The Coexistence of Feast, Famine

Once a month, a battered U.N. truck loaded with vegetable oil labors up a narrow, forbidding valley along stream beds and switchback roads to this tough mountain village--its name in Pushtu means “scorpion”--in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province.

The shiny 11-pound cans, emblazoned with the American flag or the circle of blue stars representing the European Union, are essentially bribes to the parents of Laram to send their little girls to school.

The oil-for-schoolgirl project, administered by the U.N. World Food Program in cooperation with the Pakistani government, is a new weapon in a worldwide battle against not just female illiteracy, but hunger. In the second half of the 20th century, the front lines of the age-old war against want have shifted. International agencies are seeking new strategies that go beyond traditional charity and food aid programs to treat the root causes of hunger.

That’s because those causes have grown more complex: Famine no longer is a scourge of nature but results from war, politics and other misdeeds of man.

Thanks to breakthroughs in science and agriculture, the world now produces enough food to feed every man, woman and child on the planet. The number of undernourished people has actually decreased since 1975, despite a 1.5-billion increase in the world’s population. And as a result of improved communication and transportation, the specter of natural famine--caused by the biblical scourges of drought, flood and pestilence--has virtually disappeared.

But hunger and starvation persist. And in many places--North Korea, Sudan, Rwanda and India, to name a few--they appear to be worsening.

Despite a worldwide glut of food, 18 million people die of starvation, malnutrition and related causes every year, according to a newly released Johns Hopkins University study.

And more than 800 million people are chronically undernourished, U.N. statistics show. That means their daily food supply falls below the 2,200-calorie minimum the World Health Organization says meets “basic nutrition needs.”

In some places, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan and Haiti, daily caloric intake falls woefully below this standard. In others, such as India, China and Southeast Asia, conditions have improved remarkably since the agricultural advances of the “Green Revolution” began unfolding three decades ago. But malnutrition persists, fostered by political and social inequalities.

In the past two decades, for example, India has become a net exporter of grain. Punjab state, India’s bountiful breadbasket, bulges with agricultural plenty. Yet, racked by endemic poverty exacerbated by the inequities of class and caste, more than 60% of India’s children younger than 5--a staggering number nearly equal to the total population of the United States--are clinically underweight and suffer from stunted development. In neighboring Bangladesh, the percentage is 65%, the highest in the world.

The final declaration of the groundbreaking 1974 World Food Conference, which convened the world’s nations in Rome to face what was then believed to be a crisis in food supplies, hopefully projected that “within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition.” But that vision is still very far from reality.

More often than not, the reasons for this cruel paradox--hunger in the midst of global plenty--have little to do with natural causes. Of the millions who go hungry every day, “we estimate that only 10% are victims of disaster,” said World Food Program Executive Director Catherine Bertini.

Diverse Causes Call for Creative Solutions

At last year’s World Food Summit in Rome, the sequel to the 1974 conference, a U.S. Department of Agriculture report identified some of the forces that create hunger: war and civil strife, misguided national policies, trade barriers such as crop subsidies, technology, environmental degradation, poverty, population growth and gender inequality.

This vast array of problems requires different, more creative solutions, say agriculture and nutrition experts. Although traditional charities still play an important role, the challenge of feeding the world has gone beyond international famine relief committees and church basement food drives.

“The international community already knows how to provide emergency humanitarian relief,” Bertini said in an interview. “Collectively, we can do that. The issues for the international community now are what to do about the basic causes.”

Some contend that the solutions lie in broadening democratic institutions.

“In the terrible history of famines around the world,” wrote Amartya Sen, a Harvard University economist and renowned expert on famine, “no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democracy. They have occurred in colonial territories run by imperial rulers (pre-independent India, say, or Ireland), in military dictatorships controlled by authoritarian potentates (Ethiopia, Sudan), or in one-party states intolerant of opposition (the Soviet Union in the 1930s or China at the time of the Great Leap Forward).”

Others say it is time to push the Green Revolution to a new level: Since the 1970s, the revolution’s advances in science and technology have more than doubled global wheat production and brought a 56% increase in rice production and an 80% jump in corn production. Now plant genetics and biotechnology promise to improve on that astonishing human achievement.

