Heather Hanson's blog

According to the UN, last year more than 925 million people — one in seven people — around the world were undernourished. A large percentage of those people are children. Photo: Colin Spurway/Mercy Corps

For the last four days, I've been helping fight hunger by changing my diet. I've chosen a diet similar to that of many of the people Mercy Corps works with around the world: basic staple foods like rice, beans, greens and a bit of fruit. And I'm not alone in this — it’s part of a much broader effort to fast as a way to highlight to the plight of the poor.

In my fast, I join a group of more than 30 organizations and 4,000 individuals in a collective effort to form a circle of support around the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people by fasting to call attention to the very real challenges facing them.

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Tomorrow — Saturday, October 16th — is World Food Day.

Two years ago at this time there were media reports almost daily about the impacts of the “global food crisis.” This year, the issue appears to have faded from the headlines. But the crisis hasn’t gone away.

There is some good news: the United Nations 2010 State of Food Insecurity in the World Report notes that the total number of undernourished people in the world fell from just over a billion in 2009 to just under a billion in 2010. But that’s still just about a billion people going hungry. And the total number of hungry people in the world is still higher now than it was before the food and financial crises hit two years ago.

This excellent UN report also highlights something that we at Mercy Corps have known all along: hunger is a political condition. The countries with persistent hunger problems are those where conflicts and natural disasters have stretched weak government structures beyond their capacity, limiting opportunities for people to build self-sufficiency for themselves and their families.

Najibollah received Mercy Corps' assistance with his peach orchard. Mercy Corps brought him saplings, which he will help grow into mature fruit trees, and then sell fruit in local markets to support his family. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

At Mercy Corps we know that all our efforts must begin with a long-term vision for change in mind. While we do sometimes distribute emergency food supplies to save lives, we transition our programs as quickly as possible into building back key agricultural infrastructure, providing income generating opportunities, addressing weaknesses in local institutions, and linking people with market opportunities.

This is not always easy. As the UN report highlights, despite the fact that 166 million of the world’s hungry live in fragile states, two-thirds of these countries receive less international aid per capita than more stable developing countries.

It’s easier for the international community to provide funding and get results in countries with stable governments and strong economies. The Obama Administration’s Feed the Future Initiative — which is positive and groundbreaking in the fight against global hunger — unfortunately falls into this same pattern by focusing only on a handful of countries where government capacity and will to end hunger is strongest. But as the UN report makes clear, underfunding the toughest parts of the world means shortchanging those most vulnerable to hunger.

Mercy Corps’ food security and agriculture programs are working — even in the toughest places on earth. If our talented national staff can build functioning economic value chains to produce and sell raisins effectively in the middle of a war in Afghanistan, then there is no reason and no excuse for policy makers to turn a blind eye to hungry people who just happen to live in places with bad governments.

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I have read a lot of research studies in my life, and so I know that lots of research seems to turn up things that we already knew. In some ways, that’s also the case with the study Mercy Corps is about to launch today.

Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

We carried out this independent study because decades of experience provided us with so much anecdotal evidence suggesting that it is vitally important to involve people in their own development from the start – even during and just after open conflict. And although there have been tons of studies proving the value of participation in development efforts, in conflict and post-conflict setting we saw donors going in the opposite direction – favoring quick impact projects to meet urgent needs rather than laying the groundwork for people’s participation in the long-term development of their own communities.

I’ve been managing this research effort for over a year now and today I am struck by how simple it all looks now that it is finally done. In fact, I know that there was nothing simple about this study – from beginning to end it has been a constant challenge. Without the dedication, vision and skills of many Mercy Corps staff and outside experts it would never have been completed.

First, there’s the countries that we chose to carry out research in. It’s not exactly easy to make your way around Iraq and Afghanistan and interview community leaders and members. Not only did we have to think about security issues, we also had to consider our methodology very carefully to ensure that the people being interviewed felt free to share their opinions with interviewers. In normal research settings this is tough, but in countries with such complex histories of conflict one has to consider many more factors. Our research tools had to be translated into three languages. The interview teams had to include half women to ensure interviews could be completed with designated women in field locations. Random samples had to be reworked and adjusted when security conditions changed where we could safely carry out interviews.

Second, there’s the question that motivated our research. Much research on international development aims to evaluate whether a project has been successful at reaching its basic goals and objectives. Too often that produces measures of output, not of impact. But we wanted to do something altogether different. We wanted to understand people’s perceptions of different development efforts. We wanted to see – through their eyes – what really matters most for people in moments of conflict or post-conflict when things are still unstable and they urgently need assistance to rebuild their lives.

