A Disease of the Soul

My return trip from Nairobi, Kenya took about nineteen hours, airport to airport, and I was exhausted by the time I arrived home. But I was delighted to sit down to a home-cooked meal with my family and share my experiences. Over a fresh salad, chops, vegetables and rice, we talked about hunger in Africa.

I’d flown to Nairobi to meet with a non-profit called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Their mission is to modernize agriculture on the continent and, in so doing, help end the chronic hunger and starvation that claim millions of lives there every year.

At this point – the beginning of paragraph three – you’re probably tempted to stop reading this column. Please don’t. These are problems that you might think you understand, or think you’ve heard enough about, but you don’t and you haven’t.

For five years, back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I served as Africa Bureau Chief for NBC News, and during that period I covered famines in Ethiopia and Mozambique, and visited rural farming communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and South Africa. It was clear then that Africa was losing the battle against hunger. But in the past two decades, things have gone from bad to worse.

UN health and food organizations estimate that 25,000 people in the developing world die every day from hunger, malnutrition and related diseases. As Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman point out in their book, Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, that’s the equivalent of sixty jumbo jets crashing every day. And fully half of these hunger victims are in sub-Saharan Africa, where close to half a billion people are undernourished.

The statistics are numbing, and that’s part of the problem. Like so many challenges in Africa, it’s tempting to put hunger and malnutrition in the “Too Hard” basket and move on to more tractable problems. Fortunately, powerful organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and African organizations like AGRA aren’t moving on. They’re tackling the challenge head on.

The Green Revolution began with the work of an agronomist named Norman Borlaug, who received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1942. Two years later, Borlaug was recruited by the Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program to help Mexico increase its grain production. During his fourteen years with the program, Borlaug developed new varieties of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat that helped Mexico go from a net wheat importer to a net wheat exporter. In 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to India, where he replicated his success. Wheat production there increased from 12.3 million tons to 20.1 million tons in just five years. Borlaug moved on to Pakistan, and then to China, adapting the techniques of the Green Revolution to the specific soil and climate conditions he found in each country and region.

But Borlaug’s efforts foundered in Africa, where smallholder farmers, mostly women, struggled against both the natural elements (primarily drought) and an economic infrastructure that stymied efforts to improve crop production and profitability. To make matters worse, misguided environmentalists campaigned against Borlaug’s utilization of genetic crossbreeding and use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides, the very techniques and products that had saved so many lives in Mexico, India, Pakistan and China.

“If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things,” Borlaug said of his critics.

The folks I met with at AGRA are trying to re-start the Green Revolution Borlaug began decades ago, but this time, they say, it will be a revolution with an African face. Led by its chairman, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the organization’s president, Dr. Namanga Ngongi, AGRA is looking to reduce food insecurity by 50% in at least 20 African countries and double the incomes of 20 million smallholder families in the next decade.

These are ambitious goals, and it will take more than Gates and Rockefeller money for AGRA to achieve them. It will take a genuine commitment by Africa’s fifty-two nations to work together to defeat hunger and end starvation, and it will require the cooperation and collaboration of countries around the world – especially with regard to tariffs and farm subsidies – for Africa’s Green Revolution to succeed.

I left Africa on Wednesday evening convinced that AGRA’s goals were achievable, at least on paper. They’ve assembled a talented group of smart and experienced people to meet the challenge, and they have some powerful allies and champions. But it’s also clear that success will require a level of selflessness, generosity and commitment from nations and political leaders that has been, sadly, in short supply.

Volli Carucci, who works for the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia, observed that starvation is “something people in Europe and the United States have forgotten about." But Carucci, working on the front lines in the battle against hunger, said he couldn't forget. "Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger," he said, "becomes a disease of the soul.”

Norman Borlaug, the founder of the Green Revolution, died six months ago, at age 95, after a life of extraordinary achievement. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, it was estimated that he had saved more than a billion people from starvation. In accepting his award in Oslo he said, “Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of famine, as he has so often done in the past.” He concluded, “We will be guilty of criminal negligence, without extenuation, if we permit future famines.”

Forty years later, our criminal negligence continues.

It needs to stop.