*EPF419 05/09/2002
Byliner: Congressman Hall Urges More Attention to World Hunger
(Nominee to U.N. food agencies says new programs promising) (2060)

(The following article appears in the May 2002 issue of the State Department's electronic journal, Economic Perspectives. The issue is titled: Food Security and Safety. The entire journal can be viewed at: http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/journals.htm)

Hunger is a cause of poverty, not a symptom of it, says Representative Tony Hall, U.S. Ambassador-designate to the United Nations hunger and food organizations. Hall says the world needs to make a stronger commitment to eliminating hunger, and he points to promising new anti-hunger programs, such as the Global Food for Education Initiative, and creative public-private partnerships.

Following is the text of Hall's article:

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NEW CHALLENGES IN HUNGER

By Tony Hall, Ambassador-designate to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Program and International Fund for Agricultural Development; current Member, U.S. House of Representatives; Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Task Force on Hunger

Since I first held a dying child in my arms during Ethiopia's 1984-85 famine, the anti-hunger community has mounted a series of remarkable efforts to ensure that such a tragedy never again visits our world. The reaction from policy-makers and the public has been generally supportive, but in recent years experts' responses to the challenge of feeding a growing world population have come under increasing scrutiny.

Despite clear evidence of progress, many engaged in this work were looking beyond immediate problems to the structural obstacles to reaching the goal of ending hunger, and were looking for ways around them. Conventional wisdom was being shaken up, the public was becoming engaged, and approaches shaped by grassroots activists in developed and developing countries alike were getting fresh consideration. The upcoming World Food Summit and the World Summit on Sustainable Development were expected to mark the culmination of this process and the launch of an era of more enlightened and effective action against hunger and poverty.

Then, on September 11, 2001, this chastening and adapting process was transformed -- from grist for conferences into a priority task for the United States. Since that horrible day, Americans have gained a new conviction that the needs of suffering people do not deserve neglect, pity, or empty gestures, but effective attention. It is no longer sufficient to merely recognize shortcomings in efforts to ease hunger and other suffering; what matters now is overcoming the hurdles the U.S. foreign aid programs face in getting their intended results.

That the terrorists who attacked the United States weren't themselves poor isn't the point; most Americans sense, at a gut level, that misery breeds a contempt that spreads and risks turning others' problems and injustices into our own. The Bush administration has responded with concern about this breeding ground for terrorists. Early in the war it arranged food drops in Afghanistan that, while an imperfect solution, were unprecedented. Most recently, President Bush pledged to increase aid to poor countries significantly. While financial support is critical, money alone can't do this job. The problems of poverty are complex, and even though the lessons we've learned aren't the whole answer, they need to be applied. However tempting, this is not the time for hasty, stop-gap measures, particularly where there is broad consensus on the reforms needed.

For example, the futility of saddling poor countries with interest payments that mushroom into a large drain on the resources they need for future progress is now clear. The push to provide debt relief to some of the world's poorest nations grew out of an initiative mounted by faith groups, which brought the dry subject to life for policy-makers and bystanders alike. While their spark has put success within reach, helping countries avoid falling into the same traps again will take the sustained attention of the United States and other governments, as well as international bodies. This is painstaking work, not a problem to be washed away with one debt-for-nature swap, or a big check, or even a wholesale shift from grants to loans.

Another issue driven by grassroots activists has been the need for justice in trade and environmental responsibility, particularly as both are shaped by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The spotlight they have shone on these problems has exposed faulty assumptions -- such as the link between investment and growth (which isn't always ironclad), or the importance of fiscal discipline (which can be counterproductive when it is excessive or badly timed), or the ability of man to ignore nature (which too often is a short-lived victory). Too often, these and other flaws in how development initiatives are designed have hindered progress; sometimes, they have left communities in an even more precarious position. The lessons learned suggest that early and meaningful involvement of stakeholders and other local people is essential to any project's lasting success.

Statistics add urgency to the relevancy of these lessons for the fight against hunger. Most disturbing is the fact that only 10 percent of the world's hungry and malnourished people currently are being reached by international efforts. The good news is that many of the people being assisted are part of the 6 million who leave the ranks of the hungry each year; the bad news is that, to reach the goals we set for ourselves at the World Food Summit in 1996 -- a halving of world hunger by 2015 -- four times as many must escape hunger each year.

HOW TO CHANGE OUTCOMES

To change outcomes, we must apply these lessons and rethink our approach to hunger. In the past, it has been seen as a manifestation of poverty, merely a visible symptom of an underlying problem. Viewing hunger instead as poverty's cause not only would mirror the impressions of the poor who are the real experts; it also may trigger a more productive response.