What we found was not a surprise to us. We found that development efforts are viewed as most effective when people are so actively involved that they feel like the project is theirs. This sense of ownership is a real sign that these efforts matter to local people – because they themselves are creating the changes that they value most. We also found that in conflict and post-conflict settings the problems facing local residents can vary considerably, making involvement of community leaders and community members even more important for ensuring that programs address the needs considered most urgent by local residents. Finally, we found that working hand in hand with local people was essential to creating trust, which is the basic building block for collaborative work to rebuild fragile institutions.

I hope you’ll check out the full result of our study. We are sharing it widely with policy makers, donors and the public, with the hope that we can share with a broad audience the amalgamated voices of many of the courageous Afghans and Iraqis who we’ve worked with over many years.

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Getting a bunch of advocacy staff from dozens of organizations to all work on the same thing at the same time is a bit like herding cats. That’s what I spent my day doing yesterday.

Working with the Roadmap to End Hunger Steering Committee and InterAction, we brought together a big core group of advocates to discuss how we can work together to make sure that the Congress approves the President’s budget request for the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative.

The budget request is exciting! If approved, the US would spend $1.76 billion to end global hunger. Because the lion’s share of that money — $1.15 billion — goes to agriculture programs, it is mostly focused on supporting programs to help people help themselves, making it both sustainable and smart.

I know that $1.76 billion probably sounds like a lot of money, but when you keep in mind that there are roughly a billion people going to bed hungry every night...well, that’s less than $2 per hungry person! And when you compare this to the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — which, according to a July 2009 Congressional Research Service report, were costing the Department of Defense $10.2 billion per month on average — it’s clear that it’s a pretty small piece of the budget pie.

I’ve written here before about what terrific opportunities we have in coming years to really reduce world hunger. And I still think we have a great chance of reaching millions of hungry people.

But these are hard times in Washington and everyone is looking for places where they can cut spending. We’ve been hearing from more and more Members of Congress that they just can’t justify this kind of funding for international programs when their constituents are also facing hard times.

So yesterday, dozens of groups came together and did the not-so-exciting work of dividing up into teams and assigning each team a few Members of Congress to meet with. In the next two weeks, we will join our fellow humanitarian, development and advocacy organizations to meet with all the leaders in the House and the Senate that we need to educate and to convince that they should support full funding of the President’s budget request to end global hunger.

Polls show that the vast majority of Americans support efforts to end hunger and poverty. But, because our elected representatives often don’t hear from us on these issues, they continue to neglect them.

This is a critical time to contact your Senators and Representative to let them know this is an issue you care about. It will make a huge difference.

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Here in DC we’ve been working with a group of partner organizations for 18 months now to address the problem of world hunger. We’ve worked to get groups in DC behind a common vision that includes a comprehensive plan to orient U.S. government resources and concrete steps to ensure ongoing leadership in the Congress and the Obama Administration. We’ve gotten new legislation introduced in Congress, and we’ve been successful at increasing the level and effectiveness of U.S. financial commitments for ending global hunger.

This morning we all met again – this time with Ambassador Ertharin Cousin, the U.S. Ambassador to the Rome-based UN food agencies. Ambassador Cousin briefed us on the progress being made to bring greater efficiency to the United Nations, and to increase financial commitments and coordination of government and private sector donors all over the world.

For the first time, the U.S. Government has a fully operational coordinating committee on food security, which means that high-level staff from all the relevant agencies like the State Department, the National Security Council, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Commerce Department, and many more meet regularly to develop joint plans. And the U.S. commitment of $3.5 billion a year to the goal of ending global hunger shows just how serious our country is about addressing this global problem. With more than a billion people suffering every day from hunger, this new commitment is welcome.

What Ambassador Cousin told us this morning is fabulous news, and news I wanted to share with all Mercy Corps supporters. She said “When you hear us making bold statements about ending global hunger, it is in large part because of the hard work of you and all your supporters in the U.S. Because with that support we know that we can stand behind our promises and deliver results.”

This next year is going to bring many truly historic opportunities for us to contribute to and lead these ongoing efforts and I hope many Mercy Corps supporters will join us in this important mission!

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Last week, I did an interview with the Global Hunger Examiner — a news outlet dedicated to world hunger issues — about Mercy Corps' efforts to fight hunger. We're one of several non-governmental organizations supporting the Roadmap to End Global Hunger, currently under under legislation in Congress. Our efforts come at a critical time, when more than one billion people around the world suffer from hunger and continue to fall behind because of the economic crisis.

Here's a link to the interview, which outlines our strategy for working more closely with the White House to create more effective, efficient, visionary programs to end hunger: Heather Hanson of Mercy Corps talks about the Roadmap to End Global Hunger

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