Statement of the Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme Mr. Jean-Jacques Graisse USDA/USAID Export Food Aid Conference "Food Aid: Are we Reaching the Hungry?" KANSAS CITY, USA 24 April 2002 1
Eighteen thousand young children will die today, largely because their families could not feed them. That is hardly the best line to begin a luncheon speech, but it explains why I am here at this conference and why there is an organization called the World Food Programme. It is really difficult for people here in the heart of America's breadbasket to understand the depth of hunger that still exists in the world. The same is certainly true in my native Belgium and the rest of Western Europe or in other rich countries like Japan, Canada or Australia. Yet the simple process of obtaining and eating food is at the very center of the existence of hundreds of millions of hungry, poor people. Here in the US, family household expenditures on food at home average a little more than a ten cents out of every dollar earned -- in some poor developing countries that figure is as high as 80 cents. Average income for an American family of four is around $28,000. Imagine what it would be like if that family had to spend more than $22,000 on food. Earning enough to eat would overshadow every other activity in daily life. There would be little financial room to pay for a car or television, school fees might well break the bank, and investing for the future would be out of the picture. If you had to scrape together just $500 a month to rent your house or land, that might mean cutting back to two meals a day, or smaller meals without the variety needed for sound nutrition. The bread-winner would eat first and most, while other family members might get shortchanged. It is hard for you and me to even imagine that kind of existence. But this is what life is like for roughly 800 million hungry people in the developing world. There are some welcome signs that we may eventually help them solve their problems. President Bush and European Union officials both announced substantial increases in development assistance for poor countries in Monterrey last month. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that it takes more than pouring in more aid funds to cope with the lack of economic growth in the developing world. On food issues, it is a really positive sign that Andrew Natsios announced that the US will boost its spending to strengthen agriculture in the developing world by 38 percent. Funding for agriculture - the most important sector for most poor people in Asia, Africa and Latin America - has languished in recent years. All this is great news. But I have to ask one question. What about those 18,000 children who will die today? Will this aid make a difference? Will it make a difference in time? To the first question, I would answer with a strong "yes". To the second, I would have to say often the answer would be "no". We will continue to lose children - 2
especially young ones - to hunger and malnutrition today, tomorrow and for years to come before economic development ever even reaches their families. Why? Well, quite frankly, I don't think we look at poverty through the eyes of the poor. We don't look at hunger through the eyes of the hungry. If we did, we would behave quite differently -- just as an American family would with $28,000 to live on and spending $22,000 on food. Like any other field, foreign aid and development has its own jargon. You run into phrases like "people centered" and "participatory" development. The idea here is to go out ask involve poor and hungry people in helping themselves. You go out and ask them what kind of assistance they need and how they want to use it. Well, we are only listening with one ear to their answers. A while ago the World Bank did a survey of poor people and asked what was the single thing they lacked and needed most. The answer they gave most often was: food. It is not always the poorest people who are reduced to spending so much time and energy on obtaining food. Pieter Piot, who heads the UN programme working to combat AIDS, spoke some time ago about AIDS patients and their families in Africa and Asia and what it is they told him they needed most. You know, it wasn't medicine and it wasn't cash - it was food. So my first point to share today is that donor countries - and I do not mean the USA - are just not paying enough attention to the immediate needs poor people have for food. The international development banks, by far the best players in the development arena, make loans. They want to demonstrate some minimal level of performance and return, so they often invest in the most productive rather than the poorest areas. They want to show clear progress to their donors. The same is true to varying degrees for most of the players in international development. They want to help the most people with the best targeted investments - often these are not the poorest and most marginalized people. And it is these very poor people who struggle with hunger - pastoralists in the barren countryside of Ethiopia and Eritrea, street children in Lima, and landless Bangladeshis who have nothing to offer but their labor in an economy with too few jobs. To be fair, I think all the aid agencies are now looking at ways to get to the poorest segments of the population in the developing world. A while ago, the World Food Programme took a look at its food aid and compared it to other kinds of international aid. According to the OECD, only 44 percent of all foreign aid actually went to the poorest countries. That is pretty extraordinary. When you and I pay our taxes and our governments tell us a portion - a very small portion in fact - is going to help poor people through foreign aid., that is what we expect will happen. Obviously, it is not that simple. There are many reasons and explanations for this, some good and some bad, and 3
I won't go into the merits of them here. But at WFP we were encouraged to find that over 90 percent of our food aid was going to the poorest nations, and in those poorest nations to the poorest people. The message is simple and this is my second point: of all types of foreign aid, targeted food aid does a better job of reaching the poorest people than just about any form of assistance. There is another major plus to food aid, especially when it is provided in carefully targeted projects. Food has an immediate impact on an anaemic pregnant woman in the highlands of Ecuador, on an AIDS orphan in Uganda, on an old man in North Korea who is refusing to eat so his grandchildren will not go hungry. These people cannot wait for economic development to reach them: they are hungry today. We need to feed them today and until they can feed themselves. Another question I like to ask some of my colleagues in the development field is: How do you expect hungry people, who are often weaker and sicker, some even stunted or retarded, to hop out of bed - assuming they have a bed - in the morning, filled with energy, to go out and compete with people who have been fed all their lives? These people are out of the race before the gun goes off. What's worse is that some of them - and this is the most depressing part - are literally born hungry. Their mothers were deficient in vitamin A and iron and did not take in enough calories. The result is inevitable - a malnourished baby. All of you know just how crucial prenatal nutrition and good food in the first year of life are for cognitive development. All of us who have children can remember rushing around and pursuing them with food when they were small. Maybe there is something instinctive about that. Well, there are hundreds of millions of mothers who do not have the food to go rushing after their babies. Time and again in some of the worst disasters WFP has faced in countries like Sudan and Angola, we come across desperate mothers with crying babies clinging to them. Let me tell you, there are few things more horrible than the look in the eyes of a mother who is so hungry she cannot even nurse her baby. Last year, WFP fed 73 million poor people in 84 countries. You may have heard about how we kept 2000 trucks on the road in Afghanistan, even at the height of the military campaign, to make sure that enough food was going into the country. Most of that, by the way, was U.S. food. You may also have heard about our doing much the same thing in Kosovo a few years back and in East Timor, Southern Sudan, in the Horn of Africa and in Central America. We are feeding desperate people both in wars and natural disasters and in peace. But - in spite of all these recently announced increases in aid - those numbers are about to drop sharply. We expect to get far less in surplus food contributions from USDA this year and that means poor people will go hungry. In the 4
last few years, USDA has done a fantastic job of helping us reach far more people than in the past. Altogether, the US contribution to WFP in 2001 was $1.2 billion out of a total of $1.9 billion - we are voluntarily funded so that was a great vote of confidence. In fact, it was the first time the US contributed more than $1 billion to any single UN agency. But that figure is about to drop by nearly $500 million. The decline in USDA contributions alone will mean we will have to stop feeding more than 30 million people. There is a debate going on now in Washington about agricultural policies, including food aid, as Congress finalizes the new Farm Bill. Needless to say, I am no expert on US law and it is not my place to lobby. But let me ask a few questions: Is it time to cut back on food aid when there are still 7 million hungry Afghans and an unstable political situation? And what about the 6 million North Korean children America is helping to feed? Will it help defuse tensions to cut back there as well? What happens if the predicted El Nino this year devastates Central America again? America has long been the world 's largest single contributor of food aid. We are making progress in reducing the number of hungry people each year. Now is not the time to stop. Eighteen thousand young children will die today because their families could not feed them...and that is a tragedy we have the capacity to end. 5