The Real Cost of Hunger
Continued from previous page

What will it cost if we don't end the hunger that now afflicts so many of our fellow humans? The World Bank has concluded that each year malnutrition causes the loss of 46 million years of productive life, at a cost of $16 billion annually, several times the cost of ending hunger and turning this loss into productive gain.

But victory over hunger will not come without the assistance of those countries able to help, including the European nations, Japan, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the OPEC oil States. And before the battle is over, perhaps it can be joined by China, India and Russia. Of equal or greater importance is the need for reform in the developing countries if hunger is to be ended. This means improved farming methods; the conservation and wiser use of the earth’s limited water resources; more rights and opportunities, especially education, for the girls and women of the Third World; a greater measure of democratic government responsive to basic human needs, including food security; and a substitution of common-sense negotiation of differences instead of the murderous civil, ethnic and nationalistic conflicts that have torn up people, property and land across the Third World. It is estimated that 10 per cent of the world’s hungry people are in that condition because of the disruptions of war and other civil strife. People in villages and on farms, including poor women and men, as well as city dwellers, need to be involved in political and economic decisions that affect their lives. Education and democracy may be the most powerful combatants in the war on hunger and poverty. These are a few of the conditions that need to be confronted to build for the first time the architecture of food security on our planet.

FAO Photo

Of the world’s hungry people, 300 million are school-age children. Not only do they bear the pangs of hunger but also their malnutrition leads to loss of energy, listlessness and vulnerability to diseases of all kinds. Hungry children cannot function well in school - if, indeed, they are able to attend school at all. Hunger and malnutrition in childhood years can stunt the body and mind for a lifetime. Every minute, more than ten children under the age of five die of hunger. No one can even guess at the vastly larger number of older children and adults who lead damaged lives because of malnutrition in their fetal or infant days.

A nutritious, balanced school lunch for every child is the best investment we can make in the health, education and global society of the future. After President John Kennedy appointed me in 1961 to head the United States Food for Peace Program, I was contacted by a remarkable Catholic priest who was stationed with the Maryknoll Fathers in the impoverished Puno area of Peru. Father Dan McClellan convinced me that if the United States could supply the food, the Maryknoll Fathers could administer a school lunch programme in the Puno region.

On 12 May 1961, Prime Minister Pedro Beltran of Peru came to my office at the White House to place his signature on an agreement for school lunches for 30,000 Puno students, to be adiministered by the Maryknoll Fathers. At the Prime Minister’s suggestion, however, the food was given to the children as a breakfast upon their arrival at school. Mr. Beltran told us that the children did not receive enough food at home to begin the day. A school breakfast would be an incentive for students to be on time and would give them enough energy for the day's educational activities. Perhaps a glass of milk with a cookie or a piece of bread could be added at midday as an energy pickup.

In the Puno area, illiteracy was 90 per cent. Only a meagre fraction of the students were in school. In some schools, nine out of ten students dropped out before completing the sixth grade. Schoolchildren were seriously handicapped by the lethargy and drowsiness that resulted from malnutrition. But within six months after the United States-assisted school lunch programme began in the fall of 1961, teachers noted that attendance had nearly doubled and academic performance had improved dramatically.

The signing by Prime Minister Beltran and me signalled a new emphasis in Food for Peace on United States-assisted school feeding programmes. This was the first United States agreement of its kind. By 1964, 12 million, or one out of three, schoolchildren in South America were being fed a nutritious daily lunch through Food for Peace.

In Asia, Africa and Latin America, wherever we have experimented with school lunches, we have seen school attendance double in a year or so; grades have also climbed. A daily lunch is the surest magnet for drawing children to school that anyone has yet devised. This is a very important fact because of the world’s 300 million school-age children 130 million are illiterate and not attending school. If education is the key to development in the Third World, the school lunch is the key to unlocking the education door. Of the 130 million not attending school most are girls because of favouritism toward boys. These illiterate girls marry at the age of eleven, twelve or thirteen, and have an average of six children. Girls who go to school marry later and have an average of 2.9 children. A good school lunch is the best way yet found to get both girls and boys into school. The lowly school lunch indirectly produces healthier youngsters, advances education, reduces the birth rate and provides a profitable market for the surplus farm commodities of the United States and other surplus-producing countries.

A school lunch every day for every child in the world would require the labour and initiative of many people and nations. In the United States, we would need to call on churches, synagogues and mosques, as well as our secular philanthropic groups. Such religious and charitable institutions are already engaged in administering and distributing food relief abroad. But they should be urged and enabled to do much more. Wherever such private agencies can take the place of Government in administering and monitoring school lunches or other food programmes, they should be encouraged to do so. Also, wherever possible, local farmers should be given an opportunity to supply food at a fair price to the local school lunch programme. When locally produced food is available, food aid can be acquired more cheaply from recipient or neighbouring countries than from more distant sources where shipping and handling charges would be significant. The programme would still require substantial dairy, livestock and cereal grain production from the United States and other surplus-producing countries, because local supplies are not always equal to the demand. Beyond this, private foundations, labour unions, corporations and individuals should consider contributing to this cause. Such contributions should go to the UN World Food Programme in Rome.

I would estimate the start-up costs covering the first two years of a school lunch programme seriously intended to be universal at $3 billion. With the United States initially in the lead, our portion might reach half of that figure - $1.5 billion spread out over two years. The bulk of that would be in surplus commodities purchased in the American market. As more and more students enrolled in the programme, costs would increase, but we may hope that more and more countries would join in helping to finance the programme, so American costs would probably not increase significantly, if at all. Also, expected contributions from private foundations, corporations, labour unions and individuals should hold down government costs.

It is my hope that the receiving Governments would themselves be able to take over and finance the programme within five or six years. Meanwhile, it would be under the instructional and monitoring eyes of the World Food Programme, which has highly capable and experienced people in field offices within eighty countries.