World Hunger Demands Attention — Now

As the aftermath of September 11 prompts questioning about anti-Western rage, a good starting point is a statistic: 800 million. That’s the number of people in the developing countries who lack “food security” — who don’t have enough food to perform the basic tasks of daily living.

Nearly 30 years ago, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a promise to the first World Food Conference: “Within a decade, no child will go to bed hungry.” No one has made good on Mr. Kissinger’s promise, but he was correct that it was possible. We had the means; we lacked the motivation. After September 11, we have both. If moral concern alone is not enough to impel serious U.S. action on reducing world hunger, our national interest — and national security — certainly ought to be.

As a primary beneficiary of economic globalization and one of its principal rule-makers, the United States has a special responsibility to build a world market that works against hunger. The surprising outpouring of anti-American bile we’ve seen from parts of the third world these last few months surely owes much to the problems of poverty and hunger. It is easy to hate a nation where food is wasted and more than 60 percent of the people are officially overweight — as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control — when its leaders will not take significant steps to help the hungry.

So far, American policy makers have been too preoccupied with defending the homeland and stimulating the economy to begin the process of thinking differently about how to approach the issue of world hunger. But our changed understanding of the American place in the world — our inescapable interdependence with and vulnerability to the rest of humanity — makes the problem more urgent. If we use the tools at our disposal to fight world hunger seriously, the benefits will redound to all of us — in the West and in the developing world — politically, economically, and morally.

The last decade was the richest in world history, so it seems reasonable that the proportion of people in developing countries who are undernourished dropped from 20 percent to 17 percent; that’s 40 million fewer hungry people worldwide in 2000 than in 1990. But China alone accounted for 76 million fewer people going hungry, which means that in most other developing nations hunger increased.

Regionally, sub-Saharan Africa has the hardest time feeding itself, with 34 percent of the population, or 194 million people, going hungry. While “only” 16 percent of those in the Asia and Pacific regions are hungry, that’s almost 500 million people. Latin America has 53.6 million hungry people, 11 percent of the population; North Africa and the Middle East, 32.5 million, or 9 percent.

Expanding trade has improved the food security in countries that have been able to take advantage of it. But the least developed countries, where growth in exports has been substantially slower than the aggregate growth of trade, have had to use about 23 percent of their export earnings to import food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, in Washington. The average among all countries is only 6 percent.

Any number of reasons can account for why poorer countries have to spend so much of their export money on food, but unfair trade practices imposed by first world countries is a big one. Many poor nations face market barriers to their goods abroad, on everything from textiles to sugar, while their farmers must compete with highly subsidized food and agricultural goods from the world’s richest nations in North America and Europe.

Wealthy countries — members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — have continued to subsidize their domestic farmers’ production at a rate of $365-billion a year. Buoyed by these subsidies, farm production in the United States and other OECD member countries has increased steadily, depressing world prices, discouraging producers in the developing countries, and putting valuable trade earnings out of the reach of the poorest countries. The effect is that poor countries get cheap food dumped on them from the subsidized farmers in the United States and elsewhere. Little of this imported food gets to the hungry in the countryside; most winds up with the urban elite.

Of course, the United States has a duty to take care of its own small farmers. But its agricultural subsidies go to only one-third of U.S. farmers, while two-thirds of the money goes to the largest and richest 10 percent of those eligible. Moreover, this puts the nation’s agricultural policy, foreign policy, and development policy at three-way cross-purposes.

In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed that access to food is a human right. The United States agreed — until recently. At the 1996 World Food Summit, we changed our position on this basic right, reportedly for fear of legal implications. Moreover, U.S. aid to foreign countries is the lowest, in terms of percentage of gross domestic product, among wealthier countries. And most of the aid the United States does provide goes to a few better-off countries, primarily Israel and Egypt.

What’s more, the primary U.S. international food-assistance program, Food for Peace, is dramatically out of sync with the times.

