Bangkok--Oct 13--WFP Bureau for Asia
You wouldn’t think anyone could envy the victims of Darfur. They have suffered horrific ordeals and lived through the kind of brutality that most of us in the developed world would find hard even to imagine. Their prospects of returning home and picking up their lives again are dim at best. The future holds only uncertainty.
But there is one thing that they do have going for them. Their plight has shocked the world. Whatever other people call it — genocide, ethnic cleansing, conquest or orchestrated violence — we all know what has been happening in Darfur and the developed and developing world are united in their determination to protect these people and meet their humanitarian needs.
Not that we have succeeded. The raids by the Janjaweed militia are still going on and the numbers of displaced people are still growing by the day. But they do at least have places of refuge, where they can receive shelter and food. The World Food Programme provided food for 1.3 million of them in camps inside Darfur last month and for a further 200,000 across the border in Chad, where we work with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
And with Darfur still in the news, we can continue to feed them over the coming months. For most of these people — and certainly for the most vulnerable, the children, the nursing mothers and the elderly — that is the difference between life and death.
The problem is that for every hungry child who makes the headlines there are millions more who do not. When was the last time we read about hungry people in Azerbaijan, Guinea, Sri Lanka or Tajikistan? Even in regions that regularly hit the television screens, the hungry do not merit a mention. In all the news coverage of the West Bank and Gaza, when did we last hear about hungry Palestinians?
They say every dog has its day. On occasions such as this, World Food Day, the 800 million chronically hungry people scattered across the globe have the rare chance to garner a few column inches in newspapers or a few seconds on television or radio. At best. And tomorrow it’s back to business as usual.
And while one might think that crises like Darfur might help to focus more attention on the general problem of hunger in the world, the opposite is actually the case. Funds for the “routine hungry”, the people who are simply too poor to feed themselves and their families, are even harder to come by when the world’s attention is seized by a major natural disaster or conflict.
When conflicts are resolved and peace finally takes hold in a country battered by years and decades of strife, the donors who were there to help in the war years tend to melt away — just when their help is really needed to support people who have, often for the first time in their lives, a proper chance to secure their futures.
Look at Liberia, Sierra Leone or Angola, where millions of people are returning home, only to find their farms destroyed, their livestock gone, their land inaccessible because of landmines and no infrastructure or employment opportunities to tide them over. They still depend on our support now, just as they did when they were living in camps as refugees or internally displaced. Yet within the next three months, unless major new contributions come in, we are going to have to cut their rations. Those are the facts. But try explaining them to a hungry child.
Or try to tell a malnourished mother in Peru — a country where the proportion of under-nourished people soared from 11 percent to 27 percent between 1990 and 2000 — that the world thinks she and her baby matter less than her Sudanese counterpart in Darfur.
Of course we know that all of them matter, equally, that everyone deserves the same chances in life. But while we are now quite confident that we can deliver enough food to keep the Sudanese mother, her children and unborn babies alive, we are far from certain that we can do the same in Peru. In effect, we are starving Peter to save Paul.
Worse still, we are doing even less to help chronically hungry families survive than we were five years ago, just before the UN General Assembly set itself the top priority goal of halving the number of hungry people around the world. Since then the volume of food aid has fallen from 15 million tons in 1999 to 10 million tons in 2003 — and that included one million tons for Iraq alone.
The rising world prices of commodities have made the problem even worse. At the same time the proportion of aid dedicated to agricultural development has also slumped badly. So not only are we giving less food, we are also stifling the efforts by the developing world to produce it for themselves.
We can break this spiral. Each of us needs to do a little more. If everyone were to pitch in and help, we would dramatically reduce world hunger, especially among 300 million needy children.
There is enough food already in the world for everyone. There are actually more overweight people in the world today than chronically hungry. It’s a question of will and determination, not just on World Food Day, but tomorrow, the next day and over the years to come.
James Morris is Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme. End.
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