Complexities of Fighting World Hunger – Rev. Dr. Liz Mosbo VerHage

This week I am attending the World Food Prize in Des Moines, IA, representing Bread for the World and the ONE Campaign. Discussions range from talks about international hunger, NGOs and political involvement, MDGs and hunger, ag-business and biofortification, how obsesity and undernutrition both exist around the globe, and specific success stories of how aid and economics and trade have improved hunger. Dr. Gupta is the 2005 World Food Prize laureate, recognized with a large cash prize and the prestige of receiving the ‘Nobel Prize in Food and Agriculture’ from his peers for his work in pioneering fishery techinques and spreading the ‘blue revolution.’

The World Food Prize is chaired by a former Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the inventor of ‘the green revolution’, Norman Borlaug. In the 1970’s, this doctorate in ag and plant species from an Iowa farm used biotech and genetically modified organisms to bring resistant wheat strains to Pakistan and India, starting a wave of foods that were made to thrive in various environments, be sustainable crops, and bring higher nutrition to the world’s hungry. This technology and the subsequent advances made in the last thirty years is part of why for the first time, we really can make poverty history around the globe. It’s interesting to learn more about these details on nutrition and the various groups participating in different ways to fight hunger – check their website (linked to the name above) if you’re interested in this area and seeing who the experts are in this area.

I continue to be persuaded, through this and other events, that there are very few people who literally do not want to help end hunger, or who don’t care about those suffering (although there are a few in that camp or whose motives are too mixed for me to understand). I think that what is more often the case, is that people feel overwhlemed by the complexity and enormous size of the problem, hear competing views on how and who should/can help contribute to ending hunger, and through guilt or busyness or not knowing how to start small with the problem, they give up or feel like they are personally not connected to it. Sometimes people choose to take on a watered-down version of a ’cause’ and then push in small ways that are popular or easy to do without any deeper commitment (think every Miss America contestant’s dream to end world hunger or establish world peace). Sometimes people become very ‘anti’ or ‘against’ different issues, retaliating in anger or frustration to complex issues, but seem unable to find something they are for or a way to constructively build toward a better vision or solution. Sometimes people are able to find a way to start helping, through personal one-on-one charity or through advocacy to begin to change the systemic issues involved in world hunger. Sometimes people seem to elect to be in the ‘business of social justice’ – and I am somewhat in this group – where their personal goals and interests become very comingled with the goals of bringing justice or helping others. This can be a very rewarding, and a very dangerous, place to be.

Professionalization of the service industry in its various forms has been happening over the last fifty years in the US. There are many positive benefits of having a larger pool of qualified and trained service personnel, and many pitfalls (John McKnight’s “The Careless Society” does a great job of looking at this phenomenon in more depth). I have always been aware of the pull to help others or work on justice or be in ministry for my own personal perks and benefits, so I’ve worked to stay honest about that and to not get too pulled into selfish interests above the goals of social justice. But more and more, as I see companies, NGO’s, government, churches, individuals, etc. who all work on hunger – with completely different views and opinions, and very different interests at stake – I think this area is an important one to continually re-examine. Not that getting a personal benefit out of helping others, or having any self interest is necessarily wrong – but it is sometimes difficult to separate the means from the ends. Do we want to end a social problem if it means we might lose our jobs, or not be needed? How do people in the business of being ‘the helper’ take turns and also learn to receive and express their own neediness? How does the market and gains

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that benefit specific shareholders not obfuscate the call to serve the poor? Healthy work and faith would integrate these areas, I would think – being able to not get turned into the monster you’re trying to fight in the name of effectiveness or yield or the ‘greater good’. But there is a business in fighting world hunger, and I for one don’t want to get too far along in its ranks. A call to living a life that fights hunger because of my kingdom values is more what I am aspiring to embody – which kinda sounds like a fine disctinction, but hold immense significance, I believe.

Below is a portion of an article that brings this issue up in the arena of food to Africans; it looks at whose interest is benefitting when the US gives food relief. (By the way, Andrew Natsios, quoted at the end of this excerpt, is speaking here tomorrow morning.) This business of world hunger can be a dangerous place, I tell you.

African Food for Africa’s Starving Is Roadblocked in Congress, New York Times
by Cecilia Dugger, October 12, 2005
It seemed like a no-brainer: changing the law to allow the federal government to buy food in Africa for Africans facing starvation instead of paying enormous sums to ship it from the American heartland, halfway around the world. Not only would the food get to the hungry in weeks instead of months, the government would save money and help African farmers at the same time.

The new approach had an impeccable sponsor in Republican-dominated Washington. The Bush administration, famous for its go-it-alone style, was trying to move the United States – by far the world’s biggest food donor – into the international mainstream with a proposal to take a step in just this direction. A lot of rich countries had already done so, most recently Canada .

So why is this seemingly sensible, cost-effective proposal near death in Congress?
Fundamentally, because the proposal challenges the political bargain that has formed the basis for food aid over the past half century: that American generosity must be good not just for the world’s hungry but also for American agriculture. That is why current law stipulates that all food aid provided by the United States Agency for International Development be grown by American farmers and mostly shipped on United States-flag vessels. More practically, however, it is because the administration’s proposal has run into opposition from three interests some critics call the Iron Triangle of food aid: agribusiness, the shipping industry and charitable organizations.

Just four companies and their subsidiaries, led by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sold more than half the $700 million in food commodities provided through the United States Agency for International Development’s food aid program in 2004, government records show. Just five shipping companies received over half the more than $300 million spent to ship that food, records show.

Members of Congress often applaud the benefits of food aid for American farmers, but that is not really how it works, as Christopher B. Barrett, a Cornell University economist and co-author of “Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting its Role,” noted. “It’s the middlemen who enjoy most of the gains,” he said, “not the farmers.”

Mr. Barrett’s research has established a third side to the triangle of interests with a deep stake in the status quo: nonprofit aid organizations. He and his co-author, Daniel Maxwell, a CARE official, found that at least seven of them, including Catholic Relief Services and CARE itself, depended on food aid for a quarter to half their budgets in 2001. Those groups distribute food in poor countries. But what is less well known is that they have also become grain traders, selling substantial amounts of the donated food on local markets in poor countries to generate tens of millions of dollars for their antipoverty programs. Given that at least 50 cents of each dollar’s worth of food aid is spent on transport, storage and administrative costs, selling food to raise money in, say, Africa, is an exceedingly inefficient way to finance long-term development, Mr. Barrett said. Better to just give nonprofit groups the money directly.

Had the Agency for International Development had the authority to buy food in Ethiopia in the mid-1980’s, when a million perished, or in 1999-2000 when 20,000 died, it could have saved many more lives, said its administrator, Andrew S. Natsios, who added, “Speed is everything in a famine response.”

2 thoughts on “Complexities of Fighting World Hunger”

Margaret says:

2005/10/14 at 5:15 AM

Hey, beautifully written post. It’s true that it’s difficult to balance self-interest and a desire to help others.

I’m working right now for the UN World Food Programme & I love the fact that we’re able to reach people quickly & effectively.

I can tell how involved you are with the fight against global poverty but please take a minute to look at Fight Hunger … just leaving your e-mail address feeds a child for a day.

Thanks, keep up the amazing posts!
Liz says:

2005/10/17 at 3:08 PM

Margaret – thanks for the comment and the site, great idea. I’d like to learn more about what the World Food Programme does – nice to “meet” you online. – Liz

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