One way to start ending the hunger that nurtures poverty is by recognizing that hungry people don't have the luxury of "the long run." To survive, they need food today and the security of knowing they will be able to feed their families tomorrow. If they must focus on scraping their next meal together, hungry people cannot grab hold of lifelines such as education, or new agricultural techniques, or microcredit assistance. Nor can they escape the diseases that plague their families even when some individuals escape. As a result, instead of risking failure by trying something new, many do what they always did. And, as the saying warns, the result is that they get what they always got: another turn of the vicious cycle of poverty and still more hunger.

The Global Food for Education Initiative, championed by George McGovern, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. hunger and food organizations, and former U.S. Senator Bob Dole, is a good example of a program that squarely addresses food insecurity. By providing students in developing countries with a solid meal at school (which often represents most of the day's nutrients), it removes one obstacle to attending classes. It is not the whole answer, but it has proven effective -- starting in our own country, where school lunch programs begun after World War II exposed a surprising number of Americans who were too stunted by hunger to be capable soldiers. Begun in 2000 with $300 million worth of food, the program is a foreign aid program that can enjoy sustained public support, an attribute that deserves greater respect. Another promising new focus is opening markets to broader participation. Developing countries are demonstrating more willingness to help solve their problems by being active participants in global trade. Millions more people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America could lift themselves from hunger and poverty if unfair practices that shut poor workers out of the international trade system were eliminated. The international community, led by the United States, should continue helping developing countries gain access to new markets and find trade-based, win-win solutions.

And there are tried-and-true approaches, too -- from supporting microenterprises, to funding child survival and basic education, to projects that are being adapted to meet the needs of HIV/AIDS sufferers and AIDS orphans. Often, what's needed to make traditional programs effective is simply a stronger commitment to them.

PREVENTION

Another scrap of outdated thinking is the notion that "compassion fatigue" undermines support for anti-poverty work. The problem is not that this is wrong; the problem is that it has resulted in a hair-on-fire approach to fighting hunger that has made "fatigue" a self-fulfilling prophesy.

For example, emergency relief once made up about 30 percent of the World Food Program's work, and famine prevention accounted for 70 percent. In recent years, this has flipped: the dollars to help with irrigation or income projects, which could help people withstand difficult times, instead are going to showy and massive interventions after a crisis begins. Drought, war, and other triggers for these crises are nobody's fault, of course. But the siphoning of funds away from prevention has compounded problems once they begin. The resulting images frustrate even the most generous donors and make others fed up with what they perceive to be a failure to invest aid dollars more wisely.

Savvy Americans don't expect money to solve all problems, and they do expect to see problems on the news; but they rightly feel that some results of ongoing efforts should be apparent. "What works" may never make breaking news, but those projects are the best hope for the progress that can combat donor fatigue. To be most effective, prevention must begin in rural areas, where 75 percent of those experiencing extreme poverty live and where problems are rife. For example, rural women produce 60 to 80 percent of their countries' food, but own just 2 percent of the land. More needs to be done to strengthen legal frameworks that enable them to protect their property and other rights. Another example: improving agricultural productivity will mean finding ways that don't encroach further on fragile lands or further stress the supply of freshwater resources -- but poor families' dependence on farming leaves them little room to experiment with new techniques.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE INITIATIVES

A third way to make the changes needed is to tap the private sector, which has become an emerging, creative force in the past decade. The role played by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, who have seeded an immunization project with $750 million, of media mogul Ted Turner, who has contributed $1 billion to the United Nations, and of numerous other donors is remarkable and, hopefully, marks the beginning of a more active generation of philanthropists.

This outreach should not stop at funding solicitation, though. Individuals and corporations seem willing to accept new social responsibilities, but they must be engaged more constructively if innovative approaches are to be found. For example, many corporations probably can find common ground with activists on rule-of-law and other issues important both to commerce and civil society. More certainly can help carry activists' messages of the need for governments to be responsive to their people to powerful audiences in ministries that civil society rarely can access.

OLD APPROACHES AREN'T THE ANSWER

For too long, the food needs of a growing population have been answered with an assortment of solutions that tended to ignore cultural, political, and religious factors. Countries and their peoples were expected to adapt to these one-size-fits-all recommendations. Many did, and the results of a generation of work are, on balance, largely positive. But there is an unacceptable danger in accepting results with serious flaws, or congratulating ourselves for progress that touches the lives of just 1 in 10 of the world's hungry.

The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 yielded a new generation of structures capable of protecting Americans serving abroad and their colleagues. The attacks in 2001 on our society and our values, which American embassies around the globe symbolize, ought to trigger an equally sweeping redesign of the programs and priorities aimed at the 2 billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.

Starting this work with a fresh determination to relegate hunger to the world's history books would be a promising foundation for promoting sustainable development and ending the desperate need that impoverishes us all.

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(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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