The Fight Against Hunger:
Report from the Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker: Dr. Pedro Sanchez
Overview of Task Force Work
DR. PEDRO SANCHEZ
2002 World Food Prize Laureate
Co-Chair, UN Hunger Task Force
Director of Tropical Agriculture, The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Thank you very much, Dr. Swaminathan. I would like the members of the Hunger Task Force who are present here to please stand up and be recognized. See, there are several.
And this will be a team effort. I will talk about the general organization and scope of the work. Sara Scherr will talk about the overarching policy environments. Chris Dowswell will talk about the early action in Africa. Kevin Cleaver will talk about what it takes to mobilize the donor community. And, finally, Dick Beahrs will talk about mobilizing political will.
My bottom line – and I think the bottom line of a task force is simply this (and it’s not in any slide): a modification of the old Chinese proverb that says, “Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.” To that we would like to add, “And that man and that fisher will also buy fishing equipment.” And what I mean by fishing equipment is to get into the markets and to move from a subsistence economy into a market economy.
So that’s our bottom line and our contribution. Minister Kisamba-Mugerwa said it very, very clearly: The main problem is market access, and the task force is focusing on that.
Jeffrey Sachs talked yesterday very eloquently, but I’d like to underscore some of the points that he makes: That we have a deal called the Millennium Compact, signed by all the nations in the world. And the poor countries commit to good governance and development policies based on solid evidence, good science and scaling up Best Practices. This we heard from Minister Kisamba-Mugerwa this morning.
While the rich countries commit to much greater financial assistance, access to their markets and expanded knowledge transfer – that’s the deal, and that’s the deal that the Hunger Task Force promotes, that we have to carry it. It is a deal already.
The bigger picture for the whole Millennium Project – there are six critical policies to break out of the poverty truck, and I’d like to see in the order they are presented. You will see that the first is investment in human development – nutrition, health, education, water, sanitation, basic human needs.
The second one is raising agricultural productivity by small holder farmers.
The third is to reach an adequate threshold of infrastructure – roads, railroads, energy, ports and communications.
The fourth, create a sound investment in environment for manufacturing for experts instead of just primary commodities.
The fifth, empower poor people, especially females, through participation, democratic governance and human rights.
And finally the sixth is to protect and enhance the natural and human-dominated ecosystems including the urban environment.
The point that is, I think, important here is that number one and number two, in terms of nutrition and in terms of agricultural productivity are at the center of the Hunger Task Force.
The Millennium development goal of cutting the number of hungry people in half by 2015 is perfectly possible to do. It’s already a global commitment, and it is a political choice. And it is a political choice that has not been made yet everywhere. We certainly have seen in Uganda, but we haven’t seen it in this country, in many rich countries, to really get onto this.
The Hunger Task Force is a group of science people, policy people, private sector representatives, NGOs, African governments, UN agencies – we have a very varied group, and some of them are here with us. And our task is to develop a business plan to cut the number of hungry people in half by 2015.
We’ve done a background study by Sara Scherr and colleagues and show where of the 800 million hungry, 92% are not victims of extreme events. And this is important. This was said yesterday, that the extreme situations that we saw for which Laureate Catherine Bertini, very well-deserved laureate prize, is the people who are in dire need. But about 92% of the hungry are not in the crisis in this starving, acute situation; they’re in a chronic, silent, malnutrition situation which captures less headlines but constitutes the core of the people who are hungry and malnourished.
170 million of them are infants and preschool children, so the Hunger Task Force is putting emphasis on this portion of the hungry. More than a hundred million are affected by HIV AIDS, and I am delighted to see the increasing importance given to sound nutrition, especially calories, as we heard this morning and as we heard from Josh Ruxin yesterday about that nutrition is just about as important as... drugs and condoms, as he said.
Two billion show hidden hunger, micronutrient deficiency. And while we were starting, the UN Secretary General requested an early action for sub-Sierra in Africa, which made us jump-start our studies, which have been going on for a year there. And Chris Dowswell will explain more of that.
So our task force has focused in Africa for its first year, very much towards South Asia in next year and the rest of the hungry world.
Where are these 800 million people? Most of them are in South Asia, 230 million, and a lot of them in the rest of Asia and East Asia and the rest of Asia, but 200 million or so in sub-Sierra in Africa, which is a higher percentage prevalence, and less in other parts of the world.
Who are they? Fifty percent of them are farm families living in marginal lands that have been largely bypassed by the Green Revolution. Twenty-two percent are the rural, landless poor, the people who live in rural areas but have no land. Twenty percent are the urban poor, and that proportion is increasing. And eight percent are... and forest dwellers.