At the Centro Internacional de la Papa in Lima, Peru, researchers feel they are close to developing a potato that is resistant to the blight that caused the great Irish potato famine of 1846-51 and that, in a virulent recent reappearance, still threatens crops around the world.

And American companies are pioneering efforts to create plant varieties that are resistant to herbicides and natural pests. St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., for example, has created a genetically manipulated soybean that does not die when subjected to the company’s trademark Roundup household weedkiller. Because some view these DNA-injected creations as dangerous tampering with nature, the Roundup Ready soybeans have been the target of protests around the world.

‘Taboos Against Female Education’

One strategy for ridding the world of hunger is through education, primarily of girls. A recent World Bank study showed that educated women marry later and have fewer children. They are more likely to have the status and power in their household to ensure prenatal care, childhood immunizations, better diets for children and better housing.

Few places on Earth have a more dismal record of educating women than Pakistan. According to government statistics, only 20% of Pakistani girls attend primary school--the lowest rate among the nine most populous developing countries. In neighboring India, 68% of girls attend school. Indonesia, like Pakistan a primarily Muslim country, enrolls 92%.

The situation is even bleaker here in Pakistan’s rugged North-West Frontier, where the dominant Pathan tribe resists female education. “The North-West Frontier is a very difficult society to penetrate,” said Bronek Szynalski, World Food Program director for Pakistan. “There are few other places with such strong taboos against female education.”

“The feeling was that, if you educate the girl, she would become too independent,” said Zahid Majid, another U.N. administrator and native of the North-West Frontier.

Not long ago, the people of Laram and the surrounding Dir District, set in the mountains separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, grew opium poppies and carried guns. Shootouts were frequent. Feuding families occasionally launched rocket-propelled grenades into the walled compounds of their adversaries.

‘Something Different’ for Pakistan

The former rulers of Dir--a cruel line of local despots who carried the hereditary title of khan--banned all education for girls, except their own, whom they sent to private school in distant Lahore.

The khans of Dir were deposed when the district and the surrounding Swat Valley formally became part of Pakistan in 1962. The Pakistani government, bankrolled by international anti-drug agencies, banned opium production. Most of the guns disappeared.

The authorities, aided by the U.N. and other agencies, then faced the challenge of introducing female education where it had not existed before. Schools were built, even separate facilities for boys and girls, but most parents still refused to send their daughters--many of whom were placed in arranged marriages at the age of 12.

In 1991, the World Food Program came up with the idea of giving food to parents who send their female children to school. “We call it an incentive,” said Majid, “but some people call it bribery.”

This was a departure from practice in other parts of the world, including nomadic regions of Africa, where the U.N. agency offered meals in the schools. “But we looked at the conditions of the schools here--no kitchens, no proper buildings, no infrastructure,” Majid said. “We saw that we needed to do something different.”

Three years later, the Pakistan program was launched. The strategy was to give an 11-pound can of cooking oil--often the most expensive item in the Pakistani diet--to each girl who attended classes at least 20 days a month. The same incentive was offered to teachers, to reduce absenteeism.

Giving cash in lieu of food was not an option. “Money is the one commodity that can disappear without a trace,” said Szynalski of the World Food Program.

Hopes of Building ‘a Healthy Nation’

The program has the advantage of raising a girl’s status in her family, said Szynalski. “The little girl who picks up her can of oil has something visible to present,” he said. “She is bringing it to the household.”

There is still considerable corruption in the program. Shops in the nearby city of Mingora openly display stacks of the vegetable oil cans, clearly labeled “Not to Be Sold or Exchanged.” Shopkeepers say some customers trade the oil for cans of ghee--the clarified butter traditionally used for cooking here. But merchant Saiful Malook said he regularly receives five cases--with 30 cans apiece--from a supplier who trucks the oil in from Peshawar, the provincial capital. Malook said he makes a 50-cent profit on each can.

U.N. authorities shrug off the losses, saying they are inevitable in the highly corrupt local culture and that most of the oil still reaches the schoolgirls.

