When armed men demanded food from a United Nations World Food Programme warehouse in Afghanistan, the worker protecting it replied, “The cost of this food is my life.”
Because the men included some of the worker’s relatives, they spared both the employee and the food intended to help six million starving Afghans.
Catherine Bertini, executive director of World Food Programme, shared this story and other challenges of meeting emergency needs at a forum yesterday at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“What we do is try to end hunger and to use food to reach people to try to help them improve their lives, and stay alive, in some cases,” Bertini told the crowd of more than 100.
Although WFP has worked toward this goal in Afghanistan for 20 years, she said Afghans faced additional challenges when the Taliban took power and banned girls from schools and women from work.
After WFP staff told the new leaders that Afghan widows would die without employment, the Taliban allowed the organization to set up bakeries run by widows. WFP also responded to restrictions by giving their female employees computers to use at home.
Although the organization had to rely exclusively on local employees and commercial truckers, 260,000 tons of food — equal to the weight of 25 Eiffel Towers – has entered the country over the last four months.
“Our logistics operators were extremely creative and found new routes from every country surrounding Afghanistan,” Bertini said. “The truckers were extremely brave. They stopped on the first day of the bombing and started again the next day.”
Today, WFP is using food as a reward for work and as an incentive for children to attend schools and for pregnant women to visit clinics. They will continue distributing free food until July, when the harvest season begins. To help this humanitarian aid get where to it is needed, a new operation to build infrastructure will begin in April.
However, because hunger affects 777 million people worldwide, Bertini emphasized the need for public awareness of starvation in the other 82 countries her organization serves.
“What other Afghanistans are out there that we don’t know about, much like we didn’t know about Afghanistan before Sept. 11?” she said.
Along with more awareness, Bertini also wants to address the underlying causes of hunger.
“There’s enough food in the world to feed everyone,” she said. “It’s a question of access, sometimes because of war, but mostly because of poverty. They’re hungry because they’re poor, and they’re poor because they’re hungry.”
She urged students to battle these problems by learning other languages, contacting elected officials and exploring internship opportunities.
“You and I can make a difference in the lives of hungry people around the world,” she said. “We are making a difference, but the needs are so great, and we can do so much more. One by one by one, we can make a difference to the whole world.”
Daniel Krutzinna, a Harvard graduate student from Germany who attended the forum, said he generally supports the organization’s efforts. However, he disagreed with the United States attaching of concessions to its donations, requiring food to come from its own surpluses and markets.
“I think she was a bit too optimistic,” he said. “The WFP gets criticism that they don’t support the supplying of food from the domestic markets of developing countries.”
However, Krutzinna was impressed by the overall efficiency of the organization, whose administrative costs are only nine percent.
“It’s the right perspective to look at the glass half-full,” he said. “There’s a lot less people suffering than years ago, and it’s good to have some mechanism in place.”
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