WASHINGTON--If you didn’t know it, this past Friday was World Food Day. To make sure I knew it, a press aide to Hillary Clinton invited me to join a conference call with the secretary of state and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who touted the Obama administration’s commitment to reducing hunger around the world.
There are a billion people who are chronically hungry. That’s roughly one of every seven inhabitants of this planet. Hunger is a far greater pandemic than AIDS. Nearly 16,000 children die of hunger every day, according to Bread for the World, a Washington faith-based organization that advocates for the hungry.
That amounts to more deaths in a single year than the total of all the people who died violently in the wars of 13 countries over the past 50 years.
“We are very pleased to be part of a commitment, along with other nations, of more than $22 billion over three years to spur agriculture-led economic growth,” Secretary Clinton said.
Funds will be used not just to deliver food to starving people, but to also pay for programs that provide food security for countries where hunger is widespread.
Food security is diplomatic-speak for what the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi said:
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Helping poor countries feed their hungry masses is not just a grand humanitarian gesture; it is good diplomacy--a refreshing change from the jingoism and dollar diplomacy of previous administrations.
“Our goals should be to increase the availability of food by helping people in countries produce what they need, to make that food accessible to those who need it, and to teach people to use it properly so that they can make the most of it,” Secretary Vilsack said.
Understandably, the Obama administration’s efforts to keep Iran and North Korea from joining the world’s nuclear club and to end the long-running Jewish-Muslim conflict in the Middle East grab the headlines. But it is the shortage, or unavailability, of food that is the immediate threat to global security.
Last year, there were food riots in Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico and Pakistan.
Since 2007, there have been more than 60 food riots around the world, Secretary Clinton said.
That’s a warning shot that shouldn’t be ignored.
The administration’s effort, along with the countries with the world’s eight strongest economies, is movement in the right direction.
I’ve seen what chronic hunger does to people in places such as the Cite Soleil slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The long-term strategy for reducing the widespread hunger there and elsewhere in the world is to give poor nations the resources they need to sharply increase their production of food.
That won’t be easy.
For example, there is little arable land in Haiti, a once lush-green Caribbean nation. The country’s poor vandalizes the landscape by using trees for fuel, which robs the soil of vital nutrients needed for agriculture and condemns millions of Haitians to a life of hunger.
A part of the answer to Haiti’s food shortage is biotechnology--which includes the use of scientifically altered seeds to improve food production--that Secretaries Clinton and Vilsack said the United States will share with other nations to jump-start their food production.
But as the deadly food riots last year indicate, there is an urgent need to feed hundreds of millions of starving people now--and then teach them how to fish.
