Nearly 30 years ago, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a promiseto the first World Food Conference: "Within a decade, no child will go to bedhungry." No one has made good on Kissinger's promise, but he was correct that itwas possible. We had the means; we lacked the motivation. After September 11, wehave both. If moral concern alone is not enough to impel serious U.S. action onreducing world hunger, our national interest--and national security--certainlyought to be. Happily, national interest and moral responsibility coincide here.As a primary beneficiary of economic globalization and one of its principalrule-makers, the United States has a special responsibility to build a worldmarket that works against hunger. And while it is clear that the multimillionaireOsama bin Laden was not even pretending to act on behalf of the poor and hungry,the surprising outpouring of anti-American bile we've seen from parts of thethird world these last few months surely owes much to the problems of poverty andhunger. It is easy to hate a nation where food is wasted and more than 60 percentof the people are officially overweight (as defined by the U.S. Centers for DiseaseControl) when its leaders will not take significant steps to help the hungry.
So far, American policy makers have been too preoccupied with defending thehomeland and stimulating the economy to begin the process of thinking differentlyabout how to approach food security. But our changed understanding of theAmerican place in the world--our inescapable interdependence with andvulnerability to the rest of humanity--makes the problem of world hunger moreurgent. Hunger is not new, but the worldwide flow of communications, ideas,capital, labor, and opportunity provides policy makers with ways to help poorpeople generate income in formerly remote areas. If we use the tools at ourdisposal to fight world hunger seriously, the benefits will redound to all ofus--in the West and in the developing world--politically, economically, andmorally.
Global Trade and World Hunger
The last decade was the richest in world history, so itseems reasonable that the proportion of people in developing countries who areundernourished dropped from 20 percent to 17 percent; that's 40 million fewerhungry people worldwide in 2000 than in 1990. But China alone accounted for 76million fewer people going hungry--which means that in most other developingnations, hunger actually increased. Regionally, sub-Saharan Africa has thehardest time feeding itself, with 34 percent of the population, or 194 millionpeople, going hungry. While "only" 16 percent of those in the Asia and Pacificregions are hungry, that's almost 500 million people. In Latin America, there are53.6 million hungry people (11 percent of the population); in North Africa andthe Middle East, 32.5 million (9 percent).
Power relationships tell us who is likely to be hungry. Three-fourths ofthe world's hungry are politically marginalized people who live in rural areas.Within the family, women and children are the most likely to go hungry. Studieshave found that educating women is the most significant step in reducing hunger.Thus, in poor countries, any government like the Taliban that bans the educationof women virtually guarantees child hunger.
Expanding trade has improved food security in countries that have been able totake advantage of it. Economists at the International Food Policy ResearchInstitute (IFPRI) measure a country's food security in a combination of ways:domestic production, nutritional status of the most vulnerable, education levels,and the percentage of export earnings that a country uses to import food. Beforethe explosion of the global food market in the early 1970s, this export/importpercentage was fairly uniform across countries, ranging between 15 and 20percent. By 1998 the average had dropped substantially, to 6 percent--but for theleast developed countries, where growth in exports has been substantially slowerthan the aggregate growth of trade, the percentage is up, closer to 23 percent.
Any number of reasons can account for why poorer countries have to spend somuch of their export money on food, but unfair trade practices imposed byfirst-world countries is a big one. Many poor nations face market barriers totheir goods abroad--on everything from textiles to sugar--while their farmers athome must compete with highly subsidized food and agricultural goods from theworld's richest nations in North America and Europe.
