Honored Malibu Man Finds His Mission Frustrating : The Miracle Bean Crusade: Can It End World Hunger?

When Jean-Pierre Hallet won the prestigious 1987 Presidential End Hunger Award, he felt certain that people would finally recognize the promise of his miracle bean.

For years, the African adventurer and art dealer had been a harsh critic of the high-profile charity appeals, government programs and rock concerts commonly used to collect food for starving people around the world. To Hallet, these were self-defeating handouts that only guaranteed greater hunger for impoverished natives who really needed to be made self-sufficient.

Then, last year, this inveterate gadfly traveled from his Malibu home to Washington to receive a framed certificate, signed by the President, that honored his solution--the winged bean, a little-known crop he had successfully introduced to Pygmies in Africa. At last, Hallet thought, he would be able to spread the nutritious plant to the hungry world.

Instead, the recognition has meant only increased frustration for the bearded 6-foot, 5-inch Hallet, whose striking appearance has been likened to Robinson Crusoe.

No One Interested

“I show a key to ending hunger, and the award leaves no doubt it is efficient and successful,” Hallet said with characteristic intensity. “But no one seems to be interested to pick it up and open the door.”

For the last three decades, Hallet, 61, has made it his mission to save the endangered Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in Zaire, one of the last pure-blooded groups of Pygmies. He has taught them basic farming methods and provided them with seeds, supplies and medicine, leading to a reversal of a century-long population decline.

But the Belgian-born Hallet, who was trained as an agronomist and sociologist, said the greatest strides occurred when he read a report about the winged bean in 1979 and brought it to the Pygmies from Thailand two years later.

The soybean-like tropical legume has been cultivated for centuries in parts of Asia and New Guinea. The plant, which is named for the wing-like flanges on its pod, is fast-growing and drought-resistant.

The U.S. Academy of Sciences has called it “a supermarket on a stalk” because its leaves are like Vitamin A-enriched spinach, the shoots like asparagus, the flower like a mushroom, the young pods like a snow pea and the tubers like a potato. The protein-rich brown seeds, meanwhile, can be roasted like peanuts, processed into milk or ground into flour.

Others have also touted the plant’s potential. In Sri Lanka, President Junius R. Jayewardene has instituted a national campaign to put a winged bean plant in every back yard, said Noel Vietmeyer, an associate at the National Academy of Sciences.

But few match the fervor of the Hallet, who has never been shy about promoting his causes, whether in his three books about his African adventures or his newsletter about the Pygmies.

His winged-bean experience began with a mere 3 1/2 ounces of

seed that he persuaded the Pygmies to plant, cultivate and incorporate into their diet in 1981. The following year he brought 330 pounds. Today the Pygmies have 500 tons of what Hallet calls the “seeds of hope.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development credited Hallet and the winged bean with reversing a trend that saw the number of Efe Pygmies drop from 200,000 a century ago to 33,000 in 1942 and 3,800 in 1974. Today there are at least 5,000 survivors of a people whose ancestors date back many centuries.

In announcing the End Hunger Award, the USAID said Hallet had undertaken a “monumental challenge” by introducing a new subsistence crop into “an ancient culture, in which tastes have been ‘set’ for ages.”

Population Increase

“More remarkable, however, is the fact that within only a few years the population of the Efe had begun to increase for the first time in 100 years. Through years of incredible adversity, Mr. Hallet has demonstrated the highest level of dedication, a clear grasp of the nature of long-term, sustainable development and the deepest human understanding of the dignity and the worth of his fellow human beings.”

Hallet was one of 11 to win the End Hunger Award last year. Past winners include such multimillion-dollar organizations as the Peace Corps and Save the Children.

Hallet, in contrast, is the founder of the 14-year-old Pygmy Fund, a nonprofit organization with a $100,000 annual budget raised through contributions and proceeds from an African art store he and his family run in Westwood. The Pygmy Fund’s headquarters is a cluttered, converted bedroom in Hallet’s modest Malibu condominium. He and his wife are its volunteer staff.

When he accepted the award at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, an exhilarated Hallet told an audience of 300, including relief specialists and members of Congress, that he had “eight tons of surplus seeds available for the hungry world just waiting in storage.”

He was warmly applauded as he repeatedly held aloft a bag of winged beans.

