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Recently retired Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme and Speaker for the Tobias Lecture writes about hope for hungry children
One child dies every 5 seconds ofhunger andrelated diseases. You have no doubt run across these sad statistics before, perhaps in a television appeal or a news article. Frankly, they are hard to get your mind around and a bit paralyzing. It's difficult to imagine all that loss of innocent life. But if you had the opportunity, as I have, to see some of these young children, to hold them in your arms and look into the eyes of their pleading mothers, the statistics become fartooreal. And they haunt you.
They have troubled me now for the five years I have spent as head of the World Food Program. WFP delivers food aid to poor families that saves millions of children's lives -- and the lives of those left hungry by war in Darfur, AIDS in southern Africa and natural disasters like the Indian Ocean tsunami. On average WFP feeds more than 90 million malnourished people a year -- but this is not yet enough to have a real impact on the
cold statistics of child mortality.
I recall all too vividly the first time I held a dying child in Africa. First, there was an incredible sorrow and, then quickly after, a deep shame. How could we -- how could I -- let this happen? The child's face was blank, but somehow I still saw a plea in it. I certainly saw a plea in the face of his mother, who I know thought that somehow I could miraculously help.
I couldn't. It was already too late. How is this still happening in 2007? We are so rich in the United States, Europe and Japan that we watch sports and soap operas on expensive cell phones and the value of the food we throw away far exceeds what it would cost to feed all the world's orphans and refugees.
Do I sound like I am pushing some global welfare scheme? I am not. But I am really frustrated and ashamed that we tolerate hunger and malnutrition on the scale that it still exists today. We so clearly have the capacity to end it. According to the World Health Organization, hunger and malnutrition are still the single biggest threat to health worldwide, claiming more lives than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
So why aren't we getting the traction we need to do something about them? I suspect that many people in the West do not really believe hunger is as lethal as we know it is.
In the United States we have been incredibly prosperous for decades now, and we see the world through the lens of our own daily experience. When has a major network run a story about American children being stunted, going blind from a lack of vitamin A or mentally impaired because they lacked iron or iodine? Yes, hunger exists in America too, but it is a different hunger and largely the product of local failures in quite well-funded social welfare systems. U.S. government funding for child nutrition, education and health totaled $333 billion in 2006. Just U.S. nutrition programs -- food stamps, WIC , school lunches -- are more than $40 billion each year.
Where WFP works, such systems often do not exist. Though there are 852 million people who are chronically hungry worldwide, global food aid -- from all donors -- is barely a tenth of the size of our nutrition efforts in the U.S. and most of that is concentrated on emergencies such as Afghanistan and Darfur, not the low-grade hunger that is ruining the lives of 400 million children.
I have often thought a hungry child in the middle of a war or a huge natural disaster was better off than one living in a developing country at peace and quietly struggling to better itself. Sadly, all of us seem to pay far more attention to the former than the latter.
The issue is not so much a lack of generosity by donors as perhaps mistaken priorities. Official Development Assistance has broken through to an all-time high of more than $100 billion and globally poverty dropped by an extraordinary 20 percent in the 1990s, largely due to economic growth in China, India and other parts of Asia. The AIDS pandemic and the Indian Ocean tsunami elicited an unprecedented outpouring of private aid and foundations like Gates, Ford and Lilly are having a greater impact than ever before.
Despite all this we are seeing the creation of a permanent underclass of extremely poor people who are severely malnourished. Their numbers are growing by about 4 million a year. Most are women and children, with AIDS helping to drive up the numbers. More farmers in Africa have died of AIDS than there are farmers in North America and Europe combined. One African in three suffers from chronic hunger.
It is not clear to me that the donor or academic communities have fully grasped the incredible impact of good nutrition in global development. I think of the children of the two Koreas. When I was young there were fierce debates among academics about the impact of nature versus nurture. Well, nothing would have stunned them more than to see two Korean boys side by side today -- one from the North, one from the South. At age 7, the boy from the South is 8 inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than his North Korean counterpart.I like to remind people who are skeptical about food aid that back in the 1960s, the U.S. was providing massive amounts of food aid to South Korea, while today they are a multibillion-dollar importer of American food.
The U.S. and other donors need to get back to the basics. Thanks to bipartisan efforts over decades by remarkable statesmen like Sens. George McGovern and Bob Dole, the United States long ago built systems to deal with the nutritional needs of the poor. We forget that in Appalachia in the 1960s hunger had the same impact it does in the developing world today. The school feeding programs they promoted so successfully have drawn children into schools, which is so critical, especially for the future of girls.
Hunger and malnutrition have deprived the nearly 100 million people WFP feeds of hope. To me, they are often unrealized opportunities -- people who could have contributed so much more to their societies if only they were properly nourished.
Each of us can reach out to some less-fortunate child who needs us. After all, isn't that what you would want if your child were starving?
Jim Morris, of Indianapolis, retired in April, 2007 after five years as Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme.
