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A native of Denmark, Per Pinstrup-Andersen is the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell University. He also serves as the chairman of the Science Council of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
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From 1992-2002 Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen served as the director general of International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Prior to that, he was the director of the Cornell Food and Nutrition Policy Program and a member of the Technical Advisory Committee to the CGIAR.
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Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen won the World Food Prize in 2001 for his contribution to the improvement of agricultural research, food policy, and poverty.
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My interest in hunger and malnutrition, as well as poverty in developing countries started when I was in graduate school at Oklahoma State University. I originally attended graduate school because I wanted to get into agricultural marketing to buy and sell products, agricultural commodities. I realized that there was something more important that I could do: I could do things that would help people out of poverty and out of hunger.
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I then went to Columbia, and I saw first hand what hunger and poverty do to people. And since that time that has been my passion. In a world as rich as ours, it is unethical, immoral and totally unacceptable that so many people go to bed hungry. I want to do what I can to change that.
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"I have seen this with my own eyes. It is horrible."
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There are two ways that I can kind answer your question. I can rattle off a bunch of statistics. Every third pre-school child is malnourished; she does not grow to her full potential. If she survives, she will grow up to be a stunted individual and chances are that her intellectual capabilities are not fully developed. There are 800 million people--one in every six people in the world--that go to bed hungry every night, if they have even have a bed to go to. One in five people is extremely poor. There are statistics on all of these things.
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The other way I can answer your question is that I can take you to West Africa and bring you into a household that is very poor and likely to consist of a man and woman with six or seven children. They are likely to be farmers. The woman is likely to do most of the agricultural work, and whenever the drought hits, she loses her crop. If you come back six months later, chances are she has lost one of her children to starvation, simply because she is unable to feed her children.
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When the drought eliminates her crop or when the insects eat her crop, she has no buffer. She has no place to go for support. There is no social program. She cannot go to her neighbor because the neighbor is also poor and has also lost his or her own crop. The only outcome of that, or the most likely outcome, is going to be more malnutrition and possible one or more of the children will die. I have seen this with my own eyes. It is horrible.
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"The most important cause of hunger is poverty."
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The most important cause of hunger is poverty. Seventy-five percent of the world's poor people live in rural areas and most of them are hungry. So the hunger problem is a problem of primarily rural areas in developing countries. But if we do not deal with the poverty problem in rural areas, it will become an urban problem.
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Whatever causes poverty in rural areas is likely to cause hunger. That means poorly developed infrastructures such as roads and markets, as well as lack of access by poor farmers to appropriate production methods and technology, lack of access to credit, poor education, and lack of access to primary healthcare. You put these things together and you have hunger.
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People simply cannot get access to the most basic healthcare and because they are malnourished to begin with, it takes very little to get them down. The common cold, which may keep us away from work for a day or two, it may even keep us in bed, may severely harm malnourished children.
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"What it would take to virtually eliminate hunger would be high priority on the part of governments to solve the hunger problem."
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What it would take to virtually eliminate hunger would be high priority on the part of governments to solve the hunger problem. Without that priority the hunger problem will never be resolved.
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Six years ago, leaders from 186 countries got together in Rome and they agreed to set a goal to reduce by half the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. That is reducing the number of 800 million to 400 million hungry people over that twenty year period.
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"Not only will the goal not be achieved on time, it will never be achieved with business as usual."
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During the 1990s, there was a reduction of about forty million of the number of hungry people, but the number in China was twice that, about eighty million. So if you take China out of the equation, for all the other developing countries, there was an increase of forty million hungry people.
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Not only will the goal not be achieved on time, it will never be achieved with business as usual. The gap between the goal and what is actually happening is increasing. Unless something is done, which is quite different from business as usual, by 2015, we will have more hungry people than we have today.
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"As Americans and Europeans it is in our best interest to help poor people escape poverty and to help hungry people escape hunger."
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Poverty and hunger is a tremendous economic waste: Poor and hungry people do not produce very much. You know in your own case, if you are ill and you try to go to work, your productivity is way down.
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Imagine a situation where you are chronically malnourished, you do not have access to enough food, you are sick because you have little resistance to the diseases that affect all of us. You will produce very little. It is a huge economic waste, not only for poor people, but for all of us.
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As Americans and Europeans it is in our best interest to help poor people escape poverty and to help hungry people escape hunger. There are several reasons for that. One, poor people make bad trading partners. They do not buy what we offer or what generates employment in our countries because they have no money to buy it with.
