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Trivially, GiveWell doesn't and as far as I know hasn't really supported direct food aid: not only is it already a crowded field, while there's some possible benefits, there's also a lot of concern about crowding out local agriculture or having the constant-need requirements you bring up.
Reproduction as a whole was (and remains) a concern, but it's not an unknown one, and there are some counterintuitive reasons to suspect that decreasing mortality and especially early mortality causes reductions in reproduction rate -- and while it'd be easy to dismiss them as just-so stories, they've shown up in surprising places (eg, studies on deworming).
((Uh, modulo the difficult question about how much you trust studies at all.))
GiveWell has also separately been investigating 'family planning' organizations, though they've not promoted them too heavily (or been very happy with the effectiveness of any).
There's a stronger argument that the programs GiveWell does focus on, like malaria, worm infection, and vitamin deficiency, result in greater net population growth without solving the underlying problems, but for most of these efforts the actual pills or vitamins aren't the crux of the costs anyway.
Yes, GiveWell doesn't send rice but the malaria medicine and vitamins do the same thing.
This is where EA gets really grotesque and why I said it was an abomination. So we're giving supplies to Africans and notice that the effect is more Africans who need more supplies. The solution? Let's just get them to have less kids! Does it not seem crazy to you to that EA basically declares itself the captain of these Africans? Why do they even need malaria medicine? It's always been there. Maybe their mortality rate is a bit too high for Western sensibilities, but what do they think? And if they're unable to influence their mortality rate on their own, maybe that's the way it should be?
Heck, I would quantify a marginal African life as negative and even I'm creeped out by this "we know best, we will do it for you" attitude.
The people who are "unable to influence their mortality rate on their own," in the AMF's model, are children under five years old. So yes. I would say they are unable to influence their mortality rate on their own, and I don't think "that's the way it should be" is a particularly likely conclusion for them any more than it is for any other four year old on the planet. If you think that's a likely conclusion, then I suppose we have completely incompatible moral principles.
An analogy: if aliens showed up and started handing out some crazy technology we can't replicate that cured any disease for 5 year olds and younger, do you think that would be good or bad? I think bad.
I think good, as the children would then live, and children dying is bad. It is a pretty foundational moral intuition on my part that children dying is bad and things that exclusively cause children to not die are good, and I'm pretty sure it's extremely widespread, to the point I would very seriously have to rethink my model of the general population if normies disagreed.
If this were to happen, we would no longer be sovereign. These aliens are basically superior, so instead of building our own capacity from the ground up, one can skip all that by currying favour with said aliens. Our rulers are now also subservient to the aliens, lest they do something the aliens don't like and we lose access to this special alien technology that we never had in the first place.
Change out aliens for a rival power, like the Chinese. Suppose for COVID they came up with a vaccine that actually works and gave it to us for free, but we did not have the ability to manufacture it. Say Biden or whoever decided that we would accept this gift. The Chinese now own us. Nobody who will turn down these vaccines can get elected, and it goes without saying that not pissing off China would be a requirement for shipments to continue.
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It's not terribly clear it does, in the same degree or extent; the demographic collapse when countries have child mortality drop isn't perfectly reliable, but neither is it some unlikely possibility.
If I thought any GiveWell cause was going to strap Africans to the table and chop their balls off, perhaps. When they're basically looking at providing condoms and LARCs, I'm a little less concerned about whether it would be Better if sub-Saharan African instead 'should' be reinventing premarin or making its own rubber.
... having actually spoken with a number of people there, they're not especially predisposed to a lack of running water, to blindness, or to malaria. (Or a wide variety of other issues: a local guide complained at length that he was sick of having to get treated for dysentery, so don't trust that particular bottled water company).
And if the moon were made of cheese, they'd never be hungry.
There may well be some situation where merely providing optional resources overwhelms internal agency -- indeed, my willingness to put the threshold for direct food aid points to a pretty low bar! -- but I don't think any GiveWell programs here have gotten anywhere close.
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