The Fight Against Hunger:
Report from the Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker: Dr. Sara Scherr
Overarching Policy Reforms
DR. SARA SCHERR
UN Hunger Task Force Member
Director, Ecosystems Service, Forest Trends
Director, Ecoagriculture Partners
Good morning, ladies and gentleman. It is an honor to be here, and I would like to add that it is a privilege to be part of the task force that is led in such an inspirational way by Dr. Sanchez and Dr. Swaminathan. And on behalf of the whole task force, we would like to honor them.
What I’m going to do is provide a little more detail about the proposed strategy that the Hunger Task Force is suggesting that we pursue to reach the goals that Pedro mentioned. And let me start with the overarching policy shifts.
The first of the major policy shifts that needs to go in developing countries is this refocus on the agricultural and rural sector. If we look at what has happened in terms of food production over the past 40 years, we do see in the developing countries dramatic increases in food imports. What’s less well recognized is that the proportion of food imports has actually remained more or less the same – it’s been about 10% for that entire period; it’s just that demand for food has gone up so much. So the domestic agricultural sectors are absolutely critical for supplying food for the population.
But equally important is the point that Dr. Swaminathan made in his introduction – agricultural production is the principal source of wealth creation and income generation in the rural areas. And we know that 75% of the poor are in the rural areas. There isn’t any way to jump past that; there’s no other place to get wealth creation on a massive scale.
The third element is that environmental conservation in these areas will not be achieved by starving agriculture of resources and impoverishing farmers. They are – the farmers, the herders, the fishers – they are the stewards of the environment, and we need to be supporting them to play that role as well as an agricultural production role.
The second key policy that is again reflecting new understandings that have come out of experience and research is that nutrition, investments in food security, investments in nutrition, are not charity in the context of developing countries. Undernutrition is a major lag; it’s a major barrier to economic development. And we now have considerable evidence that shows very, very high rates of economic return to many of these interventions.
So those are the two key things in developing countries.
But, again, the Millennium Compact is a two-way street, and there are important policy shifts that need to take place in rich countries such as the United States. What has been mentioned again and again is agricultural trade issues. I think all of you are aware now of the serious problems that are created for hunger and for rural development in the developing world as a result of our dramatically excessive subsidies that dump low-cost food on the world.
I’m an American. I believe we need to be supporting our farmers, and we need to be supporting our rural communities. But our challenge to those of you in this room is to put your heads together and figure out a way that we can achieve that without deepening hunger in the developing world. I’m certain that we can do that, and we need to be discussing that with our politicians.
We also need to be significantly expanding financial assistance for these issues, not only to Iraq and Afghanistan, but to all the developing world.
To talk more specifically about the strategies to reduce hunger, one key point that we want to make is: We know a lot about how to do this. There are still some big questions, there are still some big challenges, but we know a lot about how to do this. The developing countries know a lot about how to do this.
Let’s look first at the nourishing of the next generation. This is a core, basic activity because it determines the quality of the next generation. And we seek a hundred percent coverage, if that’s possible – that should be our goal, not just half.
Let’s give you the example from Thailand. The Community Volunteer Corps for Household Nutrition Security reduced the level of mortality of children under six from 50% in 1982 to 10% in 1996. That’s a dramatic decline in only 14 years. We definitely can do that kind of significant change at a global level in 12 years.
The second piece I want to mention – I won’t talk about schools, because Chris is going to talk about schools – but micronutrient fortification. When a major campaign to promote vitamin A supplements took place in the mid-1990s, between 1998 and the year 2001, one million child deaths were prevented through vitamin A supplements, for literally pennies.
There was also a major commitment made in the 1990s to try to expand salt iodination, which I think you all have heard. And in a period of ten years, the number of countries that iodized their salt went from 46 to 93. We need to get another 50 in there. But what was extraordinary is, the estimate is that the number of children with mental deficiencies that will affect their entire life, declined from 40 to 28 million during that ten-year period, by having iodine in their diet. That is a lot of children.
The second key thing, as Pedro emphasized, has to do with raising the productivity of farmers, of livestock owners, of fishers, of forest users. What we found is that a lot of the hunger hot spots are these places that were bypassed by the Green Revolution. They were the places with very difficult environments, the places where... It’s very risky to produce in the drylands, it’s risky to produce in hillsides, it’s risky to produce in flood-prone areas.
And then in many cases in order to justify, in order to reduce the risks of using inputs, of using higher investments, you’ve got to somehow stabilize the environment. You need to do things like replenish soil fertility, provide more stable water supplies to irrigate crops. You need to revegitate areas.
The sad truth is that in the poorest developing countries, less than one third of farmers are using fertilizer, either because they can’t get it, they can’t afford it, or it doesn’t work because they don’t have the proper recommendations for the adaptation for what they’re doing.
Similarly, nearly have the maize area in the developing world, in the poorest part of the developing world, does not use improved seeds. This is extraordinary in 2003.
We have highly variable conditions, and so one of the things we need to do – in addition to investing in the basic natural resource so that it makes sense to apply inputs and improve seed, which is critical – we need to actually strengthen producer-driven extension programs. Some of these areas are remote, many are poor. We need to get that expertise inside the community so it’s permanently available to farmers and not rely entirely on outside experts from the city. And we have a lot of successful models in doing that.
And the final point is the need to secure rights to local people. Land reform is not Communism. Land reform laid the basis for capitalist development in Taiwan and in South Korea, as was the point that was raised by speakers yesterday. And there are many very good land reform programs actually in place that are chronically underfunded.
There’s a massive opportunity available now in terms of changing forest ten-year rights. Twenty-five years ago governments owned almost all the forest in almost all developing countries, and they realized they couldn’t manage them. And they’ve been trying to move them back to being controlled by communities, and now 25% of all the forests in developing countries is controlled by communities. And there are programs in many countries to try to continue that process of devolving those resources, so people can control them and manage them and improve them and rely upon them for livelihoods. They’re chronically starved of resources.
This is an example here from a Honduras hillside, of programs in which some of our task force members were participating. This is an area in Honduras, and most of the agriculture production in Honduras is hillside agriculture, on this kind of steep slopes. The farm that was on the left, the plots had actually been abandoned because soil fertility was so low and production was so low. In a period of two years, a combination of improved soil fertility practices and ...manures and improved seeds, led to production on the right-hand side there of just over four and a half tons of maize. We can do this – it doesn’t take ten years; we can do it in two years and three years in many parts of the world.
Third point, as Pedro said, is improving marketing systems so they work for both poor consumers and poor producers. Producers in the developing world have a hard, uphill battle competing against subsidized grain from overseas. But they also face a tremendous difficulty in even getting their food to market. Often that’s due to major lack of infrastructure, often due to barriers of regulations and being stopped, literally having roadblocks along the street.
One of the most disturbing statistic that we learned some years ago is, if we build roads, if Africa builds roads in the future at the same rate that they were building roads in the 1990s, by 2020 they will have achieved the same road density that India had at the beginning of the Green Revolution in the 1960s. We’re not going to get a Green Revolution in Africa, we’re not going to get major productivity increases, we’re not going to get major economic development until infrastructure of roads, of storage, of all sorts of market facilities and institutions can go at a much, much, much more rapid pace than what the current situation is.
Let me move to the next point, which is the three strategies we’ve just talked about – these are the strategies for future growth. These are the strategies that will create the foundation for economic development in these low-income countries. But we can’t forget that there is a major issue around managing food prices. And one of the really exciting things about, I think, the last ten or fifteen years, is we have learned, again, a lot about how to do this in a way that’s highly cost effective and highly efficient.
In many cases, first of all, by actually setting up plans ahead of time to reduce household and community vulnerability – having food banks, making sure farmers plant areas for fodder reserves when draughts come.
The second is learning to mobilize effectively for large-scale emergencies. And Catherine Bertini has demonstrated that dramatically and is being rewarded for that with this World Food Prize.
Another issue is to start making plans so that every community knows what it needs to improve, either in terms of watershed improvements or in terms of building infrastructure, so that when there’s a need for Food for Work Program, when there’s some sort of a crisis, there will be plans and a process for actually mobilizing that labor to do the most efficient and the most effective types of interventions, and really use those.
I’ll just summarize here by identifying some of the areas that we think are critical areas of success. We’re not talking about business as usual. We’re talking about a massive mobilization of resources and effort and will to reduce by half, the number of people that are poor. We have to be as efficient and effective as we possibly can be. And we just want to highlight a few of those key elements.
The first one is the one that Pedro was mentioning – we have to foster synergies. We need to find interventions that affect multiple Millennium Development goals at the same time. We find that integration works best at the local level, and that’s really where the capacity needs to be built. Other layers of organizations and institutions need to be put in place to support some of these efforts at the local level, and we need to scale up those community actions.
I’ll just use an example of watershed management. We can use Food for Work programs to revegitate the stream banks and the riverways, to improve water quality, so that when children drink water they will not get infectious diseases which compromise their nutritional status. These are very complex interactions, but we know a lot about how to do them.
The second one is the point about empowering women. This is not being politically correct. Women are playing a central role as mothers, as food managers, as traders, as economic actors, as agricultural producers. They must be able to make claims on resources within the household, within the community, with the government, with NGOs, with the market – in order to achieve their worth.
Mobilizing political action needs to happen both in terms of working with our decision-makers, but creating a mass movement around the world to achieve these goals. And one of the things that’s interesting – in today’s world in democracies, large numbers of people don’t die from famines because they mobilize to feed people, if it’s from their own produce or from food aid. But we have to have poor people make claims for development as well and build on successful, existing initiatives.
It’s a shared commitment from both. The developing world has shown it’s starting to make that commitment in strong ways, and we need to be doing the same.