World Hunger and Birth Control

Re “Far From Plenty,” hunger series, Dec. 22-26: Genetically engineering rice and cassava and donations to relief organizations are wonderful things we can do to alleviate world hunger. “Rewarding” cultures that discontinue chauvinistic prioritization of males, as mentioned in your Dec. 25 editorial, is also commendable. Yet you omitted the most important component of any sustainable plan for feeding the world’s hungry. A few pennies added to those necessary to give iodized salt and vitamin A to pregnant women and girls should be used to provide birth control education and supplies.

What could be more humane than delaying the introduction of damaged and starved children into the world until they can be adequately nourished in or out of the womb?

MARTIN BYHOWER

Redondo Beach

*

In the coming year the president and Congress will probably be adopting new rules for trade and investment in Africa. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, has pointed out that while this isn’t likely to be front-page news in the U.S., the new rules are “a big deal indeed for millions of Africans.” These rules could do harm or good, depending on how they are shaped.

Bread for the World is working to include a package of initiatives that would benefit women and small-scale poor farmers. As the sidebar on Dec. 24 indicates, success in battling malnutrition in Latin America was due, at least in part, to empowering women. If this success is to be duplicated in Africa, we need to pay continuing attention to our government’s policies to make sure that the needs of poor and hungry people are given priority when economic decisions are made.

PAUL C. EKLOF

Costa Mesa

*

Though conflict does indeed cause hunger, the converse, that hunger causes conflict, is the deeper truth, and arrogance and greed among helping institutions both private and public are greatly to blame.

Take Sudan. That richly endowed country would never have degenerated into what we now call an ethnic-religious struggle if a long series of Western experts hadn’t pushed totally stupid irrigation schemes, livestock projects and loans that ultimately displaced and broke a million or so innocent peasants who turned on each other in their anger and despair.

Alas, your reporters’ faith in high-tech fixes like genetic engineering and vitamin tablets typifies the attitudes that generated this mess. Band-Aids can mask catastrophic soil erosion and biodiversity loss (call it desertification) only so long. The Green Revolution did much to stave off a reckoning while land has continued to die.

I have seen this firsthand as a consultant to World Bank and USAID projects in western and southern Africa. More ominous is the destruction of American land and (it’s coming!) agriculture by the same stupidity.

SAM BINGHAM

Denver