The real cost of hunger.

Hunger is a political condition. The earth has enough knowledge and resources to eradicate this ancient scourge. Hunger has plagued the world for thousands of years. But ending it is a greater moral imperative now than ever before, because for the first time humanity has the instruments in hand to defeat this cruel enemy at a very reasonable cost. We have the ability to provide food for all within the next three decades. Consider just one encouraging statistic: When I ran for the presidency in 1972, 35 per cent of the world's people were hungry. By 1996, while the global population had expanded, only 17 per cent of the earth's people were hungry -- half the percentage of three decades ago. This is an impressive fact, particularly in view of the gloomy prophecies of the 1960s that population growth was racing ahead of food production. Widespread famines across the Third World were also predicted. Clearly the gains in food production from scientific farming, including the Green Revolution, plus the slowing of p opulation growth, have reduced hunger in the developing countries.

Here are some other encouraging statistics: the world now produces a quantity of grain that, if distributed evenly, would provide everyone with 3,500 calories per day, more than enough for an optimal diet. This does not even count vegetables, fruits, fish, meat, poultry, edible oils, nuts, root crops, or dairy products. Despite the dire predictions that the world's population would soon outstrip food production, it has been the other way around: food production has risen a full 16 per cent above population growth. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has noted that 78 per cent of the world's malnourished children live in countries with food surpluses. Clearly, this condition indicates a need for a keener social conscience and better political leadership. A 1996 United Nations survey that is regarded as the most accurate forecast available estimated that world population will peak and then level off near the year 2050 at just under 10 billion--an increase of 4 billion over the present total. Population may then decline somewhat, because of lower birth rates. Such predictions are uncertain. It may be that advances in medicine and health care will enable people to live longer, thus offsetting declining birth rates. Although a population of 10 billion will tax some resources, projected increases in food production indicate that the world can feed that many people a half-century from now. As we will see from the pages that follow, the nations and peoples of the world will have to take a series of common-sense steps to ensure that everyone is fed. But there is no need for panic or scare tactics. There is enough food to go around now and for at least the next half-century. The world is not going to run out of food for all. Those readers young enough to be around in the year 2050 will need to consider other measures that will take the world safely through the last half of the century, to 2100. But who can even guess what scientific gains will come into the hands and minds of future generations?

Having grappled for years with the global hunger challenge and the American domestic condition, I am sure that we have the resources and the knowledge to end hunger everywhere. The big question is: Do we have the political leadership and the will to end this scourge in our time?

One of my admired friends of long standing was the late Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil. He once observed: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." I learned much about the burdens and hurts of the poor from this good man.

Two questions need to be considered together in a treatise about world hunger: (1) What would it cost for the nations of the world, acting through the United Nations, to end hunger? and (2) What will be the cost if we permit hunger to continue at its present level? Of the scores of experts with the UN agencies in Rome chiefly involved in the global hunger issue, I have yet to meet a single one--conservative, liberal or mugwump--who does not believe that the cost to the world of hunger is vastly greater than the cost of ending it. I can think of no investment that would profit the international community more than erasing hunger from the face of the earth.

So what will it cost? Beyond what the United States and other countries are now doing, it will take an estimated $5 billion a year, of which $1.2 billion would come from the United States. If this annual allocation were continued for fifteen years, until 2015, we could reduce the 800 million hungry people by half. To erase hunger for the remaining 400 million would cost about the same if it were to be accomplished in the fifteen years leading up to the year 2030.

The United States Agency for International Development puts the cost at $2.6 billion annually, whereas the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the cost higher at $6 billion. My figure of $5 billion annually--which is based on my own judgement of the cost of some of the steps I would like to see taken, including especially a universal school lunch programme for every child in the world--is $2.4 billion higher than USAID's but still a billion below the United Nations figure. I concur with the estimate of the respected Bread for the World Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland, that it would take another $5 billion--largely in updating our food stamp programme--to meet the needs of the 31 million inadequately fed Americans. Thus, the total American cost internationally and domestically would be an additional $6.2 billion a year--a fraction of what we now spend on cigarettes, beer or cosmetics. If we decided to enact a modest increase in the minimum wage, we could cut the increase in food stamps in half.

What will it cost if we don't end the hunger that now afflicts so many of our fellow humans? The World Bank has concluded that each year malnutrition causes the loss of 46 million years of productive life, at a cost of $16 billion annually, several times the cost of ending hunger and turning this loss into productive gain.

