World Hunger

- time for Northern Ireland to do more

by Pauline McCabe

Every night, as we tuck our much loved children into their beds, 850 million of our fellow human beings go to bed hungry.  Last week I met some of them in Madagascar.

Madagascar is an island nation in the Indian Ocean, off the southeastern coast of Africa. It is the 46^th largest country in the world.  It is home to 18 million people, 70% of whom live in abject poverty.  Since 2001, Madagascar has had a government committed to lifting its people out of poverty but, starting from such a low base line, it is a mighty task.

In various rural areas of Madagascar I met hundreds of primary school children who, walk bare footed, between 3 and 6 km a day, to a couple of dark huts that serve as their school. Only 14% of children of children attend a secondary school. The children leave home in time to arrive at school by 7.30am, carry out their schoolwork until 1pm and then walk home. Most have nothing to eat or drink from the time that they leave home until the time they arrive back home. Some have nothing to eat before they leave home.

Teachers in Mahazina in the District of Fandriana, an area particularly badly affected by cyclones that destroy the rice fields, told me of hungry six and seven year olds eating leaves from a nearby field to fill the gnawing gap in their empty bellies.  A teacher in Ambodivona, told me about a twelve-year-old boy, the age of my youngest son, she found quietly sobbing in the back corner of her classroom, too hungry to face the 4 km walk home. He pleaded with her for food. She had none to give him. 

In Mahazina, I also visited the local hospital comprising of a maternity unit and beside it a hut that is the medical ward. Three rooms with four beds, each with a filthy mattress and no bedding.  No running water, no electricity and the only supplies a small quantity of antibiotic and kits to test the new babies for Aids. The nurse, who lived on site, worked between the two units tending her patients - including Aids sufferers, as best she could.  On a positive note, one day each week she received the serums needed to immunize all the babies and young children in her area.

The average life expectancy in Madagascar is fifty-three years. Nearly one in ten babies dies at birth. 

And yet, the Malagasy people are warm, gentle, gracious and willing to share what little they have, even their meagre food supply. They look after one another as best they can and are touchingly appreciate of what little they have. In our materialistic world, how much Africa can show and teach us.

Each week, 210,000 hungry people die and countless other lives are wrecked. But the old challenge of malnutrition and starvation, except in times of extreme famine, rarely draws any headlines. We accept the status quo of global hunger and its dire consequences in terms of health, education, productivity and poverty. We deceive ourselves that we can’t do more. 

So what can we do? As we look forward to a different and better future, Northern Ireland has an opportunity to look outwards at the world we share and to influence what is happening to the two thirds of its people that are hungry.

In 1996, world leaders at the United Nations World Food Summit set a goal to cut global hunger in half by 2015. Currently this appears to have little chance of being achieved. Instead, the number of hungry people in the world is rising at about 5 million per year. At the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000, eight Millennium Development Goals and 18 targets were agreed to encourage the international community to stop talking about making a difference in the developing world and join forces to do something tangible. The intention is that all of these targets will be achieved by 2015 but whilst some significant progress has been made in some areas, in many cases progress is patchy, too slow or non-existent.

Yet the fact is that if people and governments made a commitment to ending hunger now, then these goals could be reached and surpassed.  As David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World notes 'The problem is not a lack of food. Hunger is a political problem, and people need to demand change from their elected officials.'  Before last Friday's meeting of the G8 Finance Ministers in Germany, a letter was sent to the Ministers urging them to make good their long standing commitment to provide 0.7% of national income in effective aid, and to commit to binding timetables to reach aid targets. The letter was signed by, amongst others, Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu.

We must also tell our Assembly that we want the eradication of world hunger to be high on our agenda. 'Northern Ireland is being transformed into a world-class and progressive region that is now part of the global community,' the DCAL Rediscover Northern Ireland programme tells us. As we are encouraged to look forward and outward, we need to consider what is our role, our vision and our obligation and responsibility to the global community. The Assembly All Party Group on International Development chaired by Carmel Hannah, should take a strong lead and coordinate the overall effort.