We have done a fairly detailed analysis as to starting with Africa as to where hunger is at the national level. So you see maps like this in which we plot what we would like to call the “hunger hot spots,” which is the darker colors, the two or three darker colors in these areas, where there’s a high number of underweight children under five per square kilometer, in other words, per unit area. You see there are about 75 of these areas around sub-Sierra in Africa.
We have prioritized but not as an exclusive, but prioritizing, eight hunger hot spots, starting with parts of West Africa and the... and the ... of Nigeria, going on towards on the eastern side, the highlands of Ethiopia, the Lake Victoria Basin in Kenya and Uganda and northern Tanzania, central Tanzania and further south, Malawi and Mozambique and Madagascar.
Together these eight hot spots cover 42% of the hungry people in Africa, but, of course, we have to work all over, not only in those; but those would be initial points of intervention.
We have very clear four strategic objectives. One is to mobilize political action. I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere by just continuing talking, and this is where mobilizing political action is necessary. It’s been more successful, the work that, for example, the government of Uganda certainly has mobilized its own political action very effectively. It’s less successful in the rich countries.
We want to reform some overarching policies, and we want to raise agricultural productivity, make markets work for the poor, serve the poor and improve child nutrition as the five key builders of the Hunger Task Force.
So, again, mobilize political action, reform some overarching policies, raise agricultural productivity, make markets serve the poor and improve child nutrition. This goes very well with the FAO Anti-Hunger Program that has the two pillars of increasing agricultural productivities and improving nutrition of the vulnerable people.
Overarching policy reforms include giving additional budget priority to rural areas in the national budgets, in the international donor commitments, especially investments that empower women. Frankly, I am tired of hearing about the plight of the women African farmer. I lived that situation, I know it very well; it’s time just to make it much more specific and have actions that empower women, such as they are able to grow firewood on their own farms instead of going into the bush and carrying the enormous loads. The time has come to make a change in that and get very, very specific.
We’re proposing an African agricultural seminar at the next African Union meeting to mobilize and sensitize public opinion in Africa as well as everywhere else in the world, and then emphasize on what Dr. Kisamba-Mugerwa said – infrastructure, roads, education, health, energy, communications and removing barriers to trade – things that are not on the farm, but without this overarching policy, the more specific policies that we are suggesting will not fly.
We feel that critical elements of success are:
· Scaling up on successful initiatives. There’s a lot of good stuff out there that we know works – it needs to be scaled up.
· Sharpen the focus on hunger reduction. Many plans deal with more economic growth and hunger reduction per se. There are some trade-offs there, but let’s keep the hunger focus in perspective.
· Emphasis on ecoagriculture. Not only ways of increasing productivity, but ways of increasing productivity in tune with environment, and more... there; there’s no question about it. A lot of emphasis in rural public works.
· And consider, and keep considering, safety nets, because we have to realize that there are about 200 million people who are too weak to work right now, and they will not be helped by the other activities.
Our point that we are promoting and we want to discuss with the countries is perhaps something that is a bit new, which is to promote synergistic intervention, that develop political will, but to promote synergistic intervention – things that feed on each other. And they are in three general areas: Drastically increase agricultural productivity; making rural markets work for the poor – the issue that the minister said so eloquently this morning; and improve the nutritional status of vulnerable people.
This by itself has been tackled in many ways, but what we’re proposing is that countries consider how to do it together. And I’ll just give you an example here from Africa.
The school feeding programs with locally produced food will have tremendous effect on the next generation of school children, also... with other programs that take care of the mothers and children less than two years old – will have tremendous nutritional effect, increase attendance of girls in school particularly, make learning better. But will also stimulate markets, create a demand for rural markets, and therefore create additional demand for increasing productivity, which would allow farmers to tackle the key biophysical constraints, such as restoring soil fertility and improving water management.
We estimate that the school programs can increase demand by as much as 15% or so. Let’s consider that the total amount of food sent to Africa is about 10% of the total production in Africa. So it could be a major amount, and the point here – this is an example of synergies. By doing something that has a nutritional and an educational intervention, we can also increase the demand and open the markets so farmers can really sell, and sell a more varied product.
Timeline: We want to mobilize political action and public support. We want to help under this framework to design national programs to cut hunger in those areas, in those countries where we’re invited to do so, and influence budgetary allocations in both poor and rich countries, scaling up these areas and hot spots and other areas as well, and not only in Africa but in south Asia and Latin America, etc., mobilize... capacity, and strengthen institutions, and hopefully reaching the goal.
Again, I would like to say that this can be done. It requires a lot of political, it requires policy reforms, and it requires especially – and maybe this is the main point – it requires the synergy of local actions that we’ve always done separately. And starting with nutrition, we can improve markets and improve productivity and have a virtual circle going around.
Thanks very much.