On the other side, some agribusinesses and the shipping lobby wish to keep food aid the way it is, arguing that eliminating the grow-pack-ship steps in the U.S. would cost thousands of jobs in the shipping and farming sectors, not to mention millions and sales and household earnings each year.

This has led to an awkward trade-off: Do we preserve more jobs at home, or do we feed more hungry people abroad?

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Here's a look at how the numbers stack up. A 2010 report by the research company Promar International found that the combination of handling, processing, and transporting commodities from farms to U.S. ports, plus the cost of transporting those products to foreign ports, adds up to $1,984,000,000 in output, $523,000,000 in earnings for households, and 13,127 jobs.

Texas would be the most heavily impacted state if we restructured food aid, followed by breadbasket states like Illinois and Iowa and rice growers like Louisiana:

When combined with growers and shippers, Promar estimates that's somewhere between 16,000 and 33,000 jobs we'd lose if food aid was no longer mandated to be grown in the U.S. and sent abroad.

The economic impact could be dramatic for states with large farming sectors, according to 21 senators who wrote a letter to President Obama arguing against a change to the current aid program in February. It was signed by heavy hitters on both sides of the aisle, including Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that controls agriculture spending.

"American agriculture is one of the few U.S. business sectors to produce a trade surplus, exporting $108 billion in farm goods in 2010," the senators wrote. "During this time of economic distress, we should maintain support for the areas of our economy that are growing."

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Meanwhile, charity groups rallying for a change say that the current setup is outdated. In the 1950s, the federal government wanted to boost struggling farmers' profits, so they bought up surplus grain and -- realizing they then had way too much of it on their hands -- decided to ship it overseas to needy countries. And even though the government changed its farm policy in the early 2000s, we're still managing foreign aid the way we did 60 years ago.

The downside? Buying food in developing countries to then give back to vulnerable groups -- displaced people, refugees, malnourished children -- would be much, much cheaper than buying it in the U.S., so aid dollars could theoretically be stretched further. Cereal prices alone are 53 percent lower when bought locally (LRP), versus in the U.S. (transoceanic), according to a paper by three Cornell University researchers:

What's more, buying food locally shaves 14 weeks off the delivery time, which can be crucial during a famine.