At a Departmental level, each of our new Ministers can make a difference. To give two simple examples:

Catriona Ruane says that she wants our education system to create 'children who will be able to avail of the opportunities today's global economy provides them'. Last year I was part of a project to link eight Roman Catholic, Protestant, Integrated and Irish speaking schools in Newry and Mourne with eight schools in Namibia. The project gave our children the chance to work together on something that was purposeful and also to learn about Namibia and the lives of children who live there. Importantly, it also gave children in Namibia the chance to learn about life in Northern Ireland. Teachers in Namibia, and in the secondary schools I visited in Madagascar, talked constantly about the challenge they face to conquer the apathy that results from helplessness and make children aspire to a different and better life.

Michelle Gildernew has said that she wants an 'outward-looking rural society'. Improving agricultural technology development and transfer is vital for Africa. Farmers need help to handle their land, water resources, seeds and planting techniques so that they can provide the major part of their food themselves. Northern Ireland has a part to play.

Businesses in Northern Ireland can also play a significant role if they make the choice to do so. Earlier this year, I helped to set up an organisation called The Corporate Goat, which aims to encourage the business community to contribute more to eradicating world hunger. The evidence is that businesses will give more if they know that the money they give to charitable causes is being used in the most efficient and effective way to alleviate suffering. They have a particular understanding of the impact of bureaucracy and red tape. They want to know that the approach being adopted will achieve a very good return, in human terms, on their investment - whether they are contributing to targeted programmes to give very needy people immediate access to food or to interventions to improve food availability, incomes and productivity.

In Madagascar, I looked at a number of projects that meet all of the above criteria and are being adopted by companies in Northern Ireland.  All of them are projects owned by the local community and with an emphasis on sustainability. Four of them involve building schools in remote rural communities and providing the start up costs for a vegetable garden, hens or/and animals that will help to make sure that the children attending the school are fed once during the school day. 

An estimated 130 million children in the world are not enrolled in school due to hunger and malnutrition. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, 170 million children receive no food during school hours. If you feed children, they come to school and learn better. The Sisters of the Poor in Antanarivo, the capital of Madagascar, get hundreds of street children, age 3 to 13 to attend school by providing them with some food at breakfast and lunch. At night, they go back to the streets but many of them go on to attend state schools and eventually to receive skills training to enable them to earn a living.

The education of women in the third world has been shown to empower them and offer great possibilities. Illiterate girls have an average six children each. Girls who go to school have an average of 2.9 and are better equipped to rear their children. A farmer with only four years experience of elementary education provides 8.7% more food than a farmer with no education. Children who complete primary school are only half as likely to contract Aids. Those who finish secondary school are 15% as likely.

It costs less than £6,000 for a business in Northern Ireland to undertake the building of a school with three classrooms and a vegetable garden in Madagascar.

In August, a web site describing our approach to adopting projects in Madagascar and Ghana in 2007 will be fully operational and we will be offering free seminars to businesses to share our experiences in the hope that others will be encouraged to do something similar - or better.  You can keep up to date on this development by logging on to www.thecorporategoat.com.

Following a harrowing trip to Ethiopia, Mary Robinson once wrote that it was up to each of us as individuals sitting in our lounges watching the images on television to 'just do something.'

Why not start by writing to Carmel Hannah at Parliament Buildings, Belfast BT4 3XX or e-mail her at carmelhannasdlp@btconnect.com.  Make it clear that it is your wish that the All Party Group on International Development ensures that the ending of hunger in our world is high on the Northern Ireland political agenda. Give as much as you can to charities that you have confidence in or/and help with fundraising.  Find out more about how we can end hunger. A great place to start is the inspirational book 'Ending Hunger Now' by George McGovern, Bob Dole and Donald E. Messer published by Fortress Press. Every political, church, civil and business leader in Northern Ireland should certainly order a copy of this book tomorrow.

The words of a Latin American prayer state simply: Lord, to those who hunger, give bread.  And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice. 

We don't have to live in a world where 20,000 children every day are still dying preventable deaths and one in ten never sees her third birthday.

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Pauline McCabe is a Business Consultant with a master's degree in Human Resource Management.  She is a Chartered Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and has just completed five and a half years as an Independent Member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.