Too Many in the World Are Left Out

In the fall of 1944, as a 22-year-old American bomber pilot based in war-torn Italy, I saw widespread hunger for the first time: emaciated children begging for food on the streets, teenage girls selling their bodies to stay alive, young mothers scratching through the garbage dumps near our bomber base to find scraps of food. This was even worse that the hunger I witnessed during the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when our family, who lived in a farm community in South Dakota, fed a steady stream of out-of-work “hobos” who came to our door.

Not surprisingly, hunger became a primary issue for me when I was elected to Congress in 1956. I became director of the U.S. Food for Peace program and later was President Kennedy’s designee on what came to be known as the World Food Program--the world’s largest international food aid organization. Last year, the program provided food assistance for more than 52 million people in 76 countries. Through these programs I saw how much can be done when nations come together to combat hunger. In the past 25 years, for example, despite a doubling of the world’s population, the percentage of chronically undernourished people in the world has been cut in half and the absolute number of chronically undernourished people has been reduced by more than 100 million.

We can take heart from these and other similar steps forward, but this does not mean the job is done. This winter, Russia will be facing acute food shortages caused by poor crop conditions and the collapse of the Russian economy. Millions of Russians will go over the edge of starvation in the absence of international food aid now. Indonesia, hurricane-struck Central America and large parts of Africa currently are sustained by international food donations.

The fact is that many of our fellow human beings are left out, living on the knife-edge of existence. As World Bank President James Wolfensohn reminded us, “In too many countries, the poorest 10% of the population has less than 1% of the income, while the richest 20% enjoys over half.”

In too many countries, girls are half as likely as boys to go to school. In too many countries, children are impaired from birth because of malnutrition. And in too many countries, ethnic minorities face discrimination and fear for their lives at the hands of ethnic majorities.

In this world of plenty, of marvelous scientific advances, of growing freedoms, we cannot ignore the tragedy of millions who are excluded from the blessings we enjoy. There is a moral imperative to be concerned and to act. It is simply wrong for a child anywhere in the world to suffer the crippling effects of malnutrition. It is wrong--even outrageous--that more than 800 million people, 14% of the human race, are malnourished, many near starvation. It is wrong to accept as “unavoidable” the millions of hungry people we read about or see on TV. It is wrong to let politics and ideology interfere with helping the hungry, especially children. When criticized for helping the communist government of North Korea establish child-feeding programs in that drought-stricken country, Catherine Bertini, who is head of the World Food Program replied, “I can’t tell a hungry 5-year-old boy that we can’t feed him because we don’t like the politics of his country.”

But beyond that, it is in our self-interest to end hunger. After all, we live in one world. Rich and poor alike, we breathe the same air; we share a global economy. Killers like AIDS and environmental calamities and other threats to health don’t stop at national borders. The chaos associated with political instability rooted in poverty and desperation is rarely contained within a single country.

Earlier this year, when President Clinton asked me to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations food and agriculture agencies in Rome, I readily accepted because of my lifelong interest in agricultural matters and in solving the problem of hunger. At the agency, I work with such organizations as the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is headed by Senegalese agricultural authority Jacques Diouf; the World Food Program, directed by Bertini, an American, and the International Fund for Agriculture Development, under the direction of Fawzi al Sultan, a Kuwaiti banker. Our common purpose, articulated at the World Food Summit hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization in November 1996, is to reduce hunger by promoting an adequate supply and distribution of food in the world.

This plan, endorsed by all 186 nations represented at the summit, has the practical and achievable goal of reducing by half the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. Consider these facts:

* Over the past 50 years, infant and child death rates in the developing world have been reduced by 50% and health conditions around the world have improved more during this period than in all previous human history.

* In the past three decades, agricultural production techniques, developed through the internationally supported system of research centers, enabled a “green revolution” in many countries. Improved seed and associated breakthroughs in agricultural practices resulted in the most dramatic increase in crop yields in the history of mankind, allowing nations like India and Bangladesh, which in the early 1960s and mid-1970s, respectively, were kept alive through outside food assistance, to become nearly food self-sufficient.

