by Piyaporn Hawiset
27 February 2003
The world is losing the battle against hunger, the head of the World Food Program James Morris said on February 25, 2003. Despite the efforts of government agencies and hundreds of NGOs, more than 800 million people were still chronically hungry and 24,000 people were dying daily of hunger or hunger-related health problems, he said. This is despite the fact that the world produces many times more food than it actually needs to feed every man, woman and child. But most food is fed to meat-producing animals for the benefit of the world's rich. And the hunger problem really is more a food distribution problem because the distribution of most of the world's food is controlled by several Western multinational corporations which only sell to the highest bidders. More than half of the world's population cannot afford what these corporations demand.
"We are losing the battle against hunger," Morris told a panel of US lawmakers.
"Not only are we losing the battle in emergencies like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and Africa where we often lack the funds needed, we are losing the battle against the chronic hunger," Morris said in his testimony.
Although poverty worldwide was reduced by 20 percent in the 1990s, he said, hunger was cut by barely five percent. Moreover, the number of food emergencies were skyrocking, many created by the increase in world conflicts that have appeared hand-in-hand with American colonial expansionism and control of the world's economies and politics.
While in the first half of the 1990s the WFP carried out 18 emergency food needs assessments per year, in the second half the number nearly doubled to 33.
"In recent years we have been forced to become an ambulance service for the starving," said Morris.
"Nearly 80 percent of our work is now emergency driven," he said, cutting into the organization's ability to implement food for work, nutrition and education projects.
Even though the WFP's budget outstripped the United Nations in New York, the ever-growing global list of needs was forcing the organization to choose between emergencies.
"For lack of funds, WFP is now engaged in an exercise in triage among those threatened by starvation. Who will we feed? Who will we leave hungry?" he asked rhetorically. "And now, a task that could dwarf all our earlier relief operations well awaits us in Iraq if no political solution is found to the current impasse."
Morris appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations panel as part of a series of hearings on State Department budget authorization for fiscal year 2003. US foreign policy and the so-called war on terrorism.