The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations from 1986 to 1994 was meant to lowerthese rich-country subsidies; it largely failed. Wealthy countries--members ofthe Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)--have continued to subsidize their domestic farmers' production at a rate of $365 billion ayear. (Total official development assistance, meanwhile, has been running at about$55 billion yearly.) Buoyed by these subsidies, farm production in the UnitedStates and other OECD countries has increased steadily, depressing world prices,discouraging producers in developing countries, and putting valuable tradeearnings out of the reach of the poorest countries. The effect is that poorcountries get cheap food dumped on them from the subsidized farmers in the UnitedStates and elsewhere. Little of this imported food gets to the hungry in thecountryside; most winds up with the urban elite. This is clearest in Africa,where the better-off in the seaport capitals can be fed more cheaply bysubsidized U.S. and European grain than by food trucked hundreds of miles overbad roads from the interior. Thus, the middle class in Dakar, Senegal, eatbaguettes made of wheat, while up-country farmers go broke and hungry for lack ofmarkets.
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, whiletwo-thirds of the money goes to the largest and richest 10 percent of thoseeligible. Moreover, this puts the nation's agricultural policy, foreign policy,and development policy at three-way cross-purposes. In October the United Stateswas following several contradictory courses simultaneously: trying to bring poorAsian nations into its coalition against terror; participating in agenda draftingfor a new round of trade negotiations in Doha, Qatar, aimed largely at gettingrid of domestic farm subsidies; and working on legislating a farm bill thatcalled for $171 billion to be paid over the next 10 years to mainly wealthyfarmers (who in turn donate to the politicians who fight for their subsidies). Theaggregate effect of all these conflicting impulses is to make a hash of U.S.food-security policy.
America's Flawed Food Policy
In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of HumanRights proclaimed that access to food is a human right. The United Statesagreed--until recently. At the 1996 World Food Summit, we changed our position onthis basic right, reportedly for fear of legal implications. Moreover, U.S. aidto foreign countries is low compared with other OECD countries in terms ofpercentage of gross domestic product--in fact, it is the lowest, at one-tenth of1 percent of GDP--and most of the aid we do provide goes to a few better-offcountries, primarily Israel and Egypt. How can we be taken seriously when we say,as we often do, that we want to work with partners to improve global foodsecurity if we refuse to provide resources and are afraid to acknowledge foodsecurity as a basic human right?
The primary U.S. international food-assistance program, Food for Peace, isdramatically out of sync with the times. Since its inception in the 1950s, reformcompromises have left a bureaucratic nightmare--a Rube Goldberg device riggedaround and through a maze of politically tendentious government agencies,including the Department of Agriculture, the State Department, USAID, the Officeof Management and Budget, the National Security Council, and even the Treasury.With such a cumbersome and conflicted system, it is hardly surprising that after adecision was made to provide emergency food relief for Afghanistan, delivery washeld up for days while U.S. government officials argued about whether the foodwould be bought in the United States or in Pakistan.
Worse, the program's resources are still tilted toward moving U.S. farmsurpluses into export markets rather than feeding hungry people. Title I of Foodfor Peace benefits American farmers by providing loans for the purchase of U.S.agricultural commodities to be used as food aid. The program's budget wasincreased by 50 percent in 1998--despite repeated reports from the GeneralAccounting Office and elsewhere that the effort is of little help in marketdevelopment or to the poor. Meanwhile, the budget for Title II--under which foodis given to nongovernmental organizations for humanitarian distribution--wasincreased only marginally, after having been allowed in the past to fall belowthe amount required by law. The budget of Title III, a government-to-governmentprogram aimed at encouraging development, has fared even worse: It has shrunkfrom $300 million in 1993 to $30 million in 2001.
To be fair, it should be noted that the United States is the biggest donor tothe UN 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 we devoteinsufficient food aid to the fight against chronic hunger. We refuse to recognizethe benefits we would reap if, as the world's richest superpower, we put a higherpolitical priority on assuring food security for the world's poor and less on thedemands of the farm lobby.
Lessons from China
As mentioned, China has reduced the number of its hungry by76 million since 1990. Are there lessons from the Chinese example that could beapplied elsewhere--or is China unique?
