Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on World Hunger Report

(This is a partial transcript)

WITNESSES:

JAMES T. MORRIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WORLD FOOD PROGRAMMEME, U.N.ITED NATIONS
ANDREW S. NATSIOS, ADMINISTRATOR, U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
ELLEN S. LEVINSON, GOVERNMENT RELATIONS DIRECTOR, CADWALADER, WICKERSHAM & TAFT
KEN HACKETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES
DR. JOACHIM VON BRAU.N., DIRECTOR GENERAL, THE INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

LUGAR: The compliment is untrue, but let me thank Senator Hagel for raising the question, because the answers you have given are really among the most definitive, I think, we've ever heard, either in agriculture committee or in this committee. It's an extremely important issue.

While compassionate people are trying to feed people, systemically, as governments or as institutions, we may be starving them. And juxtaposition of this is very important.

It is appropriate that our next question should be Senator Feingold, who has given such leadership on African issues and I call upon him for his questions.

FEINGOLD: I was wondering how you were going to connect this to the dairy industry, so I appreciate that being the connection.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member for convening this very important hearing and I thank all the witnesses for being here today. As this chairman indicated, I served on the subcommittee on African affairs since I came to the Senate 11 years ago and have spent half of my tenure as either ranking minority member or chairman of the subcommittee.

I, like all of you, have watched with horror as food crises in southern Africa and the Horn have unfolded over the past year, sometimes striking at populations already weakened by the HIV-AIDS pandemic.

In July of last year, I asked the GAO to examine some of the causes contributing to the southern African food crisis and to evaluate the efficacy of our response so we can improve our performance to prevent crises in the future.

I am looking forward to the GAO's final report and hope that it can point the way toward proactive steps that we can take to work with all of our African partners on this issue.

We also have to ensure that even as we focus on urgent needs, we also work consistently and energetically over the long term to actually address some of the underlying causes of food insecurity in Africa, so that we can reduce communities' vulnerability to natural factors affecting harvest.

Certainly, we need to join with many Africans who want to ensure that misguided policies and decisions are examined and discarded and the tremendously destructive policies pursued by the Zimbabwean government leave to mind in this regard as some of the testimony has already mentioned.

We need also to help African societies reinvigorate their agricultural sectors and reduce barriers to inner state trade by working to get small farmers the technical assistance, infrastructure and opportunity that they need to succeed.

Mr. Chairman, I just returned yesterday or Sunday from a brief trip to Botswana in South Africa along with Senator Durbin of Illinois and I have been reenergized by the committed and talented people I encountered in those countries, just as I have been in each and every trip that I have taken in the region.

We have excellent partners on the ground throughout the continent. That means that we can win the fight against cyclical famine if we stay focused and committed over the long term. So, I am very pleased that this hearing is happening at this time. Let me ask some questions in my remaining time.

Due to a lack of funding, the World Food Programme has been forced to curtail much needed food aid to refugee populations, particularly in Africa. U.N.HCR and WFP issued a joint appeal for 112,000 metric tons of food worth an estimated $84 million in U.S. dollars over the next six months to avert severe hunger among refugees.

It is also feared that a lack of food can compel governments that are hosting refugees, such as Tanzania, to then prematurely return them to their home countries. How has the United States responded to this appeal?

Mr. Natsios?

NATSIOS: Senator, I took some difficult decisions. I'll just tell you what I did and I can be criticized for it, but our first priority is the preservation of human life. And that meant the countries where starvation was imminent or already beginning got all the food. We shut down food programs in development areas and refugee camps where there was enough supplies so people would not die in order to shift the food to Ethiopia and to southern Africa and to Eritrea as well.

In the areas where refugee -- in the areas of the world where refugee populations such as Afghanistan were at risk of starvation, we provided $80 million worth of food to the World Food Programme, which is a principle mechanism by which we distribute food into refugee camps, even though they are run by U.N. and other agency food systems, is run by WFP in those camps and we are the primary contributor to those.

But we made those decisions and I am not being defensive about it. The budget had not gone through and that is not just because of what happened in the city. It had, the budget for us, for Title II had a $325 million increase. You know, this shift and we can talk about it in 416(b), shifted money into our budget. That was in the '03 appropriation. That was a very large increase in our budget over '02. But we didn't have it because the budget hadn't gone through.

Now that it has, we are reviewing all of the programs we had to curtail to see what we can restore, but our first priority was we could not miss one monthly shipment to Ethiopia or we would have had a catastrophe on our hands.

FEINGOLD: Let me ask Mr. Morris. What is the status of your appeal for these refugees? Will your program be able to help them?

MORRIS: Part of the reason I am in Washington this week is to talk about the issue with people at USAID and people at the refugee bureau at the State Department. Our problems in Uganda and Tanzania and the Congo and Burundi and several other places are enormous. We have food probably that will get us through May-June, but we don't have food to get us through year-end. The numbers you stated are accurate. That's exactly what we are trying to pull together.

The U.S. traditionally has been our largest supporter of work food for refugees. We have a memorandum of understanding with the U.N. High Commissioner on refugees and any time there are more than 5,000 refugees in a single location, we provide the food. So, it is our responsibility.

But once again, we have all these emergencies in the world and there are a limited number of resources. People focus on emergencies as opposed to focusing on development and they'll focus on people coming out of natural disasters or conflict disasters as opposed to refugees.

The competition for resources is very intense right now and the refugees are hurt. Back to the question of GM, we have 15,000 metric tons of GM food in Zambia feeding refugees from the Congo and from Angola, which USAID had provided and the government required us to get it out of the country. And we had been using GM food in that refugee camp for seven years.

FEINGOLD: Just for the record, because my time is running out, could you say a little bit about how these shortages contribute to exploitation of refugees in these camps? I would like to have that on the record. What happens to people?

MORRIS: Well, these are already people that are in very difficult circumstances and it leads to serious hostility and conflict and makes the camps almost impossible to manage. It also leads to conflict between the people in the refugee situation and the people living just outside the camp. If one is being fed and the other isn't, sort of the neighborliness of the situation disappears and it becomes a very tough situation.

Also particularly vulnerable are young girls -- young girls 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 are forced to turn to things that we would not find acceptable to find resources to be fed. These are -- I don't know if you have visited places, these refugee camps. I visited one in Pakistan and I must tell you, it was a life changing experience to see so many tens of thousands of humans aggregated in places like this with nothing and virtually no hope or opportunity as well as nothing, no food. These are some of the saddest situations that exist.

FEINGOLD: All it took was one look at it in Angola in 1994 and you never forget it and stay committed to it. I thank you for your testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

LUGAR: Thank you, Senator Feingold.