The United States played a leading role in alleviating hunger, especially in the period immediately following World War II, by encouraging the international community to set in place the institutions and methods to address the issue. As prosperity spread across Europe and other parts of the world, more nations have shared in the task of solving the problems of food insecurity.

The Food and Agriculture Organization is providing technical assistance in a variety of ways:

* establishing productivity-enhancing technology such as user-managed, small scale irrigation schemes;

* eradicating and controlling pests like desert locust that threaten food security for millions of people living in a swath extending from the Red Sea to West Africa;

* monitoring crop conditions around the world to provide early warning of food supply difficulties and disasters;

* conserving scarce food resources such as fisheries and biodiversity to protect future food security.

The World Food Program that is meeting emergency food needs in Rwanda, North Korea, Sudan and the Horn of Africa has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Also, the program often plays a development role in nonemergency situations characterized by chronic hunger and malnutrition, using “food for work” to enable thousands of communities to build schools, improve community water systems and expand other basic infrastructure. And the International Fund for Agricultural Development, established only 20 years ago, provides development loans for addressing the basic needs of small farmers and poor rural communities. The agency was the first to provide funds to the now spectacularly successful Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which created a model for channeling microcredit to the very poor. The agency is currently supporting similar grass-roots microcredit models in West Africa.

Obviously, progress in ending world hunger can be greatly advanced by progress in other related problem areas, including better family planning to restrain excessive population growth. There must also be continuing efforts to halt the bloody and disruptive political and military conflicts in developing countries that drive multitudes of people from their homes, fields and jobs.

Reaching the goal adopted at the World Food Summit, to reduce the number of undernourished people by one-half in the next 17 years, is beyond the capacity of any single country or organization. It will require the effort of many international organizations and national governments and the help of private voluntary organizations, such as CARE, Church World Service, Lutheran World Relief, Catholic Relief Services and the United Jewish Appeal.

The target beneficiaries themselves have a key role to play, because reducing hunger and achieving security is much more than simply distributing food aid. It’s about developing concerned and capable government leadership responsive to citizens. It’s about having sound economic policies and educating people. It’s about reducing disease and improving public health. It’s about improving cultivation practices and making production tools, including rural credit, available. It’s about conserving forests, fisheries, genetic resources and biodiversity. It’s about establishing effective markets. And it’s about having essential infrastructure including farm-to-market roads.

These difficult but achievable goals motivate the U.N. food and agricultural agencies in Rome as they assist communities and nations to eliminate hunger and to establish the basis for sustained productivity. This work requires technical knowledge, cultural sensitivity, organizational development skills, a realistic appreciation for market incentives and a good measure of altruistic motivation.

During a recent trip to Egypt, I visited a rural community in the desert between Cairo and Alexandria. Here, the government has settled about 15,000 families on so-called “new lands.” To prepare these lands for production with water diverted from the Nile River, the settler families undertake the task of desalinating the soil, a repeated process of tilling, flooding and draining that typically takes more than three years. In addition, an array of basic village facilities and irrigation infrastructure has to be built. The work required of the settlers is backbreaking. But also needed are support, guidance and money, requirements being fulfilled by a collaborative effort of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, which is financing the nonlabor cost of the on-farm infrastructure; the World Food Program, which is supplementing the family diets until the fields come into production, and the Food and Agriculture Organization, which helps monitor and guide the technical aspects involved in getting the land fit for production.

This is the kind of investment activity that leads to sustained food security. This is the kind of activity that Americans and citizens in other donor countries support.

I am proud of the tradition of the people of the United States to give a helping hand to the hungry and to those in need. I am proud of the record of foreign assistance that the United States has provided to nations to undertake essential economic development initiatives; it has paid dividends to both the recipient countries and to us. Likewise, I am proud of the pivotal role that the United States has played in making the system of United Nations agencies strong and effective. It saddens me that the United States is today delinquent in paying what it owes to the U.N., including to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the family of multilateral organizations that plays such a key role in eliminating hunger.

There are no easy solutions to the problems of poverty and underdevelopment in our world. However, eliminating hunger is the place to start and should be our priority. The need is evident. The methods are known. The means can be made available.