Offered Seeds

Having been embraced by the Establishment, he said, he then contacted relief agencies to offer the seeds and his expertise.

The response: not a single inquiry.

“Everyone understands feeding the hungry,” Hallet said in his still heavy Belgian accent. “It’s very simple and very visual. But very few people understand that people have to feed themselves and be self-sufficient. To give is easy; to teach is hard.”

The easy approach, he maintained, can be seen in periodic well-publicized handouts from the West that assuage affluent contributors’ guilt while destroying recipients’ incentive to produce and wiping out indigenous farmers who can’t compete with free food. Hallet insisted that this approach, however well-meaning, assures future dependence and starvation.

Several national agricultural specialists agree privately with Hallet that relief organizations such as CARE and Save the Children don’t always serve long-term needs. But spokesmen for both groups said Hallet and the other critics are wrong.

On the Same Team

“If his concern is long-term, sustained development, we are exactly on the same team,” said Tom Drahman, CARE’s regional manager for Asia. “There is no panacea for development or poverty. Everything has to be socially and culturally appropriate and reasonable.”

He noted that CARE, which has a $400-million 1988 budget spread over 40 countries, is testing the winged bean in Sri Lanka to see whether it can be grown and marketed efficiently.

The winged bean has been introduced into 70 new countries on a limited scale in the last 13 years, said Vietmeyer, who in 1975 wrote a booklet for the National Academy of Sciences touting the plant’s promise.

But “it hasn’t had the big impact that is inherent in it,” he added. “It still has the potential for that. There is no hidden flaw. It is a very good-tasting, attractive, adaptable and nutritious crop.”

The bean has suffered, in part, from the stigma of being considered a “poor man’s crop,” Vietmeyer said. More importantly, unlike soybeans, the vine-like winged bean must be grown on stakes or trellises, making it costly to mass produce because it must be harvested by hand.

Louis Lazaroff, director general of the International Council for the Development of Under-Utilized Plants, said the research organization is trying to develop a winged bean seed that does not have to be grown on a stake.

“No new crop of this kind can ever move forward until the farmer feels he can make money for it,” Lazaroff said. “That means he can provide it at low cost and find a market for it.”

Loren Schulze, an agricultural official with USAID, which has conducted tests on the winged bean for a decade, agreed. He said the toughest hurdle is “the taste of the people, whether there is interest in learning about it and producing it.”

Hallet impatiently called these typical bureaucratic excuses for inaction, arguing that even back yard cultivation can avert starvation.

“I proved that with a little persuasion and a little determination those problems can be overcome easily,” he said. “If every time something is a little difficult, you give up, then nothing is accomplished.”

But part of the problem may be Hallet himself, said Merle H. Jensen, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Arizona who has worked in 50 countries. He calls Hallet “the most incredible man I have ever met,” but said Hallet “is so overwhelming people don’t want to believe his story.”

Small wonder. Hallet’s autobiography, a best-seller in the mid-1960s, resembles a Hollywood screenplay with its anthropological adventures, wild animal attacks, poison arrows and a real-life Gulliver rescuing the Lilliputians.

The son of noted Belgian painter Andre Hallet, who was drawn to the forests of what was then the Belgian Congo, he spent most of his first seven years with the Efe Pygmies, who average less than 4 1/2 feet in height, as neighbors.

The negative stereotype of the Pygmy as “a little savage hiding behind bushes shooting poison darts”--as depicted, for instance, in the 1984 film “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes”--is utterly false, Hallet maintained.

“They live in harmony with their environment and each other,” he said. “They don’t lie, cheat, steal or kill. Unlike other tribes, there is no crime in a Pygmy village because there is no material greed. I call them ‘little giants’ and if the rest of the world lived like the Pygmy we’d be in much better shape.”

He returned to Africa in 1948 as a 21-year-old agronomist for the Belgian government’s Ministry of Colonies. His writings chronicle his adventures during the next 12 years: how he lost his right hand dynamiting a lake to provide tons of fish for the starving part-Pygmy Mosso tribe of Burundi, overpowered a leopard that had attacked one of his porters in the bush and killed a lion with a crude spear as a Masai warrior initiation rite.

Hallet said he still suffers monthly malaria bouts from a near-fatal attack of an incurable strain of the disease in 1982 and circulation problems in his leg from a 1957 incident in which he was wounded by two poisoned arrows fired by a Pygmy tribe that had never seen a white man and believed he was a hairy, child-eating monster.

