ZWERDLING: Now, what about foreign aid? For years since World War II, one of the hallmarks of foreign policy, one of the hallmarks of American policy, has been that we are generous. I’m speaking now for the United States government. We give food. We give food to poor countries all around the world and other countries do the same so why isn’t that solving the problem?
LAPPÉ: Well I think the Americans are generous but they don’t understand. If you ask most Americans, 80% more want to give aid and in fact Americans believe that we’re now giving 20% of our national income in aid. They believe it’s 20% when it’s actually a fraction of 1%. So Americans are very generous but our government gives in foreign aid to help the poor countries what we spend in the war in Iraq in a few months.
ZWERDLING: Incredible figures. We’ll get back to that in a moment. But let’s pause because Dr. Pedro Sanchez is joining us now.
Dr. Sanchez, thanks for joining us. It’s good to see you today. I take it you’re at the World Food Prize International Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa. Could you tell our listeners quickly about Noman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winner who founded the World Food Prize. Why is he such an esteemed figure in the fight against hunger?
SANCHEZ: Norman Borlaug is our leader in the fight against hunger and has been so in the last 50 years or so. Because he was the father of the Asian Green Revolution during the ‘60s and the ‘70s that I watched when I was a student and when people were saying that India with a population of 200 million people was going to starve. Then Norman Borlaug and his team of scientists developed new varieties of wheat and maize and rice and other staple crops. And guess what? India has a population now of a billion people and India is a food exporter. So things have changed and he is the person who single-handedly has led the biggest effort in the world fighting against hunger in the second half of the 20th century. He got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for that. That brought a lot of clout to us agronomists and soil scientists and crop scientists because he was the first person honored by that. He tried to get a Nobel Prize for agriculture for food; he didn’t succeed so he created the World Food Prize. It is supposedly the equivalent of a Nobel Prize but for agriculture and it is awarded every year here in Des Moines, Iowa.
ZWERDLING: You’ve been very gracious talking about Dr. Borlaug. I know you’re going to be much more modest talking about yourself, so I will talk about you. You recently won that prize, right? The $250,000 World Food Prize. I know you also chair the United Nations Hunger Task Force. You’ve been meeting in Des Moines with representatives of more than 60 countries talking about world hunger this week. What is your sense? What’s the sense of this group? Are you feeling optimistic that the world is making great strides or are you all feeling troubled?
SANCHEZ: I’m feeling optimistic. And it is time to be optimistic about this. The reason I’m feeling optimistic is that the world has come to a consensus on the Millennium Development Goals which were all agreed by all governments in the world five years ago. Very, very importantly, just after this UN summit about three weeks ago in New York, all governments, particularly our own, recommitted themselves to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, and one of the key ones is cutting hunger in half by 2015. The world leaders from the rich countries have committed themselves to increasing the contribution of foreign aid assistance to poor countries to 0.7 per cent of their gross national product. As a previous speaker said, the contribution of the U.S. right now is very, very small. It’s about 0.1 per cent, so we’ve got a long way to go to do that but many other countries, particularly European countries, have reached the 0.7 per cent.
ZWERDLING: But Dr. Sanchez what gives you the optimism that the United States, for example, is going to increase its contribution by seven times, right? Or 5 times, that’s what we’re talking about, from .14 percent of our gross national product to .7 per cent. That’s a huge jump.
SANCHEZ: Yes that is a huge chunk. The commitment is there and especially the recommitment and the speech by President Bush at the United Nations General Assembly about three weeks ago in which he said the United States is firmly behind the Millennium Development Goals and the commitments and that’s what’s implied. Let’s see what happens. I’m skeptical whether the U.S. will be willing to do that. It’s a matter of political will. It’s not a matter of money as the previous speaker has said. The amounts that we are talking about here are peanuts compared to the amounts that we put in Iraq and other things like that. Actually fighting hunger and poverty around the world tackles the underlying issues of why all these things happen, all these terror attacks happen, all these insecurities happen. These are the underlying reasons so they certainly deserve a major increase in investment from the rich world and now I’m so delighted that the U.S. government now is firmly behind this.
ZWERDLING: You’ve just mentioned a crucial issue which is that according to every analyst you talk to hunger is the underlying cause of instability in the world, so you would think that the world’s leaders would put fighting hunger, ending hunger, as their number one priority. No leader wants their nation or the nation next door to be unstable so why do you think there is this lack of political will or has been for so long?
SANCHEZ: I think it’s because this message hasn’t really sunk in. Now we could fight terrorism with guns and we must, of course. We must fight that. But that is the symptom. That is not the disease. The disease is the underlying hunger and poverty and desperation that people feel when they are in this horrible situation. It’s not that the hunger and the poor people who take up arms, it’s their intellectual leaders, usually middle class or rich people, who do that on their behalf. But the underlying cause is that the hungry people are too weak to do that and they don’t have the power as the previous speaker was saying. But this is the underlying cause. If we’re going to have a stable and secure world for everybody, we have to eliminate hunger from the face of this planet and if we get the political will we can cut hunger in half in the next ten years.
ZWERDLING: Now your task force, the United Nations task force, has made a number of recommendations to the United Nations. What are two or three of the most important ones do you think that you just handed to the UN?
SANCHEZ: Well, I would say one of the most important ones relates to the issue of food aid. Food aid from the United States, Europe and so on is absolutely essential for that 10% of those 850 million hungry people around who are acutely hungry, who are starving and usually related to wars or natural disasters. What’s going on in Darfur right now and things like that. The acutely hungry, the starving people must get the food aid. But we have a better idea for the chronically hungry people, the people who are not starving to death but die in the millions because of hunger-related diseases. These are the more silent hungry people – the people that you don’t see on your TV screen. Well, this is a large majority. It’s 90% of the hungry people.
One of the recommendations is to have feeding programs, particularly in schools, and for instance with locally-produced foods – locally-produced, not imported. I want to be very clear about this. Locally-produced foods. Why? Because first they are the right kind of foods that people like there. Second, they can be very nutritionally-balanced. We need to make sure we have all the micronutrients, the Vitamin A, the iron, the zinc, the protein, as well as the calories. And third that would generate tremendous demand for increased agricultural productivity by small holder farmers which is exactly the key to getting out of hunger in the long run. So it would have a positive spin-off as opposed to what happened when you very generously send food aid but that food aid affects the local markets. That food aid usually prevents local farmers from getting a better demand for their products, and that food aid is usually unbalanced in terms of micronutrients and so on.
I am asking here flat out and there I want to strongly support the Bush Administration’s proposal to Congress to begin to wean ourselves off of food aid, again for the chronically hungry, we need to keep it in a big way for the acutely starving hungry the way they are. And basically send cash. Don’t send food. This is not going to affect American farm exports because the demand for food from the world from countries that can’t afford to buy the food, such as China, is mushrooming so that you won’t suffer because of this. We want America to continue being the breadbasket of the world, the feeder of the world, but we want most of that to be food that is purchased by other countries that can afford to do it and give a chance for the poor countries to increase their own local food production. So this is one of our tenets that is beginning to happen. Countries like Ghana, now supported by the Netherlands, are having a major program of school feeding with locally-produced foods and again I very much admire and support what the Bush Administration is trying to do there. I don’t think it has the political support yet in Congress .