Feeding World's Hungry More About Politics Than Food

SCOTT CANON / Kansas City Star 23apr04

Kansas wheat farmers might think proudly of how their fields can satisfy so many starving Africans, of how much hunger each pass of the combine wipes away.

After all, over the past half century 750 million people worldwide have warded off starvation with American food aid.

But anyone attending the Export Food Conference — sponsored in Kansas City this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Agency for International Development — heard that solving world hunger takes much more than just pointing grain barges toward the horn of Africa.

“After decades of progress, we are actually losing ground in the battle against hunger,” said James Morris, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. He's involved in a campaign prodding governments from the developed world to increase spending on food aid — hoping to move beyond crises management to long-term development.

He told conference participants of 25,000 deaths a day from hunger, mostly in Africa, and of 8,000 perishing daily from HIV/AIDS largely because they can't fight the disease without enough to eat.

On Tuesday, the opening day, weariness could already be heard in the voice of Andrew Natsios, Agency for International Development administrator, in anticipation of yet another budding hunger crisis.

“There's Ethiopia, again,” he said. “It has little way to feed its people against the vagaries of a harsh climate.”

Ethiopia came up near Thursday's close, too, in slides shown by Ethiopian disaster manager Simon Machele. They showed that in 2003, 13.2 million Ethiopians' survival relied on foreign food aid — about half of 548,000 tons from the United States.

That was almost four times as many Ethiopians unable to feed themselves as in the mid-1990s.

The conference also made clear that food aid has lost its CARE package simplicity. Sending Kansas wheat or Missouri corn to crisis spots around the globe requires delicacy and an understanding of a changing world.

• The farmer who uses the latest science to grow a crop resistant to bugs or disease or weed killers risks rejection from a developing country with phobias about biotechnology.
  
  
• U.S. officials who funnel that Midwestern grain to a Third World nation reeling from drought or flood could hear yelps from Europeans suspicious that Americans are dumping exports in the guise of food aid.
  
  
• A generous delivery of food aid might be welcomed by famished families, but resented by local farmers suddenly finding little reason to plant for the next season.
  
  
• More aid workers are coming under fire from bandits and warlords while trying to deliver help, Morris said. The United Nations, for instance, has relied solely on Iraqi nationals in that country since the bombing at its headquarters in August.

“Security is an overwhelming, overriding concern,” Morris said. “The U.N. is looking at all of its work through a different lens.”

Sometimes dangerous, delivering food aid has become increasingly problematic, too.

With much of its population reeling from the economic disaster left from a two-decades-long civil war, Angola jeopardized its international aid last month by announcing it would not accept genetically modified food, consumed daily by Americans in any number of processed foods, but shunned by Europeans.

Angola's decision has been even more maddening to aid groups because the specifics of the ban remain unclear. As a result a 19,000-ton U.S. corn shipment to the country has been delayed.

Zambia and Zimbabwe, citing environmental and health fears, have also rejected biotech food aid in the past. Other African countries have accepted American biotech grain only after it was milled to prevent errant seeds from taking hold in the countryside.

Another complaint from poor countries is that American and European farmers gain an unfair edge from hefty agriculture subsidies at home, which allow them to offer foodstuffs at much cheaper prices in the recipient nations. World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico, last September collapsed over that issue.

Americans gripe particularly about the European Union's use of export subsidies to prop up sales overseas. The Europeans, meantime, contend American food aid is actually cover for export promotion and market development.

Meantime, Washington has lobbied recipient countries in Africa and elsewhere — the United States typically provides 57 percent of World Food Program funding — to reward American generosity by taking on the Europeans at WTO talks. On Thursday, EU officials in Geneva said they might be willing to phase out their export subsidies.

“Developing countries should weigh in at the WTO,” said James Butler, the deputy undersecretary of U.S. Foreign Agricultural Services. “We need to hear more from them.”

Participants at the conference spoke of the increasing difficulty of seemingly never-ending crises, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

Conferees worried that emergency meals won't break the cycle of a continent that seems to be getting more dependent on world aid rather than more self-sufficient. At the same time, with ongoing shortages, they asked, how can aid programs shift from food deliveries needed today toward solutions, such as irrigation systems that might bring a harvest next year.

“We can't keep doing this,” Natsios said just hours after the conference started Tuesday. “We cannot, every time there's a crisis, run in. The country has to feed itself.”

Ethiopian disaster manager Machele showed the collection of growers, shippers and government and humanitarian agency officials a slide marking a growing dependency on outside help.

“Even with decent rainfall many households still can't produce enough food,” Machele said. “There must be a way to address the root causes … to find a solution to the vicious cycle.”

To reach Scott Canon, national correspondent, call (816) 234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com