SANCHEZ:   Dr. Pedro Sanchez, thank you so much for joining us today.  Pedro Sanchez, the chairman of the UN’s Hunger Task Force.  Thank you.  This is very interesting what he’s saying about foreign aid.  I think a lot of people don’t understand the origins of foreign aid, of food aid.  It was partly out of beneficence to help needy people in the rest of the world.  But that wasn’t and still isn’t the whole story, is it?

LAPPÉ:  Certainly part of the motive has been that we’ve had such abundance in the United States but because so many people are poor in the world there haven’t been sufficient markets so you’ve had this illusion of all this cheap grain in the world that we needed to get rid of and so it made perfect economic sense rather than looking at it from the human value point of view to dump it wherever we could, and so we had campaigns led by multinationals in Africa, for example, trying to convince people there to eat our wheat and to shift over to things that were imported so I think Dr. Sanchez’ point about local production, helping people buy locally is a very, very, very important part of this.

ZWERDLING:  Frankie, let’s pause again for a moment because we have a taped message now from somebody you know, one of the most famous environmental activists in the world, Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.  She’s the first African woman who’s ever done that and as you’re about to hear, Wangari Maathai is passionate about saving the environment and as we are going to talk about in a few minutes, protecting the environment has everything to do with feeding the hungry.  Here is Wangari Maathai.

MAATHAI:    I take this opportunity to commend the United Nations and especially the FAO for all the efforts that these organizations are making to end hunger in the world.  I know that it is a great surprise that despite the fact that many countries have more food than they can consume, others are dying of starvation.  This is partly because hunger is a political issue.  Those who are starving are starving not because there is no food in the world; it’s more because they do not have money to buy that food.  And those who have it are not willing to share.  But it’s also true that those who are poor are partly poor because they have failed to take care of their environment.  We know that we grow our food in the soil.  We need rain and we need water.  And it is therefore very important for us to prioritize the environment at the government level, at development agencies level, at community level.  We must protect our soil, prevent soil erosion, harvest rain water, protect our catchment areas and especially our forested mountains. 

It is for this reason that I have committed my life to educating people to understand the linkages between the problems at the local level, including hunger and the environment.  If we destroy our environment, if we do not nurture our environment, if we do not manage our environment sustainably, eventually we are going to suffer from many problems, including hunger.  And it is also for this reason that I’m complaining, appealing to the world to address the conservation of some of the most important forest ecosystems in the world.  The Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem, is second only to the Amazon Forest Ecosystem.  These two are extremely important, not only for the regions in which they are found, but also for the world, for the climate, for the control of our rain systems.  Until we combine our funds, our politics, and the energy of our people to use these to feed our people, hunger will continue to plague the world.  And of course, people will continue saying that what we need is more science, what we need is genetic engineering, what we need is population control. 

All these things are important but much more important to me is the willingness of governments, at the local level, at the national level, at the global level to prioritize food production, prioritize the environment and depoliticize the distribution of food so that people can access food when they need it.  I hope that on this World Food Day these issues will be focused on that we should urge our government to pay attention to the people to consider those who are poor and to encourage them to take care of the environment.  I want to appeal especially to the governments in Africa.  We must prioritize the needs of our people.  We must prioritize the environment.  The environment is at risk, especially in Africa.  It’s a great enemy and therefore it is in the protection of the environment, the protection of our watershed areas that should receive more money than sectors to protect ourselves with arms from an enemy that is definitely not as excruciating as hunger.  So let’s invest in the environment and in educating our people so they can take can take care of the land from which they will grow their food.  I wish you the very best and much success in the future.

ZWERDLING:   Frankie, you have visited Wangari Maathai in Kenya.  You’ve seen her at work.  Help us put into context what she is saying.

LAPPÉ:   She is my teacher.  Wangari Maathai is my teacher.  I have learned so much from this human being.  Let me say, first her life.  What did she do?  What did she do?  She looked around and saw the desert encroaching in her country and she said no, this can’t be.  Our whole food system will collapse if our ecology is ruined by deforestation in Kenya and so she went to the foresters and said we need to have people all over our country planting trees.  And the foresters said no, no, no.  It takes government-trained foresters to plant trees.  Wangari didn’t listen.  Wangari didn’t listen and she went out to the villages and she encouraged women – back to my first point about power – she encouraged women to say you have the power to solve this problem and they said well we don’t know about tree planting and she said well you know about crop planting.  It can’t be that different, so they experimented and now there are 6,000 tree nurseries in villages around Kenya and these unschooled village women who were pooh-poohed by the experts have planted 30 million trees so what they then discovered that were trees then were the entry point for them to realize the power that they could have and they did have and so then they started questioning all the export dependence. 

