Government world hunger
plan
gets mixed reviews
By
Kevin Heinrichs
ChristianWeek staff
 |
October
16 was World Food Day. On that day, the Canadian government released its "Action plan for food security," a set of objectives first talked about at the 1996 World Food summit in Rome. Some 160 countries signed on to the target goal of reducing world hunger by 50% by the year 2005. Each country was then assigned to develop its own strategy to fight hunger both domestically and worldwide. "Most countries have been quite slow," says Kathy Vander Grift, advocacy team leader for World Vision Canada. In Canada, the project fell under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture. Throughout the two-year process, it has consulted with nine non-government organizations (NGOs) for input. "At least the new Minister of Agriculture is putting a name on it," says Vander Grift. But many NGOs say the document is weak and has few measurable goals to which the government can be held accountable years down the road. |
| PHILIP
MAHER PHOTO/COURTESY OF WORLD VISION Fighting hunger with education: A nurse teaches health care and nutrition to a young mother in Malawi. Through teaching and providing basic supplies, many Christian NGOs are working to put solutions in the hands of the hungry. |
"The commitments are disappointingly modest," says Ian McCreary, a Saskatchewan farmer who works half-time as director of research and policy for Canadian Foodgrains Bank. CFGB was one of the organizations invited to participate in the process. It is a food distribution group made up of 13 church agencies, representing a broad range of evangelical and mainline churches.
At press time, McCreary had seen the next-to-final draft of the report. "It is an extremely difficult issue. The core government commitment is soft, certainly softer than the church community would like to see it," he says. "For the government, [hunger] is on an agenda with a long list of other priorities," says McCreary.
At the same time, he says he is happy that at least the Canadian government has put the issue of world hunger back on its agenda.
"We don’t want to throw cold water on the effort...the government people at the table worked with it in good faith. I think there’s some real commitments in that document that may result in some changes," says McCreary.
He cites one of the major advancements is the push to secure food as a human right, where violation of that right would be considered a punishable crime. There is also an initiative to review the way the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) operates.
Vander Grift points out other positive initiatives such as the report’s emphasis on breast feeding. But she cautions World Vision won’t give its approval to the document until it sees the final draft. "We’re not signing it in advance," she says.
Vitamins and five chickens
McCreary says the challenge is for aid programs to reach those who need food the most. "Working with the hungry means working with those who are disenfranchised. They are harder to reach," he says.
In an example of how isolated groups can be successfully reached, World Vision cites a program it created called MICAH, a micro-nutrient and health program that reaches poor people in several African countries. MICAH is run in cooperation with agencies such as UNICEF and CIDA to provide nutrition supplements and training.
As part of that program, World Vision nurse Regina Mandere visited a young mother in Malawi in 1996 and discovered that she and her baby suffered from severe anemia. Her diet consisted almost entirely of maize and beans, high in carbohydrates but low in iron and vitamins.
As part of the program, the mother received iron supplements, five chickens and seeds for indigenous dark green leafy vegetables to increase iron intake. Two years later, she and her baby are reportedly healthy.
