The Healing in Helping the World's Poor

By: George McGovern

It is impossible to visit New York City without being painfully aware of the haunting vacancy in the skyline where the World Trade Center towers once stood. The thousands of people who died there and at the Pentagon were mostly American, but there were also victims from scores of other countries.

Can any good come from such a tragedy?

Certainly, Americans are united in our patriotism and in support for our government's efforts to hunt down the terrorist network in Afghanistan. People around the globe - in Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East - have also joined to condemn terrorism and to express sympathy for its victims. But perhaps a more enduring and constructive change in the past three months is that Americans seem to be asking meaningful questions about the kind of world we live in and looking at the hatreds directed at our commercial and military power.

Half of the world's inhabitants are in poverty - millions without jobs, without adequate food or clean water, without decent homes, without much if any education, without health or dental care, without a political voice, and without hope for the future. None of this can ever justify the mass killing of innocent people. But the stubborn realities of global hunger and poverty that help fuel hatred exist.

I don't claim to be an expert on anything. But having walked and worked among the world's poor for 40 years, I have learned something about the sense of powerlessness that millions feel.

Modern communications have spread the word to these masses that the privileged few who rule them are living in luxury that exceeds all measure. Across the seas, the poor observe others with wealth, military might, comfort and pleasure that overwhelm the imagination. Is it possible that the cruel and fanatical upstarts who strike at symbols of wealth and power are heroes in the eyes of some of the downtrodden? Is it possible that desperate young men rebelling against their powerlessness saw in the collapse of American skyscrapers a sign that they are not wholly powerless?

For half a century, since the end of World War II, some of our most thoughtful citizens have been telling us that the world's poor would one day explode out of their misery. The technological and communications revolutions will aid that explosion.

We can't create a world free from tension and conflict. But during my service as the American ambassador to the United Nations food and agriculture agencies in Rome, I concluded that in our time we can end the world's hunger.

Former Senator Bob Dole and I proposed in October that of the $40 billion authorized by the Congress to fight terrorism, $5 billion be earmarked over the next five years to reduce world hunger.

We could allocate half of the $1 billion a year to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to improve food production and the conditions of life in the world's rural villages. The other half of the contribution could go for direct food aid to be distributed by the United Nations World Food Program. At the center of this effort would be a universal school lunch program and a nutritional supplement program for pregnant women and preschool children. A good share of the aid could be American farm products, an arrangement that would offer an economic benefit to American farmers and ranchers.

The United States contribution should be matched by a $3 billion annual contribution from other United Nations member countries. That amount of money and food on top of the assistance that is being provided now would eliminate hunger in areas of greatest need around the globe.

The school lunch program is especially important because it could help draw more children into school. Illiteracy consigns millions of young women to early childbearing and lives of poverty (illiterate women have a birth rate more than double that of women who have gone to school).

Afghanistan now presents the most urgent case for food relief, having faced years of conflict and drought, plus a bitterly cold winter.

I cannot promise that these steps will end terrorism. I am confident, however, that helping to feed more people can reduce the power of those who appeal to desperation and hopelessness.

Is this idealism? Perhaps. But if we take care of hungry kids and mothers while improving the conditions of life in the villages where most of the world's people live, we'll produce less hate and more love.