The answer is mixed. On the one hand, China's example demonstrates thatindependent government action can produce rapid results. On the other, fewdeveloping countries duplicate China's precise set of circumstances: a strong government, a commitment to improving small-scale farming and rural enterprise,an entrepreneurial population, a decent infrastructure, and a high populationdensity that makes it easier to get food to markets--an advantage Africa notablylacks. China, unlike Africa, was able to take advantage of "Green Revolution"crops, mainly rice and wheat, and it has been developing its own biotech crops.It opened food markets a bit, a step popular with farmers. And it relied not onforeign capital but, rather, on the creation of credit domestically. (China nowhas a savings rate of almost 40 percent of GDP, and the second-largest capitalreserves in the world.)
Globalization has also helped China--although its leaders have insisted ondefining the terms. In 1978, when the new regime opened its doors to the West, aflood of scientific and political ideas came in, further stimulating an alreadyhighly innovative population to produce more. But information now flows out of aswell as into China--and as the economist Amartya Sen has demonstrated, faminedoes not occur where information travels freely. It is thus improbable that 30million Chinese people will starve to death as they did in the 1958-1961 famines.
But China's refusal to bow to demands for globalization on Western terms willnot be easy for poorer countries, especially small ones, to emulate. Chinacontrols its own currency, so it is not prey to global financial speculators andthe International Monetary Fund. And the country's mixture of authoritariangovernment and market enterprise has allowed it to open itself up only to thedegree that Beijing judges beneficial. It's unlikely that this style ofauthoritarian state capitalism could work elsewhere in the world.
Africa Still Starves
While most of the world's hungry live in Asia, hunger ismost intractable in Africa. More than three-fourths of Africans are farmers, andthree-fourths of these farmers are women, many of them struggling alone tosupport their families, with husbands off trying to find work in the cities ordead or dying of AIDS. Some 90 percent of Africa's hungry are rural; but sincethe continent's political elite tend to live in port cities, the rural areassuffer government neglect. As an aid worker remarked during the 1984-1985 Africanfamine: "Starve the city people and they riot; starve the rural people and theydie. If you were an African political leader, which would you choose?" Thus,leaders skew policies toward city folk to the detriment of the vast majority oftheir people. Droughts may trigger famines in Africa, but their deeper underlyingcauses lie in the political choices of African governments and the slow responseto these emergencies by food-giving governments.
Ineffective or unjust governments also cause wars. According to IFPRI,there have been 17 major armed conflicts in Africa over the past decade (in thesame period, the entire rest of the world had 10). The use of hunger as an activeweapon in these conflicts has left nearly 20 million people, most of them womenand children, in need of food and humanitarian assistance. For a continentdependent on agricultural production for foreign exchange as well as sustenance,the longer-term effects of these conflicts are even more severe. According to oneUN estimate, Africa lost almost one-third of its agricultural production becauseof conflicts between 1970 and 1997. And globalization has not been much help tocountries that cannot attract investment.
Given that Africa's hungry are mainly small farmers working exhausted soil farfrom markets, ending hunger there will depend largely on increasing cropproduction on tiny farm lots. African farmers must acquire new techniques andtechnologies that rely on heavier use of chemical fertilizer as well as organicfarming methods; most of Africa lacks sufficient natural material for anorganic-only route, and few farmers can afford a chemical-fertilizer-onlyapproach. The most effective technologies will be those that providedrought-tolerance and resistance to specific pests and diseases yet areinexpensive and tailored to African ecosystems.
Traditionally, many such advances have come from government-funded researchin U.S. universities and from the 16 international research centers whose donorsare coordinated by the World Bank. But budgets for research targeted at the needsof poor farmers have been allowed to stagnate and decline. The total budget ofthe 16 international centers is only a thousandth of what the OECD spends on farmsubsidies. Biotechnology could help; for instance, drought-resistant crops may bejust over the horizon. But most biotech research is moving away from suchpublic-interest goals and toward private-sector needs. In its aggressive push toprotect intellectual-property rights, the U.S. government provides patents fornew biotech crop varieties without regard to the importance of these crops topoor countries or the deadening effect such policies have on locally tailoredinnovation. And even universities patent their discoveries now, usually providingexclusive licenses to the private sector rather than sharing them with otherpublic institutions. These new practices, combined with corporate fearfulness oflegal entanglements, have virtually halted the free flow of both the germ plasmnecessary for crop development and the information critical to research for thehungry.