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One of the best things we can do from our own self interest point of view is to help countries become better off because that will result in importing more of our goods and services and it generates employment in the United States and Europe.
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"You cannot have a stable world when one percent of the world's population earns as much as fifty-seven percent of the rest."
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There is a second very important reason why it is in our best interest and that is you cannot have a stable world when one percent of the world's population earns as much as fifty-seven percent of the rest.
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That kind of inequality we have never seen in recorded history. The inequality is the worst it has ever been. Now add to that the tremendous, wide-spread, absolute poverty, hunger and death caused by hunger and you have a very explosive situation that no military might can keep under control.
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"There is a lot of anger out there because they don't seem to be able to get themselves out of hunger and poverty and they need to blame somebody."
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We need to tackle the underlying causes of international terrorism and they are hunger, poverty and related hopelessness. People who have nothing to lose are very easy to convince to participate or, at least, condone action against the non-poor.
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Imagine the situation where you are the head of the family, you have six or seven children, your wife and children are all malnourished and you see no way out of this. It is very easy for me to come and convince you that the people from the United States or Europe that you saw on television last night, because most villages have a television set, are the reason that you are in this terrible misery. Now, whether that is true or not is without importance.
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This widespread poverty and hunger is providing the justification and, in some cases, it's providing direct support for international instability, including terrorism. I want to make very clear that I'm not suggesting that poor people are terrorists. Absolutely not. They are trying to survive. I am saying there is a lot of anger out there because they don't seem to be able to get themselves out of hunger and poverty and they need to blame somebody. We need to tackle that problem and we better start doing it now because it needs a long term effort.
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"Two things have to happen, we have to give more development assistance and secondly, it has to be better focused on poverty and hunger eradication."
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There are basically two things that we as Americans or Europeans can do as individuals. One, we can support the local organizations, the non-governmental organizations, church groups and others who are trying to do something for poor people, whether it is in Europe, the United States or developing countries. There are so many local groups who are trying to do the right thing.
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The second thing we can do is to try to convince our politicians to increase development assistance aimed at poverty eradication in developing counties. Two things have to happen, we have to give more development assistance and secondly, it has to be better focused on poverty and hunger eradication and that means focusing on the rural areas including agriculture. Those are some things we can do immediately.
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"Not only are we keeping developing country farmers out of our own markets, we are also ruining their markets in their countries by exporting subsidized agricultural commodities to their countries."
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There is one other thing that we can do in the United States and Europe. We can open up our markets for the goods and services that developing countries can produce more effectively than we do, and that is first and foremost, agricultural commodities and processed products from developing countries agriculture.
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Right now, in the United States, Japan and the European Union, we maintain very high import tariffs in order to protect our own farmers from competition from developing country farmers. We also export what we have too much of at subsidized prices. So not only are we keeping developing country farmers out of our own markets, we are also ruining their markets in their countries by exporting subsidized agricultural commodities to their countries.
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"Here's the beauty of it. It would become a win-win situation."
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We need a level playing field in trade so that developing country farmers do not have to compete with the U.S. and the European treasuries, but rather compete with American and European farmers.
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Here's the beauty of it. It would become a win-win situation because as people in developing countries earn more, they will import more goods and services from the United States and Europe. They will escape poverty and we will be able to have more employment and more income by exporting to them, so it is a win-win situation.
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It is an investment in our common future both economically and in terms of international stability. It is something we need to do. It is a long term mission rather than the short term mission which is now directing much of our policy.
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"It was, in my opinion, the most successful development effort the world has ever seen."
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The green revolution was the most effective and the most successful development effort the world has ever seen. When the research was put into place which eventually resulted in the green revolution, virtually everybody predicted that the mass starvation and death in Asia during the 60s would continue in the 70s. Very few people saw a solution to that problem. Fortunately a few did.
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The green revolution has fed millions and millions of Asians, of Latin Americans and some, but not as many Africans, by making available new crop varieties that produce more under the conditions facing small farmers in Asia and Latin America. These crop varieties were primarily for rice and wheat. Later on there were varieties for maize and a few other crops.
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"China, India and a number of other countries would not be what they are today without the green revolution."
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It has made possible for poor people in rural areas of Asia and Latin America to send their kids to school, to buy houses, to buy fertilizers and to do a number of other things they couldn't do before. It has helped millions of millions of people out of poverty. China, India and a number of other countries would not be what they are today without the green revolution. It was a tremendous success.
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Yes, there were problems associated with the green revolution. Many countries used too much pesticide which had negative health effects on people. Too much water was being used in certain parts of Asia, causing water logging and salination, resulting in decreased productivity of the land in Asia. So there were some negative outcomes as well.