But victory over hunger will not come without the assistance of those countries able to help, including the European nations, Japan, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the OPEC oil States. And before the battle is over, perhaps it can be joined by China, India and Russia. Of equal or greater importance is the need for reform in the developing countries if hunger is to be ended. This means improved farming methods; the conservation and wiser use of the earth's limited water resources; more rights and opportunities, especially education, for the girls and women of the Third World; a greater measure of democratic government responsive to basic human needs, including food security; and a substitution of common-sense negotiation of differences instead of the murderous civil, ethnic and nationalistic conflicts that have torn up people, property and land across the Third World. It is estimated that 10 per cent of the world's hungry people are in that condition because of the disruptions of war and other civil strife. People in villages and on farms, including poor women and men, as well as city dwellers, need to be involved in political and economic decisions that affect their lives. Education and democracy may be the most powerful combatants in the war on hunger and poverty.

These are a few of the conditions that need to be confronted to build for the first time the architecture of food security on our planet.

Of the world's hungry people, 300 million are school-age children. Not only do they bear the pangs of hunger but also their malnutrition leads to loss of energy, listlessness and vulnerability to diseases of all kinds. Hungry children cannot function well in school--if, indeed, they are able to attend school at all. Hunger and malnutrition in childhood years can stunt the body and mind for a lifetime. Every minute, more than ten children under the age of five die of hunger. No one can even guess at the vastly larger number of older children and adults who lead damaged lives because of malnutrition in their fetal or infant days.

A nutritious, balanced school lunch for every child is the best investment we can make in the health, education and global society of the future. After President John Kennedy appointed me in 1961 to head the United States Food for Peace Program, I was contacted by a remarkable Catholic priest who was stationed with the Maryknoll Fathers in the impoverished Puno area of Peru. Father Dan McClellan convinced me that if the United States could supply the food, the Maryknoll Fathers could administer a school lunch programme in the Puno region.

On 12 May 1961, Prime Minister Pedro Beltran of Peru came to my office at the White House to place his signature on an agreement for school lunches for 30,000 Puno students, to be adiministered by the Maryknoll Fathers. At the Prime Minister's suggestion, however, the food was given to the children as a breakfast upon their arrival at school. Mr. Beltran told us that the children did not receive enough food at home to begin the day. A school breakfast would be an incentive for students to be on time and would give them enough energy for the day's educational activities. Perhaps a glass of milk with a cookie or a piece of bread could be added at midday as an energy pickup.

In the Puno area, illiteracy was 90 per cent. Only a meagre fraction of the students were in school. In some schools, nine out of ten students dropped out before completing the sixth grade. Schoolchildren were seriously handicapped by the lethargy and drowsiness that resulted from malnutrition. But within six months after the United States-assisted school lunch programme began in the fall of 1961, teachers noted that attendance had nearly doubled and academic performance had improved dramatically.

The signing by Prime Minister Beltran and me signalled a new emphasis in Food for Peace on United States-assisted school feeding programmes. This was the first United States agreement of its kind. By 1964, 12 million, or one out of three, schoolchildren in South America were being fed a nutritious daily lunch through Food for Peace.

In Asia, Africa and Latin America, wherever we have experimented with school lunches, we have seen school attendance double in a year or so; grades have also climbed. A daily lunch is the surest magnet for drawing children to school that anyone has yet devised. This is a very important fact because of the world's 300 million school-age children 130 million are illiterate and not attending school. If education is the key to development in the Third World, the school lunch is the key to unlocking the education door. Of the 130 million not attending school most are girls because of favouritism toward boys. These illiterate girls marry at the age of eleven, twelve or thirteen, and have an average of six children. Girls who go to school marry later and have an average of 2.9 children. A good school lunch is the best way yet found to get both girls and boys into school. The lowly school lunch indirectly produces healthier youngsters, advances education, reduces the birth rate and provides a profitable market for th e surplus farm commodities of the United States and other surplus-producing countries.

A school lunch every day for every child in the world would require the labour and initiative of many people and nations. In the United States, we would need to call on churches, synagogues and mosques, as well as our secular philanthropic groups. Such religious and charitable institutions are already engaged in administering and distributing food relief abroad. But they should be urged and enabled to do much more. Wherever such private agencies can take the place of Government in administering and monitoring school lunches or other food programmes, they should be encouraged to do so. Also, wherever possible, local farmers should be given an opportunity to supply food at a fair price to the local school lunch programme. When locally produced food is available, food aid can be acquired more cheaply from recipient or neighbouring countries than from more distant sources where shipping and handling charges would be significant. The programme would still require substantial dairy, livestock and cereal grain produ ction from the United States and other surplus-producing countries, because local supplies are not always equal to the demand. Beyond this, private foundations, labour unions, corporations and individuals should consider contributing to this cause. Such contributions should go to the UN World Food Programme in Rome.