Success in Bangladesh
History shows that U.S. intervention can make a hugedifference in a nation's ability to feed itself. Throughout the 1960s, storedU.S. grain surpluses served as a food safety net for the entire world. But in1972, the United States made its first major grain sale to Russia, sharply drawingdown its reserves and sending prices skyward. Bangladesh, fragile after floodingand war, could no longer afford grain at market prices. With U.S. food aidreduced, a crisis loomed. By 1974, on the eve of the first World Food Conference,Bangladesh was lurching toward a major famine. In making the argument to denyfurther aid, a high-ranking U.S. State Department official called the country "abasket case." (It is fair to note that the case was complicated by the fact thatBangladesh was trading with Cuba.)
Facing the outcry of the U.S. public and the international community, whowere learning about the effects of the approaching famine from the media,Senators George McGovern and Dick Clark--in attendance at the Romeconference--prevailed on Earl Butz, the reluctant secretary of agriculture, towire President Nixon asking him to reverse the U.S. policy and double aid toBangladesh. The United States did--but not before more than 200,000 peoplestarved to death.
The famine shocked the United States and its partners into action and the"basket case" assessment was proved wrong: The international community mounted a$30-billion broad-based effort at alleviating poverty and ensuring food securityin Bangladesh. Since then, the country has become largely self-sufficient in riceand population growth rates have slowed. Though a third of the populace stillsuffer from food insecurity, the famines of only a few decades ago no longerthreaten. If there is a lesson to be drawn from Bangladesh's example, it is thatthe U.S. government vastly underestimates what public action can achieve if it isbroadly based, well provisioned, and organized around a clear and concrete goallike ending hunger.
An Eight-Point Plan for Feeding the World
Ending world hunger requires that the United States and itspartners create a global marketplace in which producers from poor countries cancompete fairly against those in industrialized nations. If we continue to supporta market that favors the rich at the expense of the poor, we will continue tobreed tension and turmoil in developing countries--and anger against the UnitedStates.
Most of the positive steps that must be taken to achieve global foodsecurity are well known. Most are political rather than technical, and manyrequire the United States to work with other nations. Here's what our governmentmust do.
- Secure the commitment of other countries and set the shared goal ofcompletely ridding the planet of hunger by 2015--not just cutting it in half, asgovernments at the 1996 World Food Summit pledged to do. Then take whateversteps are necessary to complete the task.
- Agree that access to adequate food is a basic human right, so thatbroad-based international efforts by governments, nonprofits, and the businesssector to build a safety net will have firm support. A global market needs aglobal safety net.
- Reform the protocols and agreements that apply to early interventionby the global community when conditions that spread world hunger begin to build.This will require a long-term plan for providing food to people marooned in warzones.
- Separate food assistance and other developmental aid from "AmericaFirst" principles and bureaucratic squabbling--and emphasize support fornutrition programs targeted to women and children.
- Reduce the perverse subsidies to OECD-country farmers and removetrade barriers that hinder poor nations.
- Lead the developed countries in creating intellectual-property-rightsregimes and institutional frameworks that will ensure a robust intellectualcommon for agricultural science. This will involve facilitating the exchange ofgerm plasm with poor countries, protecting genetic resources, strengtheningfarmers' rights, preventing exclusive licensing of so-called enablingtechnologies, and helping to build scientific capacity in Africa.
- Streamline the donor politics that surround the internationalresearch centers and increase the centers' resources so they can better supportfarmer-led innovation for the hungry in Africa.
- Most important, give the problem of world hunger the priority andattention it deserves so that we will not just try to address hunger effectivelybut will actually succeed.
The poor of the world cannot afford to have us do less. And now it's clearthat the United States can't afford to do less either.
