Richard Beahrs on the MDGs

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MDGs in Focus Session Two: Health and Hunger

Speech given by Mr. Richard Beahrs, Member, MDG Hunger Task Force

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to be here today. Everyone’s comments have been very stimulating. They have certainly given us a lot to think about. Accordingly, I am going to shift gears a bit in delivering my remarks. I came initially with a formal speech to give. My good friend Rafael Flor from the Hunger Task Force was ready to stand by with a PowerPoint presentation. That’s all gone by the wayside and I’d rather deviate from the script completely and provide some extemporaneous remarks in response to the comments of the other speakers.

What I’d like to do first of all is to give everyone a copy of the Hunger Task Force Report (which is available in the back of the room). I encourage you to take fifteen minutes to read this at your leisure. I think it will inform you about the work of the Hunger Task Force much more succinctly than I can. I’d also like to comment on Adrienne’s very insightful presentation. Her comments about compromise are something I think we should all give a good deal of thought to. From the remarks we have heard during the day, it is obvious that not everyone agrees with everyone on all of the great issues before us. In hearing the informal discussions this morning, with the references to family and our perceptions of community, I couldn’t help but think of my own family and then my extended family of perhaps fifty people. We are very close. I really believe there is unconditional love among this group. Nevertheless, we are probably split twenty-five/twenty-five Red State/Blue State. And the reality is that we all care, we all love each other, every one advocates their positions, but at the same time everyone has a great deal that they care about philosophically. I think it is important as we look around the room, to recognize that everyone is here because they care about people. That is the reality that brings us together. There is no reason that we need fear the opinions of others. There is a wonderful phrase that I heard from a corporate trainer: “Conflict is neither good nor bad, but keep it in the room.” That’s what I feel about a lot of these issues. Advocate your point of view, but at the same time, acknowledge that other people care about humanity just as much as you do.

I feel more stress today dealing with hunger issues than I ever did in my thirty-five years as a corporate executive. The reason is very simple: these issues are so much more important than anything I ever dealt with before. And as a media executive, I must admit that I feel that the media has gotten off pretty easily today. When we talk about people who make uninformed positions, that’s what the media is here for, to help educate people. We are doing an absolutely terrible job. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I read The New York Times editorial this morning, saying that the average American thinks that 25% of our budget goes to foreign aid as opposed to the reality of 0.016% of our GDP. Something’s wrong with this picture. And then we talk about global warming. How many of you read the article on the front page of The New York Times today? This is a true atrocity. In a free society, we have to be able to discuss these issues in a forthright, direct way. Another aspect of being with a religious group, a thought that has gone through my mind a lot, a topic that certainly has been raised a great deal in our lifetime, is the genocide against Jews during World War II. Six million people died. I was raised with the constant “Never again, never again, never again.” Who can disagree with that? But in Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, the Sudan, it has kept happening. As Michael said in his introductory remarks, these are moral failures. I want to speak specifically about hunger given my experience with the UN Hunger Task Force. These problems are solvable. That really puts a tremendous moral burden on us. It’s one thing to talk about a tsunami. We can talk about early warning systems and the like. But this was a force of nature that was very difficult to deal with. A year ago, I was in Ethiopia. The stunting rate in many parts of Ethiopia is 50%. Now that’s a life sentence of diminished mental capacity. People work extraordinarily hard in these areas. Sometimes when people don’t have an expansive worldview, they feel Africans are simply not taking care of themselves. In fact, when viewing massive public work projects, I felt like I was watching the Pyramids being constructed in Ethiopia. When you see the manual labor that’s invested in building wells and agricultural terraces, you recognize the effort people are willing to invest to break out of the poverty trap.