I would estimate the start-up costs covering the first two years o a school lunch programme seriously intended to be universal at $3 billion. With the United States initially in the lead, our portion might reach half of that figure--$1.5 billion spread out over two years. The bulk of that would be in surplus commodities purchased in the American market. As more and more students enrolled in the programme, costs would increase, but we may hope that more and more countries would join in helping to finance the programme, so American costs would probably not increase significantly, if at all. Also, expected contributions from private foundations, corporations, labour unions and individuals should hold down government costs.

It is my hope that the receiving Governments would themselves be able to take over and finance the programme within five or six years. Meanwhile, it would be under the instructional and monitoring eyes of the World Food Programme, which has highly capable and experienced people in field offices within eighty countries.

Measuring and monitoring prevalence

Prevalence of undernourishment is measured by the share of a country's
total population that is undernourished. The higher the prevalence, the
more widespread the problem. To help analyse and monitor progress, the
following five prevalence categories have been established:

Category  % undernourished    Description

1               <2.5         Extremely low
2              2.5-4           Very low
3               5-19        Moderately low
4              20-34        Moderately high
5          [greater than       Very high
           or equal to]35
              No data

RELATED ARTICLE: It is impossible to evaluate with dollars the real cost of hunger. What is the value of a human life? The twentieth century was the most violent in human history, with nearly 150 million people killed by war. But in just the last half of that century nearly three times as many died of malnutrition or related causes. How does one put a dollar figure on this terrible toll silently collected by the Grim Reaper? What is the cost of 800 million hungry people dragging through shortened and miserable lives, unable to study, work, play or otherwise function normally because of the ever-present drain of hunger and malnutrition on body, mind and spirit? What is the cost of millions of young mothers breaking under the despair of watching their children waste away and die from malnutrition? This is a problem we can resolve at a fraction of the cost of ignoring it.

After the school-lunch programme, a second nutritional programme that I would like to see go worldwide is the American Special Supplemental Food Programme for Women, infants and Children, which provides food nutrition counselling, and access to health services for low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women, other post-partum women, and infants and young children who are at nutritional risk.

A third step in the battle against world hunger could be the establishment of food reserves around the globe. The biblical story of Joseph in Egypt building a granary to store bountiful grain harvests for use in poor years is still a valid lesson. Countries producing grain surpluses should be encouraged to store the surplus against the day when crop failures, droughts or international emergencies call on it. In the developing world, with less experience in modern grain storage, reserve storage facilities could be improved and expanded and then closely monitored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization to prevent neglect or mishandling.

A fourth step could be the fundamental long-term instrument in the war against hunger: assisting developing States to improve their own farm production, food processing and food distribution. Most people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East live on farms or in rural villages. Agriculture is their physical and economic lifeline. Many of them are still farming with methods and equipment little improved since ancient times. I would suggest a Farmers Corps, patterned after the Peace Corps. Retired farmers in the United States and other developed countries could be recruited and paid a modest salary to go abroad for six months or more to teach improved farming methods. Each country would pay the cost of its own Corps. Many farmers who have retired for reasons of age or health are at a loss for how to use their retirement years. A Farmers Corps should be administered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

A promising fifth weapon in the war against world hunger is the emergence of high-yield scientific agriculture, including genetically modified crops. The gene modification controversy has obscured its promise. Legitimate questions have been raised about some aspects of the use of chemicals in livestock. These questions deserve honest, scientifically sound answers. But the boitechnical improvement of both the quality and quantity of animals and plants is major breakthrough in the battle against global hunger. That scientific breakthrough enables life-sustaining plants to survive pests, salt and dry weather--all with less reliance on pesticides and irrigation water. Cereal grains can be modified to mature more quickly and yet have more nutritional benefits.

George McGovern, who has just retired as United States Ambassador to the United Nations agencies on Food and Agriculture in Rome, was Senator from South Dakota from 1963 to 1981 and the Democratic Party candidate for United States President in 1972. He was the first Director of the United States Food for Peace Program. This contribution is based on excerpts from his book, The Third Freedom--Ending Hunger in Our Time. Copyright[C] 2001 by George McGovern. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY.