BUILDING A MOVEMENT
To recharge your idealism, there’s nothing better than a trip to a university campus. I got a double dose last week at Purdue and Northwestern. I journeyed to both Big Ten campuses to raise the clamor about ending hunger through agriculture development, only to find plenty of clamor already reverberating among students and faculty.
At Purdue, World Food Prize laureate Gebisa Ejeta was cranking up the new Center for Global Food Security. It brings together students and faculty from many academic disciplines to discover new ways to combat global hunger. Gebisa, a distinguished professor of agronomy and path-breaking sorghum breeder, believes greater investment in research is needed to meet the “food, feed and fuel needs of humanity” as the world’s crop supply comes under greater pressure from increasing population, changing eating patterns and the push for more ethanol fuel for vehicles.
“We cannot provide for all with the knowledge and resources we have today,” Gebisa says. “Our food and natural resources problems are getting more complicated. New science, technology and innovations will be needed. Furthermore, single-discipline solutions are not going to get it done. We need more integrated and holistic approaches to research.”
I met a legion of Purdue students eager to enlist in this effort. These students are focusing on a great range of studies, from soil science and climate change to engineering and journalism, which can all contribute to the fight against hunger. They are inspired and mentored by a host of professors who have long been working in the farm fields of the developing world.
At Northwestern, I encountered a gathering of students brimming with enthusiasm to tackle the tackle global health inequalities, including hunger and malnutrition. They came from universities across the country to attend the annual GlobeMed Global Health Summit. GlobeMed has 32 campus chapters, with partners from Mexico to Nepal. This year’s summit theme was A Call to Action: Leveraging History to Build a Movement.
This theme, I thought, was particularly relevant to the present battle in the fight against hunger. We need to learn from history – and leverage those lessons -- as the presidential initiative Feed the Future hangs in the balance of the budget wars in Washington.
Fighting hunger was at the center of two of the great diplomatic and development achievements in American history: the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II and the Green Revolution to end famine in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. As the Green Revolution took hold and spread from country to country, the movement to end global hunger was at its zenith.
But I reminded the students of the concerns of Norman Borlaug, the American crop breeder known as the Father of the Green Revolution. After winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, Borlaug warned that “the Green Revolution has not yet been won….It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts.”
He was worried that a complacency would set in and derail the movement to end global hunger. He issued this prophesy: “We will be guilty of criminal negligence, without extenuation, if we permit future famines.”
Borlaug’s worries indeed came to pass: complacency proliferated, neglect spread, agriculture development fell off the radar screen of governments in the rich and poor worlds and off the radar screens of international development agencies and the theorists who crafted policy. Hunger escalated; currently one billion people are chronically hungry.
We are now at a moment when the movement to end hunger is again picking up steam, prodded by the rising prices and spreading shortages of the food crisis of 2007-8 and the expectations that the growing population and the growing prosperity of that population will require a doubling of food production by the year 2050. Feed the Future is an attempt to reverse the decades of neglect of agriculture development that set in after the Green Revolution. Purdue’s Center for Global Food Security will be a valued ally in that effort as will the work at a number of other universities I have visited, such as Illinois, Minnesota and Texas A&M.
The post-Green Revolution history of complacency and neglect should be leveraged to resist budget-cutting pressures that could derail this movement. The Continuing Resolution for the fiscal year 2011 budget whacks 15% from the administration’s request for development assistance and slashes 75% from the President’s request for the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, which is a multi-donor program to support agriculture development projects in the developing world, particularly in Africa. The President requested $408 million for GAFSP but the Congressional resolution provides only $100 million. Since the U.S. was the lead funder of GAFSP, such a huge cut could undermine the efforts to prod other rich countries to fulfill their funding commitments and to recruit more countries to contribute.
As for the fiscal year 2012 budget, the Republicans are proposing $37 billion for the State Department and USAID operations, a figure way below the President’s request for $50.9 billion, and an even steeper drop from the Democrats’ proposal of $57.2 billion. Feed the Future is intended to be a cornerstone of State and USAID development efforts; any cuts would likely cause some erosion of that cornerstone.
All those wrestling with the budgets could use some of the passion of the students who are emerging as a cornerstone of the movement to end hunger. In a crescendo of increasing type size, the “table of contents” page of the GlobeMed Summit program exhorted students to:
“Seize Opportunity.
Transform Ideas into Action.
Make a Tangible Impact.
Work in Solidarity.
Build a Community.
Build Partnerships.
Build A Network.
Build A Movement.”
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