Since its inception in the 1950s, reform compromises have left a bureaucratic nightmare — a Rube Goldberg device rigged around and through a maze of politically tendentious government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, State Department, Agency for International Development, Office of Management and Budget, National Security Council, and even the Treasury. It is hardly surprising that after a decision was made to provide emergency food relief for Afghanistan, delivery was held up for days while U.S. government officials argued about whether the food would be bought in the United States or Pakistan.

Worse, the program’s resources are still tilted toward moving U.S. farm surpluses into export markets rather than feeding hungry people.

To be fair, it should be noted that the United States is the biggest donor to the U.N. World Food Program and that our contributions rise as our surpluses do. This food is mostly for emergency relief, which is no bad thing. But America devotes insufficient food aid to the fight against chronic hunger.

And yet, history shows that U.S. intervention can make a huge difference in a nation’s ability to feed itself.

Throughout the 1960s, stored U.S. grain surpluses served as a food safety net for the entire world. But in 1972, the United States made its first major grain sale to Russia, sharply drawing down its reserves and sending prices skyward. Bangladesh, fragile after flooding and war, could no longer afford grain at market prices. With food aid from the United States reduced, a crisis loomed. By 1974, on the eve of the first World Food Conference, Bangladesh was lurching toward a major famine.

Facing the outcry of the U.S. public and many abroad, the United States doubled aid to Bangladesh — but not before more than 200,000 people starved to death.

The famine shocked the United States and others into action. They mounted a $30-billion broad-based effort aimed at alleviating poverty and ensuring adequate food supplies in Bangladesh. Since then, the country has become largely self-sufficient in rice, and population growth rates have slowed. Though a third of the populace still suffers from food insecurity, the famines of only a few decades ago no longer threaten.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from Bangladesh’s example, it is that the U.S. government vastly underestimates what public action can achieve if it is broadly based, well-provisioned, and organized around a clear and concrete goal like ending hunger.

Ending world hunger requires that the United States and its partners create a global marketplace in which producers from poor countries can compete fairly against those in industrialized nations. If we continue to support a market that favors the rich at the expense of the poor, we will continue to breed tension and turmoil in developing countries — and anger against the United States.

Most of the positive steps that must be taken to achieve global food security are well-known. Most are political rather than technical, and many require the United States to work with other nations.

Here’s what the U.S government must do:

• Secure the commitment of other countries and set the shared goal of completely ridding the planet of hunger by 2015 — not just cutting it in half, as governments at the 1996 World Food Summit pledged to do. Then take whatever steps are necessary to complete the task.
• Agree that access to adequate food is a basic human right, so that broad-based international efforts by governments, nonprofit groups, and businesses to build a safety net will have firm support. A global market needs a global safety net.
• Reform the protocols and agreements that apply to early intervention by international groups when conditions that spread world hunger begin to build. This will require a long-term plan for providing food to people marooned in war zones.
• Separate food assistance and other developmental aid from “America First” principles and bureaucratic squabbling — and emphasize support for nutrition programs for women and children.
• Reduce the perverse subsidies to farmers in OECD countries and remove trade barriers that hinder poor nations.
• Lead the world’s developed countries in creating intellectual property-rights regimes and institutional frameworks that will ensure that the poor can use and benefit from the materials, processes, and products of the “new sciences” in agriculture, health, and communications. This includes protecting genetic resources, developing new mechanisms for scientific exchange, preventing exclusive licensing of important technologies, facilitating the exchange of genetic materials, and strengthening farmers’ rights and helping to build scientific capacity, particularly in Africa.
• Streamline the politics that surround the international research centers and increase the centers’ resources so they can better support farmer-led innovation for the hungry in Africa.

Most important, the United States must give the problem of world hunger the priority and attention that it deserves so that we will not just try to reduce hunger effectively but will actually succeed.

The poor of the world cannot afford to have us do less. And now it’s clear that the United States can’t afford to do less either.

Susan Sechler is senior adviser for biotechnology policy at the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York. This article is adapted from The American Prospect, Winter 2002 Special Supplement on Globalization and the World’s Poor.