I’d like to use two quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. to frame our dilemma. On one occasion, Dr. King said that he believed in the basic goodness of humanity. On the other hand, he said that progress is not inevitable. I agree with him on both counts. I do believe in the basic goodness of humanity, but we really have to focus on how we are going to bring about the systematic change that can allow us to reap the benefits of this basic human impulse. I’d like to suggest two underlying dynamics that can contribute to change. I am a great believer that sustainability comes from process. You need an incredible amount of focus on targeted priorities. I think the dilemma is framed quite well by one of my favorite quotes from Dickens’ The Tale of Two Cities: “The best of times and the worst of times”. I believe there is a natural progression in the scope of human knowledge, compounded by forces such as Moore’s Law which provide the potential to address the world’s most intractable problems to a degree never before attainable in human history. Truly - the best of times. Nevertheless, the difficulty to reap these rewards is balanced by the forces of entropy which has been defined as the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society. Thus progress is not the natural order of things - chaos is. Truly the worst of times. But on balance, there is reason for optimism. For efficient systems to arise, catalysts must be injected into that chaos that alter that combination of existing elements and organize them into stable, hopefully reproductive, and hopefully self-reinforcing, hopefully resilient entities.

I’d like to speak briefly about the Hunger Task Force. First of all, about 850 million people face extreme malnutrition. Millions die each year from hunger and many unforeseen consequences of stunting and the like. I do truly believe that this number can be halved between now and the year 2015. The largest number of people suffering from these maladies are in India. The highest percentage is in Sub-Saharan Africa. India is making greater progress than Sub-Saharan Africa. Many development measurements in Africa are falling further behind which makes the continent unique in comparison to all others. Much of the work on the Task Force focused on Africa’s particularly grave challenges.

There is a concept that has come up a number of times during the course of the day and that is “quick wins.” The Hunger Task Force focuses on this strategic thrust which is somewhat analogous to how a business would establish its priorities. Where can you get the greatest return on your investment in the shortest possible time frame? Where can you make the greatest difference? When facing the challenge of hunger, these decisions can be a matter of life and death.

I would like to speak to you about the two recommendations from the Hunger Task Force which I have been most directly involved with over the years. Accordingly, I feel I can speak to them in a little bit more detail. Two of the “quick win” strategies that the Hunger Task Force endorsed are school feeding programs with locally produced food and enhancing soil fertility and doing it in a very cost efficient way with organic materials. I have been involved with this work for ten years. I have seen it on the ground. I was asked at lunch – “what encourages me, what discourages me, and what can I bring from the business world to address these challenges?” My corporate career focused on new business development, specifically starting new television networks and I never saw an opportunity where you can get a better return on your investment than by what can be achieved by addressing soil fertility issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. The bad news is that I am absolutely perplexed at how difficult it has been to bring these changes into effect.

Rafael is handing out some materials to you which I am going to use as hypothetical case studies of the kind of specific actions that I think can be taken in which organizations of faith can get behind and really create revolutionary change.

I would like to make two specific recommendations. We have talked about the issue of political will. I would urge all of you to go back to your denominations and lead a focused effort to tell our political leaders that you care. At another meeting, someone noted “to make a difference, you need to have an effort like this organized like a military campaign.” You can’t merely say “I hope this happens.” For example, a denomination like the Lutherans could lead an organized campaign to get everyone in their church involved, educating them on an issue and helping them to understand precisely how to get the word out. The Republican Party has done an excellent job in recent years doing this. The Move On Movement has done a very good job for the Democratic Party making it easier for people to convey their ideas. I think this is one aspect of it ~ building political will. The other concern I would like to raise is to encourage each of you to focus on women’s issues. Advancing their access to education and opportunity is the first step on the ladder towards addressing broader issues such as malnutrition.

I would encourage you to try to find an aspect, a component, of the MDGS that you can champion. There is plenty of work for everybody here. I’m particularly pleased that John McArthur made the point about the Rotary Club helping to eradicate polio. How fantastic! There are a lot of service clubs in the world, it doesn’t just have to be Rotary. If all the organizations of faith were doing that, I think you’d have tremendous impact.

I’d like to speak about a couple of issues dealing with soil fertility. The soils of Africa are terrible. Thin from the beginning - environmental issues such as deforestation have made them worse. Some people feel “why don’t Africans do a better job of farming like in our Midwest?” These are completely different conditions. Malaria is prevalent, landholdings and markets are small and difficult to access. There are answers. Israel has done a wonderful job with tree planting and a great way to cost efficiently impact soil fertility is by planting leguminous trees. I won’t go into the details here. I have plenty of cards. I would love to talk to anybody about all of this. For example, Ethiopia, a wonderful country which has touched virtually all of the faiths in this room, is in desperate need of seeds to plant organic material to refurbish their soil, fruit trees to help feed the people. There is tremendous opportunity there to make a difference.