Immediately after the program was introduced, school enrollment among girls in the North-West Frontier--which had been an abysmal 5%--skyrocketed. In the district of Kohistan, enrollment in 32 government girls schools jumped from 575 to 2,889 within two years. One school saw its student population increase tenfold, from 21 to 220.

“Before, the only girls who came here were from the wealthier families,” said teacher Ul Fattara, whose school in Dara Ramorra, a village of 2,000 people, grew from 30 to 118 students. “Now even the poorest families send their daughters.”

The school’s two mud-walled classrooms can no longer accommodate its students, so a blackboard has been set up in the school courtyard.

Here in Laram, a hardscrabble village of stone-and-mud homes, neem trees and barking dogs, girls have sometimes walked hours for schooling and for oil.

“Some of these girls live on the top of the mountain and had never even visited the school or the village before the program,” said teacher Hussan Ara, 25.

World Food Program regional director Szynalski said the real test will come next year, when the U.N. scales back the program, which adds about $50 per year to the cost of educating each girl.

Fattara said she fears the day the program ends. “I have six or seven girls who are very bright, but I am afraid if the oil stops, they will stop coming,” said the 21-year-old teacher. “If they could only stay, they could become teachers and help the poor. They can build a healthy nation.”

But Szynalski was confident that the program had already met its goal. “The girls are clearly excited about going to school,” he said. “Supplying the food oil is simply a means to an end. Our idea is not to supply food but to try to build the assets of the society.”

The Pakistan project is just one experiment in a global struggle against the root causes of hunger.

“International donors are wisely moving away from direct food aid that could hurt developing country farmers and fuel rural-to-urban migration,” said Bertini, the World Food Program executive director. Because agriculturally blessed countries such as the United States have moved away from bulk distribution of surplus grain to poor countries, more grain is available for emergencies.

In some cases, this shift has encouraged local farmers who could not compete with the free food from abroad. But, as Bertini said, it “has done little to improve the prospects for the 800 million hungry poor.”

Organizers of the 1974 World Food Conference, convened at a time when many feared imminent famine due to overpopulation and agricultural limits, were criticized for being overly optimistic when they called for an end to hunger in one decade.

But at last year’s World Food Summit, the organizers came under attack for setting their sights too low.

‘Modesty of Goals Is Shameful’

The most dramatic moment came when Cuba’s aging revolutionary Fidel Castro rose to chastise the gathering of prominent politicians and food scientists from around the world. The group had just set a goal to halve the number of chronically hungry people on the planet to 400 million in the next two decades.

If the world has more than enough food to feed all its people, Castro asked the suddenly hushed audience, why should even one person starve? Why should even one child go hungry?

“Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world,” said Castro, whose emotional words must have lingered in the minds of the dignitaries as they dined that night in Roman restaurants. “The rich do not know hunger.”

The Cuban president decried the “offensive opulence and squandering of consumer societies.”

“What kind of cosmetic solutions are we going to provide so that in 20 years from now there would be 400 million instead of 800 million starving people? The very modesty of these goals is shameful.”

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A World of Need

Most of the world’s poor and undernourished live in 87 countries that cannot produce enough food to feed their populations and lack the financial resources to make up the deficit through imports. Agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations place special emphasis on improving food production and availability in these “low-income food-deficit countries,” or LIFDCs. Of these nations, 48 have been identified as “least developed countries,” or LDCs, which suffer from “long-term handicaps to growth,” according to the FAO. The average person in an industrialized nation consumes two-thirds more calories than his or her counterpart in an LDC. There are 16 “chronically undernourished” LDCs in which the average person consumes less than 2,000 calories per day.

