December 10, 2003

The war against global hunger faces a setback in Congress. Even at Christmas time, some members want to cut an international food-aid program that could help save millions of lives, many of them children's.

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recently reported that the number of hungry people in developing countries has increased by more than 18 million in the second half of the 1990s.

An estimated 120 million children around the world do not attend school, in part because of hunger and malnutrition. A vast majority of these children are young girls.

Last year, as part of the 2002 farm bill, Congress authorized a $100 million program to help feed children in poor countries. The program, formally called the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, provides food, money and technical assistance for school lunches and maternal and child nutrition projects in poor countries.

The program was a success. Last year 2.2 million children worldwide received school lunches through the program. This translated to about 200,000 tons of food commodities. It not only helped save many malnourished and starving children, it also provided an incentive for families to send their children to school. In underdeveloped countries, education -- especially for young girls, who often are left behind -- is crucial to a family's future.

Today, the food-aid program is under serious threat.

Some members in Congress want to cut the program by as much as 50 percent. But taking away funding for school lunches from countries that are most in need is not the moral thing to do, and it will only exacerbate the growing epidemic of hunger.

At the World Food Summit in 1996, the international community set a goal to reduce the number of hungry people by half by 2015. The U.N. General Assembly mandated the world's 22 richest countries to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) as overseas development assistance to developing nations, but only five countries have met this target. The U.N. Development Program estimates that the shortfall in aid may reach as high as $100 billion a year.

The United States has not provided a timeframe to reach the target, or even set goals for interim targets. The U.S. foreign-aid budget has been chopped to less than 1 cent on the dollar, or 0.1 percent of the GDP, compared with the 1949 high of 3.21 percent, putting America dead last among 22 major nations.

The American desire to be the world's largest superpower without accepting responsibility is generating anger and resentment across the globe. A recent Pew poll asked 38,000 people in 44 countries what they think of America. The results show they don't trust American aims or leadership. By cutting funding to needy children, the United States will do nothing to help improve its image abroad.

Today, in the absence of political commitment by world leaders, the goal to help fight global hunger is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Anuradha Mittal is co-director of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy (www.foodfirst.org), which is based in Oakland, Calif. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.