Frances Moore Lappé
Keynote Speaker, 2005
The U.S. National Committee for World Food Day is pleased to announce that Frances Moore Lappé, author of more than a dozen books and co-founder of two national organizations, will be the featured guest on the 22nd annual World Food Day Teleconference. Lappé’s books have been used in a broad array of courses in hundreds of colleges and universities and in more than 50 countries. They have been translated into over a dozen languages. She has been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has lectured widely to university audiences, community groups and professional conferences and has received 17 honorary doctorates. In 1987 in Sweden, she became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the ”Alternative Nobel” for her “vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity.” Ms. Lappé has received numerous other awards including the Rachel Carson Award.
In 1975, with Joseph Collins she launched the Institute for Food and Development Policy to educate Americans about the causes of world hunger. The Institute has been described as one of the nation’s “most respected food think tanks.” In 1990 she co-founded the Center for Living Democracy, an initiative to help make visible and accelerate the spread of democratic innovations “in which regular citizens contribute to problem solving in all dimensions of public life.” As she has said, “Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy.”
In 2002 Lappé Anna released the 30th anniversary sequel to Diet for a Small Planet, her first book, with her daughter – Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. They traveled the world to explore the greatest challenges we face in the new millennium. She is now rewriting The Quickening of America. In commenting on the importance of learning from living democracy she wrote “over these 30-plus years I have experienced our world moving rapidly in two directions at once. In one direction I see heightened violence, polarization, environmental devastation and fear. In the other, people are manifesting cooperation with each other and with nature in ways so rich I could never have imagined them possible which I began my journey. They have taught me the key lesson: Hope is not what we find in evidence; it is what we become in action.”
In addition the following will be making cameo appearances:
- Dr. Pedro Sanchez, live from the World Food Prize ceremonies in Iowa
- Ambassador Tony Hall, U.S. Ambassador to the food agencies in Rome, Italy
- Dr. Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to receive
the Nobel Peace Prize.
DANIEL ZWERDLING
Program Host
National correspondent Daniel Zwerdling’s acclaimed investigative reports appear on all of NPR major news shows. He was based in Nairobi from 1989 to1993 where he examined nations struggling to develop across Africa and South Asia. He has won numerous awards, four this year alone – the Edward R. Murrow, the Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Robert F. Kennedy investigative awards, and the Columbia University Journalism School award for reporting on diversity and ethnic issues. Zwerdling has served as adjunct professor on Media Ethics at the American University in Washington DC and as an associate of the Bard College Institute for Language and Thinking in New York. His book, Workplace Democracy in 1980, is still used in colleges across the country.