Tag Archives: Food for Peace

October 30, 2011 · 8:20 pm

Biden Optimistic Global Hunger Struggle Can Be Won

Vice President Joe Biden spoke last Monday at the World Food Program USA award ceremony. He praised this year’s winners, Bill Gates and Howard Buffett, who have dedicated their talents to fighting hunger around the globe.

But Biden also made an admission of guilt—-for being optimistic that we can win the struggle against global hunger. This battle is now ongoing in the famine zones of East Africa, drought-ravaged Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and numerous other regions.

Biden said, “I am often accused of being an optimist. I plead guilty, because I believe strongly in the human capacity-and desire-to build a better world. But I am particularly confident in our ability to feed the future because we have done it before.”

Biden talked about our support of South Korea, once a war-torn country with millions starving. Today South Korea has strong economic development and is a donor to the UN World Food Programme’s hunger-fighting missions.

Biden said, “Beginning in the 1950’s, we provided agricultural support-research, training, and partnerships with American firms-to South Korea, which was one of the poorest countries on the planet. Today, it is the world’s 15th largest economy, and a major trading partner responsible for hundreds of thousands of American jobs. ”

This is a long way from the South Korea that U.S. Army major Charles Arnold saw in 1951 during the Korean War. Arnold, who led a UN Civil Assistance team, said children arrived at feeding stations and “greeted us by rubbing their stomach and saying hungry.” After regular meals from Arnold’s team, the children took on a new, healthy look. They began to smile.

South Korea was also a country that benefited from the famous CARE packages that fed so many hungry people in Europe after World War II. President Truman urged Americans to send these CARE packages to feed those hungry and displaced by the Korean conflict.

As time went on, South Korea gained from agricultural development projects, similar to those Biden praised in the current “Feed the Future” campaign. South Korea was also one of the beneficiaries of the U.S. Food for Peace program started under President Eisenhower and expanded during President Kennedy’s administration.

George McGovern was Food for Peace director under President Kennedy. He writes that about 2 million South Korean children were receiving school meals under this hunger-fighting initiative. These meals made children healthier and better educated. This is a contrast to Afghanistan today, where low funding for the UN World Food Programme has meant that many impoverished children have lost their school meal ration.

In addition, proposed budget cuts to international food aid, including Food for Peace, will mean school feeding, Feed the Future and other aid projects will face cutbacks. This is a severe threat to peace.

Biden also said, “We will continue to support your work, by urging our friends in Congress to resist the urge to slash foreign aid budgets, because long-term solutions now can reduce the cost of massive relief efforts and instability later.”

Hunger-fighting programs currently make up less than one tenth of one percent of the federal budget. So slashing them does virtually nothing to eliminate the debt. Funding cuts though would devastate U.S. foreign policy. It is virtually impossible for countries to develop and have peace when generation after generation of children grow up malnourished and stunted in mind and body.

Biden finished his speech on Monday citing Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, who saved millions from hunger through his agricultural innovations. Borlaug said: “If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.”

This is a message Congress needs to hear again and again as it makes crucial decisions about our foreign policy. The Food for Peace tradition of the U.S. is very much at stake in the current debates on the federal budget. What they decide in the coming days will have major implications on whether the struggle against global hunger can be won.

View a video of Biden’s speech.

Article first published as Biden Optimistic Global Hunger Struggle Can Be Won on Blogcritics.

Food for Peace, Brazil and the World Food Prize

One of this year’s World Food Prize winners is H.E. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former President of Brazil. His work fighting hunger included developing the national school feeding program. An excerpt from the World Food Prize web site reads:

“The national School Feeding Program has had a far-reaching impact on reducing child malnutrition by providing nutritious meals to children in all grades of Brazil’s public schools across the country. Forty-seven million were being served in 2010, with a minimum of 30 percent of the food supplied from local farms. Child malnutrition fell 61.9 percent between 2003 and 2009, and all age groups experienced improved access to quality food.”

Brazil has come a a long way in its fight against hunger and developing its school feeding. Back in the 1960s Brazil got help from the U.S. Food for Peace program. Here is a photo of a milk shipment leaving for Brazil. George McGovern, a World Food Prize winner himself, is to the far right.

1962 Photo of the largest milk donation under the “Food for Peace” program leaving from Brooklyn, NY heading toward Brazil. Left to right is the Brazilian ambassador Roberto de Oliveira Campos; Capt. Timothy Harrington and George McGovern, the Food for Peace director. The milk will be used for maternal feeding and the school lunch program. (Library of Congress)

Today, Brazil supports school milk programs such as the one in Haiti. See my article Got Milk? Haiti’s Farmers and Now Schools Do.

Food for Peace, CRS Working to Feed the Hungry in East Africa

President Reagan called the U.S. Food for Peace program an “instrument of American compassion.” This government program has a tradition of feeding the world’s hungry. It saves lives. It represents the very best of America.

And we see it in action again with the recent Food for Peace donation of $64 million to the charity Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The food will be used as part of a relief mission to drought-stricken Ethiopia.

Ronald Reagan said “people who are hungry are weak allies for freedom.” Today, Food for Peace is threatened with severe budget cuts by Congress. (photo courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library)

Ethiopia is suffering food shortages from failed crops. For the food that is available, prices are high for many Ethiopian families.

Catholic Relief Services is feeding about a million people there as part of the Joint Emergency Operations Plan. The Food for Peace donation goes to this joint mission.

The charities CARE, Save the Children US, Save the Children UK, World Vision, Food for the Hungry Ethiopia, and the Relief Society of Tigray will assist in the distribution of the food.

Around a million people are being given a lifeline, thanks to Food for Peace, CRS and the other charities working together. In addition, CRS and other aid agencies continue their work to build up the resilience of farmers to drought. This effort has helped make Ethiopia less vulnerable to the drought, compared to parts of Somalia where aid agencies have had far less access in recent years.

Women collect water in a region of Ethiopia where CRS has been working on drought mitigation projects since 2003. Photo by KL Dammann/CRS

Food for Peace, which started during the Eisenhower administration, has come under pressure recently from Congress. Members of the House of Representatives have proposed cutting most, if not all, of the funding for Food for Peace. Yet hunger-fighting programs are a very tiny part of the overall budget and cutting them makes no dent in the federal deficit.

CRS is working with its partners throughout East Africa to bring relief from the massive drought that struck the region. This includes aid to Somali refugees in Kenya, as well as support to host communities there which are also suffering from the widespread drought. In Somalia, within the areas of Mogadishu and Baidoa, CRS is helping 28,000 displaced persons with health and nutrition services.

In addition CRS is providing food, water, and livelihood support to 35,000 drought-affected Somalis in the south-central part of the country. Their work involves not only emergency aid, but also projects for building up resistance to future droughts.

David Orth-Moore of CRS says, “While working to alleviate the immediate human suffering, CRS recognizes the importance of long-term drought mitigation programs, and we’ve seen that some communities are faring better now during this current drought because of those projects.”

You can help Catholic Relief Services by donating to their East Africa Emergency Fund