going on. “The meals are safe and sound at our warehouses in Kiev,” he says. “They have not even been distributed to the bases yet.” But the coincidence of the online MRE bonanza has raised an urgent question for Ukraine’s new leaders: Can they guarantee that U.S. and European assistance will not simply be pilfered?
Whether or not the recent MRE sales were from the federal government’s latest shipment or from a previous shipment is somewhat besides the point. The problem is this: taxpayer-funded aid supplied for the world’s “emergencies” is being sold for profit; it’s not being used.
And this shouldn’t be a surprise seeing that so many recipient governments are notoriously corrupt. This is certainly true in this case. Professor Jonathan Turley notes that, according to a 2012 Transparency International Corruption Index, Ukraine ranked 144 out of 176 countries. The same government was also placed among the three most corrupt nations by Ernst & Young the same year.
The U.S. Congress needs to seriously re-evaluate appropriations for all aid — humanitarian, lethal, and non-lethal — if not end the foolish program altogether. There needs to be more investigations and reporting over the government agencies that provide foreign assistance. It’s not the job of the federal government to provide welfare for the world.

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Tagged as: Foreign Aid, foreign assistance, MRE, Ukraine, usaid

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