You know I talked earlier about what’s happening with coffee producers.  Well we met them and they said coffee prices have gone down, down.  And they said you know we can retrieve some of the crops that were indigenous in our area – those that were draught resistant, the millets and the root crops and so they started planting kitchen gardens.  So they were so somewhat off of the export treadmill that was taking them down and they started experimenting with non-chemical agriculture because that lessened their overhead, their costs.  And then they started questioning the village chief and realizing they had power to concern themselves with what is happening to the public lands, too. 

ZWERDLING:  Planting trees was subversive.

LAPPÉ:   It was, and you know Danny, Wangari Maathai has suffered jailing, beating because she stood up for the people and for the ecology of her country so she was then given the Nobel Peace Prize for that.  But what I learned from her is that she recognized that ultimately people do have the capacity in their villages around the world and in our towns and cities.  We have the answers.  It’s very common sense.  And I love the t-shirt of the Greenbelt Movement.  It just says “as for me, I’ve made a choice.”  And so we are at choice point.  Do we recognize the power we have?  Or do we say no, no, no, we have to turn over our fate to the market and whatever happens.

ZWERDLING:  Let’s pause for a moment and hear a message from somebody else who has a lot of courage and who has also made a choice.  Tony Hall is the U.S. Ambassador to the Food Agencies in Rome.  He is the former Congressman from Ohio and did you realize this?  Back in 1993 when Tony Hall was a member of Congress, he was so upset about how Congress was changing its approach to food and hunger issues that he went on a hunger strike – a hunger strike!  A member of Congress went on a hunger strike for several weeks to protest.  Here’s Ambassador Hall.

HALL:  Greetings from Rome.  My name is Tony Hall and I’m the US Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies in Rome, Italy.  And I’m glad to be with you today even if it’s only my image on this television screen.  Thanking you for coming together to celebrate such an important occasion.  I want to send special thanks to my friend, Pat Young, for all of her hard work and commitment to the issue of hunger. 

Before I came to Rome I was the United States Congressman for 24 years and I worked hard to push through dozens of laws to help America’s needy.  But hunger and poverty do not recognize national borders, and during my time in office, I visited more than 110 countries where I tried to identify areas of greatest need and help bring U.S. assistance as quickly as possible.  I have spoken with the mother who doesn’t have anything to feed her kids in Ethiopia and so she leaves the house early because she doesn’t want to face them or hear their hungry cries.  And I’ve looked in the eyes of an orphan in Malawi who lost both of his parents to AIDS and I watched him eat the one solid meal he gets through an NGO feeding program.  I have visited patients in hospitals in North Korea who had no medicine, no heat, no electricity but who did have food.  And despite the sadness and frustration that these tragedies instill in me, I also consider myself fortunate to be able to see US assistance in action.  Keeping people from becoming casualties of hunger. 

As you know, the World Food Day 2005 marks a significant anniversary, and 60 years ago saw the very first session of the Food and Agriculture Organization.  I tried to imagine what it must have been like and to think that in the midst of the death and destruction of World War II, 43 countries got together on the invitation of the U.S.  President Roosevelt established a group dedicated to saving lives, building livelihoods through agriculture.  And he said on that occasion “You have demonstrated beyond question that free peoples all over the world can agree upon a common course of action.  And upon common machinery for action.  The United Nations are united in the war against fear and want as solidly and effectively as they are united on the battle front in this world war against aggression.  And we are winning that war by action and unity. 

During my time as Ambassador to FAO I have had the pleasure of working with bright and determined people.  We’ve put our heads together on issues like Avian flu and last summer’s locust infestation in the Africa Sahel region.  And hunger hot spots in Ethiopia and Southern Africa.  And I think President Roosevelt would be amazed at the wide range of issues FAO now deals with. 

But as much as this is a day of celebration, it also must be a day of reflection and commitment to act.  We still live in a world where 850 million don’t have enough food to eat.  And we still live in a world where in a single day 25,000 people will lose their lives.  We still live in a world where $2 a day is the wage for 50% of the population of this world.  But I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of statistics today.  I bet you even know most of them.  What we need is action.  And the chance to put an end to hunger and poverty lies in the personal will of people like you. 

Let me conclude with a story about my brief time with Mother Theresa at her home for the dying in Calcutta.  And seeing the desperate poverty all around us, I asked her how she got started, how she decided which person to help.   And she said she stopped and picked up the first person she saw lying the street begging to survive and she took him back and she cleaned him up and loved him and he died soon thereafter but he died knowing that he was loved.  And she told me, and I’m sure many others, to start by doing what’s in front of us. 

I’m encouraged by that, and I encourage all of us including me, to do the same -- do the thing that’s in front of us.