Low-income food-deficit country

Guatemala

Honduras

Nicaragua

Cuba

Dominican Republic

Ecuador

Suriname

Bolivia

Morocco

Egypt

Senegal

Ivory Coast

Ghana

Nigeria

Cameroon

Congo Republic

Zimbabwe

Swaziland

Syria

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Albania

Macedonia

Georgia

Azerbaijan

Armenia

Iran

Turkmenistan

Uzbekistan

Pakistan

Kyrgyzstan

Tajikistan

India

China

Mongolia

North Korea

Indonesia

Philippines

Papua New Guinea

****

Least developed country

Mauritania

Mali

Gambia

Guinea-Bissau

Guinea

Burkina Faso

Togo

Benin

Niger

Equatorial Guinea

Uganda

Congo

Zambia

Lesotho

Madagascar

Tanzania

Sudan

Yemen

Djibouti

Tanzania

Nepal

Bhutan

Myanmar

Laos

Cambodia

****

Chronically undernourished country

Peru

Haiti

Sierra Leone

Liberia

Angola

Mozambique

Malawi

Burundi

Rwanda

Somalia

Kenya

Ethiopia

Eritrea

Afghanistan

Bangladesh

****

Atlantic Ocean Least Developed Countries

Cape Verde

Sao Tome & Principe

****

Indian Ocean Least Developed Countries

Comoros

Maldives

****

Pacific Ocean Least Developed Countries

Kiribati

Samoa

Solomon Islands

Tuvalu

Vanuatu

****

Pacific Ocean Low-income food-deficit country

Tokelau

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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LIFE LESSONS

Education can be a substantial benefit in reducing poverty, dependence, environmental degradation, excessive population growth and other factors that cause hunger. Education provides populations of developing nations with information on:

* Training for self-employment.

* Cash crops, improved farming methods and animal husbandry.

* Health and the use of clean water.

* Family planning methods and child care.

* Nutrition, balanced diets and preservation of foodstuffs.

* Cash economies and basic accounting.

****

Productivity

A World Bank study found that farmers’ productivity increased an average of 8.7% with a minimum of four years of primary education.

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Literacy

There are about 885 million illiterate adults in the world, about 70% of whom live in rural areas of developing countries.

Women

Literate: 71.2%

Illiterate: 28.8%

*

Men

Literate: 83.6%

Illiterate: 16.4%

Source: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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THE GREEN REVOLUTION

Research in Mexico and the Philippines in the 1950s and ‘60s led to the development of the high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice that launched the “Green Revolution,” a series of sharp increases in cereal-grain yields in many developing countries.

SEEDS OF HOPE: The genetically improved wheat developed in Mexico was:

* Broadly adaptable.

* Short-stemmed.

* Disease-resistant.

****

NOBEL EFFORT: The new seeds excelled at utilizing fertilizer and water to produce high yields. They were instrumental in boosting Mexican wheat production and averting famine in India and Pakistan and earned the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for American plant breeder Norman E. Borlaug, leader of the Mexican wheat team.

CONTINUED RESEARCH: An international network of research centers was founded, and by 1992 there were 18 centers dedicated to the important food crops and environments of the developing world. The centers are staffed by scientists from around the world and supported by a consortium of foundations, national governments and international agencies.

ANSWERING CRITICISM: Recent research responds to criticism that the Green Revolution depends on fertilizers, irrigation and other factors that poor farmers cannot afford and that may be ecologically harmful. Some critics say it promotes monocultures and loss of genetic diversity.

WAVE OF THE FUTURE: There is a new concentration on development of crops to suit less favorable soils and climates, such as wheat that will grow in drought-prone climates and rice suited to the acid soils of Latin America.

* Between 1950 and 1980, food production in the developing world rose by an average of 3% a year, outpacing population growth.

* India’s wheat production tripled between 1967 and 1992.

* Rice production in the Philippines doubled between 1960 and 1980.

* Extra rice produced by high-yield varieties feeds 700 million people.

Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Columbia Encyclopedia

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About This Series

At a time when humankind has the resources to conquer hunger, 800 million people are chronically undernourished.

* Today: International agencies are seeking innovative strategies to combat the problem at its core.

* Tuesday: Nearly 40 years after Maoist ideology led to cataclysmic famine in China, the lessons can be applied to another isolationist, hunger-racked state: North Korea.

* Wednesday: No place in the world suffers more from conflict-born starvation than Africa, where civil war, ethnic bloodletting, coups d’etat and revolution take a tremendous toll.

* Thursday: Class divisions perpetuate hunger and turn India into a nation of contradictions: Stretches of bountiful land coexist with pockets of utter desperation.

* Friday: Scientists hope dramatic discoveries in plant genetics and biotechnology will produce a second “Green Revolution” that will help feed a swelling world population.