Children line up, waiting their turn for a large spoonful of warm milk to be poured in the cup they clutch in their hands. The scene of school feeding is repeated day after day in poor countries, where rich nations and development organizations provide milk, among other products such as cereals and grains, as food aid.
Former auditor for the World Food Program (WFP), Jessie Mabutas, and the current head of the WFP in Washington, Werner Keine, are familiar with the scene — not just because they see it in their work, but because they were once those children, waiting in line, eyeing the milk, clutching a cup.
“I loved the milk and bread,” said Mr. Keine, who grew up in southern Austria after World War II and got a school breakfast and lunch as part of American aid to postwar Europe.
“We would line up like I see children do in my job now,” he said. “We would hold our little cup, and there would be milk warmed in a huge pot … and everyone would line up and hold their little cup, get it filled, get their piece of bread, and off we went.”
Mrs. Mabutas recalled the same image a decade later in the Philippines. Each student at her elementary school got milk and cornbread. For a couple of years, she envied her older sister, who would sometimes bring home some of the milk or cornbread.
“I was so proud when I got to the first grade and had my own,” recalled Mrs. Mabutas, who moved from the WFP to the United Nations in New York.
“With a child’s perception, you look at it differently than I do now,” she added. “It’s something that you look forward to, and you think you deserve. Of course, I was young and didn’t understand anything about food aid.”
842 million go hungry
As the world marked World Food Day this month, an estimated 842 million people — equivalent to the combined populations of North America plus Eastern and Western Europe — went to bed hungry each day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Malnutrition and starvation claim a life every five seconds, or about 10 million per year worldwide.
“World Food Day is an important trigger for many of us who are reminded that we take food for granted because it is around us all the time,” Mr. Keine said.
“Once food is slightly scarce, it becomes a huge problem, because there are no alternatives,” he added.
About 20 airplanes, 5,000 trucks, and 40 ships deliver food aid to poor countries every day, according to the WFP. The average daily expenditure on food in the developed world is $10; WFP food rations cost 29 cents per person fed per day.
The United States is the largest food aid donor. It contributes about 80 percent of the WFP’s resources, and runs its own food aid program administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Food for Peace, which since 1954 has reached some 3.4 billion people.
As children, Mrs. Mabutas and Mr. Keine did not think much about their school feeding programs.
“We knew there were organizations that cared, and we had a feeling of gratitude,” recalled Mr. Keine. But “only later did I see the broader picture, and how massive this all was — a sign of rebuilding Europe in a spiritual, political and physical sense.”
Thousands of former beneficiaries of food aid today work for development organizations such as the WFP, the World Bank, the United Nations, or nongovernmental organizations such as CARE.
Mr. Keine figures that just about every official that he has met from the kingdom of Bhutan was once a food aid recipient. And Mrs. Mabutas remembers being in Nicaragua and meeting many WFP warehouse managers who had once received food aid.
Fear of dependency
Some people might say that having people with firsthand experience of hunger has not helped make food aid more efficient, or reduced the number of people who go hungry each day. Others argue that food aid creates dependency, and that recipient countries relying on the aid fail to provide for their own people. Or that providing food aid to a country stifles local agriculture and food production.
Mrs. Mabutas has a rebuttal for every critic.
“Everybody at the WFP knew my story, so they knew that when it comes to use of resources, that they really cannot argue with me, because they are not as passionate about it,” she said.
“I know how the whole process works. I’ve been the recipient, I’ve worked for the Filipino government, and I know the ins and outs and all the dirty business governments will do. I know how to give direction to my auditors on areas that really need to be reviewed … that was a big advantage for me.”
Regarding dependency and local food industries, Mrs. Mabutas said governments of poor countries need to learn how to better integrate food aid into their programs and work toward graduating from it, rather than relying on it forever.
“It should not be seen as a grant that will come forever and ever, but that happens in some countries,” she conceded. “But in other countries, food aid really is used to develop their own capacities.”
Food aid traditionally has gone to victims of weather and other disasters, but since the start of the 1990s, it has increasingly gone to victims of war. The number of refugees and internally displaced people has risen dramatically in the past decade. Today, camps of displaced people are found throughout eastern Congo, Gaza and the West Bank, parts of the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Colombia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, and most recently Sudan’s Darfur region and Haiti.
“Food aid is not always a blessing,” Mr. Keine said.
“There are indeed food-aid programs that slowed food production at large,” he said. “But I’m impressed at how people have been able to sharpen that tool to target the right kinds of people.”
In the past, deciding where and how to distribute food aid involved much guesswork, from estimating how many people live in a country to how much food is needed, and in what parts of the country or population groups.
Aid organizations now fund country census surveys, which give a much more accurate picture of population size and distribution. In some part of Africa, Asia and Latin America, small pockets of people live far from roads, in remote areas where even FM radio is silent.
Air drops now rare
Food donations today are targeted mainly at women and children.
“When I think back, it was my mother and grandmother who looked for food,” Mr. Keine said.
And food drops from low-flying airplanes are mostly a thing of the past. Today, food delivery is satellite-based. “It’s different than dumping food,” Mr. Keine said. “We were rightly criticized for that, but we’re way, way past it now.”
The WFP keeps food stored in strategic locations of regions with ethnic tensions that could erupt into war, or with frequent national disasters, like drought or crop failure. It also relies heavily on drought early-warning systems, which use a variety of agricultural and weather indicators to forecast looming droughts.
George Kun is a Liberian in his late 20s who worked for a Washington-based group that lobbies for aid to refugees. Mr. Kun emigrated to the United States after living in refugee camps in Ivory Coast and Ghana while fighting raged in Liberia in the 1990s.
When he, his mother and younger sister left the first camp and returned to their home in Monrovia, Liberia, Mr. Kun worked on the docks, unloading ships of food aid. At the end of each work day, he was given rice or cash. He preferred the rice, because there wasn’t always food to buy with cash, and even when there was, it was overpriced.
Mr. Kun was a small, skinny teenager whose heartiest meals were school lunches from food aid.
“That school feeding program encouraged me so much,” he said. “I don’t know I would be here today, that I would have come so far, if there hadn’t been that encouragement. Believe me, it makes all the difference to the people who are receiving it.”
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