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Those negative outcomes are now being rectified by the continuation of the green revolution, which now includes resistance to insects and diseases built into the seeds so you don't have to use chemical pesticides and a number of other ways like better water allocation policies and so on. But it was, in my opinion, the most successful development effort the world has ever seen.
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"Poverty is a very negative environmental factor."
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Poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation. This is something that is not well understood in the day-to-day debate. Poor people, in their efforts to survive, are doing damage to natural resources, although one must remember that in most developing countries natural resources are being managed by poor people.
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When a poor farmer cannot get access to appropriate technology, credit, etc., that farmer will cut down forest or climb up a hillside in order to get more land so that she can feed her children. If we could find a way for her to produce more on the land she currently cultivates, she would not have to do damage to the natural resources. Poverty is a very negative environmental factor.
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It is true that over-consumption also causes a great deal of environmental degradation and we need to deal with that, but not on the backs of the poor people in developing countries.
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If anybody is arguing that poor people should stay poor because if they become un-poor they will do damage to the natural resources, they should become poor themselves and try to see your children not being able to grow to their full potential.
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"Poor farmers in developing countries need help in solving some key problems."
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Poor farmers in developing countries need help in solving some key problems that they are facing. One problem is tremendous crop loss during harvest and after. There is tremendous risk that the insect will get to the crop before the farmer does, that the drought will kill the crop before harvest, that plant diseases will kill the crop before harvest.
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Those kinds of problems are best dealt with by making available to the farmer appropriate technologies including better production systems, crop rotation and varieties of crops that are resistant to drought, to insects, to plant diseases.
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That is where science comes in. Science can help farmers improve their production systems. It can help farmers get access to the kind of seed, the kind of varieties that farmers need to win the fight against drought and the insects and the diseases.
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In some cases the most appropriate scientific approach is genetic engineering, but in most cases we are talking about traditional agricultural research of the kind we have done for a very long time. Sometimes traditional agricultural research either cannot solve the problem facing the small farmer or it can only do so over a very long time. In those cases genetic engineering may be the best solution and we should not be afraid of it.
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"We, in the United States and Europe, have no business deciding for poor people in developing countries what is good for them. We are doing this and it is unethical."
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We should test what genetic engineering is producing before it is released. We should make sure we are comfortable with the health risks and the environmental risks, if there are any. The risks should be weighed against the potential benefits and the decision on whether to use genetic modified seeds should be made by the farmer, by the consumer, by the people who stand to benefit or lose.
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We, in the United States and Europe, have no business deciding for poor people in developing countries what is good for them. We are doing this and it is unethical. What is needed is much more publicly funded agricultural research focused sharply on solving existing and future problems of small farms in developing countries.
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"Partnerships are necessary in order to make this work."
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The solution to the exclusive rights, the patenting question is public/private partnerships in research. The private corporations hold patents to what we refer to as enabling technologies. If those companies were to work in partnership with the public research organizations, including the International Agricultural Research Centers under the consolidated group for International Agriculture Research, if they were to work together, I think you could solve many of the exclusive rights problems.
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It is true that the publicly funded research, whether it's international or national, is likely to suffer in the future, more and more, from the inability to get access for what is needed in the research process because it is patented and owned by various private corporations. Partnerships are necessary in order to make this work.
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I should also say that some of the private corporations have donated quite extensively the rights to technologies to developing countries for use in developing countries, so there are many different ways in which this can be resolved. Again, most developing countries do not have that problem at present.
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"We have a silent killer and it's called hunger."
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We have a silent killer and it's called hunger. It is silent and it does not reach New York Times front page very often because it is something we have grown accustomed to: Yes, we know, six million pre-school children died last year of nutrition related illnesses.
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It is not a sensation anymore, it never was. It is a silent killing of people caused by hunger and poverty. So in that sense, yes, we need to bring those issues to the forefront.
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"We need to bring to the forefront what we can do about it. We can talk until, as the Americans say, until the cows come home, but it doesn't do much good if all we do is talking."
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More importantly, we need to bring to the forefront what we can do about it. We can talk until, as the Americans say, until the cows come home, but it doesn't do much good if all we do is talking.
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We have the technical solutions. Remember that hunger is an integral part of economic development. You cannot be vaccinated against hunger. It is part of a much bigger, complex set of issues and these issues can only be resolved if governments decide that it is important enough to do so. Until that happens there will be lots of hungry people.
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Per Pinstrup-Andersen can be reached at pp94@cornell.edu
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