Even he acknowledged that some people do not believe his stories. Rumors have circulated, for instance, that his hand was actually devoured by crocodiles.

But Hallet has also won many accolades. One magazine called him “the Abe Lincoln of the Congo” for his role in obtaining a 1957 “Declaration of Emancipation” for his adoptive people from the Nande chieftains of Beni, who had held the Pygmies in feudal serfdom for centuries.

Ready to settle down, at least a little, Hallet moved to Los Angeles in 1960, earning his living writing, leading safaris and selling African art. In 1963, he sold a 4,000 piece collection to UCLA, including some ivory carvings from Zaire.

Hallet’s annual trips to Africa as a tour guide allowed him to visit the Pygmies regularly. Robert Coshland, a retired executive from Tucson, Ariz., recalled that when he joined one of the trips in 1971 they visited numerous tribes in four countries and Hallet “spoke with all of them in their language. He was treated as though he was a member of their tribe.”

Hallet said he speaks 17 African dialects.

Donald Heyneman, associate dean of the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, visited the Pygmies deep in the Ituri Forest with Hallet in 1982. He recalled that Hallet’s arrival sparked a celebration.

“A bunch of the kids would run to him and he’d pick them up with his hand and throw them in the air,” Heyneman said. “He is a great hero and somewhat of a white savior to them because he has always brought in medicines and helped them. And they obviously covet his warmth and friendship.”

But Hallet said he stopped doing the safaris several years ago because insensitive tourists undermined the Pygmies’ dignity, paying them to remove their loin clothes for photographs or throwing peanuts on the ground so they would pick them up like animals at a zoo. He also worried about introduction of harmful Western products such as chewing gum and cigarettes.

The century-long decline of the Pygmy population had been caused by the depletion of their ancestral forest and other 20th-Century encroachments, including the introduction of new diseases. After the nation now known as Zaire obtained its independence from Belgium in 1960, the construction of roads, lumbering and the growth of plantations forced them to change their traditional hunting and gathering life style.

Hallet helped them make the transition with improved sanitation and farming methods, successfully introducing the soybean into their agrarian system in 1979. But he believed that another food source was needed, leading him to the winged bean.

“We always sat down and discussed the problems together,” Hallet said. “They decided where they wanted to go. They were not victims of my imposed program. They always believed it was more important to survive with dignity than to compromise and prostitute themselves with lesser values.”

One way a people lose dignity, he said, is by having their hungry children pose for pictures to raise money from affluent nations.

“Those things are done for the express purpose of practicing emotional blackmail,” he said. “You have a good look at that starving person and you feel really bad about it and if you want to relieve your conscience the only way is to send money. The picture is used to create guilt.

“If you ask the mother of a starving child: ‘Do you want your child’s picture used to help raise money?’ she will emphatically say, ‘No.’ Nobody in the world wants a picture of their children taken when they are at their worst. . . .

“All of my pictures of the Pygmies always show them happy and satisfied and feeling good. . . . The little money I get is the money of love and not the money of guilt.”

He received no money with the End Hunger Award last year. On the contrary, he said, he lost contributions when scores of past donors asked that their names be removed from the Pygmy Fund’s 5,000-person mailing list.

Some assumed that the award included a substantial sum so that their help was no longer needed, Hallet said. Other left-wing supporters accused him of selling out to the Reagan Administration for recognition. And a few thought Hallet’s newsletter about the award--replete with 23 photos of himself at every stage of the presentation and evening gala at the John F. Kennedy Center--was excessively self-promotional.

“That award has brought me only aggravation,” Hallet lamented recently.

Gone, for now, is his goal of raising enough money to close the time-consuming store and devote all his energies to the Pygmies and other hunger projects.

Instead, Hallet continues to spend 20 hours each weekend at the cramped Weyburn Avenue shop, which sits incongruously amid Westwood’s movie theaters, video arcades and cafes. There, clad in safari jacket and shorts, he appears part anthropologist, part agronomist and part adventurer.

Prominently displayed news clippings, brochures and photographs invite patrons to inquire about the Pygmies, the winged bean and Hallet--any of which the colorful proprietor readily expounds on.

Meanwhile, his eight tons of winged beans gather dust in a warehouse in Zaire.