I also want to emphasize again the potential of school feeding programs with locally produced foods. This is an example of something where I feel that people aren’t focused on the whole picture. We know in this country that school feeding programs have had tremendous impact. Nevertheless, my daughter taught in the Mississippi Delta and when I visited there, her kids in their school feeding program were being given both French Fries and Fritos at lunch. Obviously, improvements are needed. At this same time, the concept of a good meal in the classroom can make a huge difference. But one of the things that we saw in Africa was that oftentimes the food for these feeding programs was coming from food aid. You could look and find surplus corn and wheat from the United States just being drop shipped to Ethiopia. The Hunger Task Force takes a conservative market focused approach on this kind of thing. You can’t have a sustainable food supply in Ethiopia if you are not producing food in Ethiopia. What are your chances as a farmer to develop a profitable, sustainable business if you are competing against “free”? That’s awfully tough to do and that’s one of the things I am very concerned about: food aid relief as opposed to development. We have all heard stories of how stifling the impact can be on development when that occurs. The fundamental change that the Hunger Task Force is advocating is that the food should be produced and purchased locally. As opposed to providing free wheat from the American Midwest, provide money for schools to buy food from local farmers to help them to institutionalize this process. I think there is tremendous potential here.

You raised an important point about women. I think the Hunger Task Force Report, like the other MDG, reports are part of a process. We shouldn’t think of them as a closed book. I can give you a good example of that. On the Hunger Task Force, we came to realize very quickly that we weren’t focusing enough on nutrition and we weren’t focused enough on women farmers. And so we recruited women farmers to be a part of the Hunger Task Force and a Ghanaian woman, Abenaa Akuamoa Boateng, was the one that led the charge to have the Government of Ghana adopt as a national policy school feeding programs with locally produced food. It’s a long process but we have to grind the detail. It isn’t easy.

I am also very concerned that in the non-profit world, we suffer from what I call a “flavor of the month” mentality and I contrast that with the business world. When you are working in a business, there is no choice but to see things through to the finish line. You need an emphatic resolve that you are not going to give up easily. I have seen too many NGO’s shift focus too easily. This is getting a little tough, how about this? Let’s try this? And people jump off onto another project. After working on the Hunger Task Force Report, I am focused on targeted aspects of our report: soil fertility and school feeding with locally produced food and just stay the course. That’s the kind of process that I think would be very helpful for your organizations, your churches, your mosques, your synagogues. Commit to finding the initiative that makes sense to you and stick with it over the long term. Let me give you an example of that: the task force reports are action plans, they are not a traditional business plans which would extend to 2,000 pages each. They are action plans with broad outlines of what needs to be done. One of things that I am pushing right now is that the University of California has sent business school teams to Ethiopia, into Ghana, to develop the business plans behind these initatives. I think that’s the kind of thing we need to do, to broaden the net of the people who are involved in the programs which will help make a real difference.

I could go on, but I think that I have made the basic points that I think illustrate the concerns that we have. I also want to formally introduce Rafael Flor. Rafael is from the Earth Institute of Columbia University where he has worked with Jeff Sachs and Pedro Sanchez. They are doing a tremendous number of things on the ground, specifically the kind of things which I am talking about here. I can give you contact information about the programs I have mentioned, but Rafael can give you much more and he is based right here in New York. For those of you who are interested in any aspect of the MDGS and what you can do, I know that Rafael can put you in touch with people at the Earth Institute to match you with other issues.

Thank you.

Richard Beahrs is the former President and Chief Operating Officer of Court T.V. He is our corporate representative and he currently serves as the Chair for the Arbor Day Foundation for the Trustees and is a Trustee of the International Center for Research in Agro-Forestry. He could easily have talked about the environment, but the Chair of the Hunger Task Force recommended that we ask him to speak about hunger since he has a strong interest in this area as well and serves on the Hunger Task Force. Hunger is so closely related to the eradication of poverty. It is increased by damage to the environment. Climate change threatens to increase the numbers of the world’s hungry by reducing the area of land available for farming in developing countries. Wars and armed conflicts are leading causes of world hunger emergencies.