Rick McNary: Change how we talk about hunger

I visited the Dedaab Refugee Camp in Kenya – home to 500,000 refugees – with former U.S. Ambassador Tony Hall, internationally renowned champion for the hungry. I asked how Dedaab compared with the 1980s Ethiopian famine, when he saw children die by the minute. He responded: “Something’s wrong. We have to change the way we talk about hunger.”

Messaging about hunger characteristically focuses on one solution: relief – giving people a fish. I first heard that message when my mom told me starving children in Africa wanted the spinach I loathed.

After a starving 5-year-old girl in Nicaragua asked me to feed her, I did what I knew to do: Give people food. I led teams to Central America and Africa and distributed truckloads of food aid.

In response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I led a Kansas-based organization that engaged more than 120,000 volunteers across the U.S. to package 20 million meals for relief. In a two-day period at the Kansas Coliseum, more than 12,000 volunteers packaged 1.2 million meals for Haiti.

Later, I discovered 1 in 6 Americans is hungry, too. The Kansas Food Bank received requests from 215,300 people last year.

However, people who work in the hunger space – the intersection of governments, corporations, nonprofits, faith-based organizations, civic clubs and schools – say there are two solutions: relief and development. Relief is sometimes necessary, yet the long-term solution is development – teaching people to fish.

Currently, two pieces of legislation in Congress focus on both relief and development: the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act (CNR) and the Global Food Security Act (GFSA).

Domestically, the CNR will reauthorize the child nutrition law that governs programs such as the School Breakfast Program, National School Lunch Program, Summer Food Service Program, Child and Adult Care Food Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. These programs currently reach 30 million children and are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The farm bill allocates 80 percent of its budget for these nutrition programs.

Internationally, the GFSA will make law the Feed the Future program of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Feed the Future is a global hunger and food security initiative designed to help countries develop long-term agriculture practices and policies. The program creates innovation labs across the U.S as research-for-development initiatives. Kansas State University received four innovation labs totaling more than $100 million.

Changing the way we talk about hunger means we quit talking about it as a humanitarian issue solved by charity. Instead, hunger is an agricultural issue; agricultural production must increase 75 percent in the next 35 years to feed 9 billion people.

Hunger is a health issue; it costs more to hospitalize a person for a day than to feed them for a year.

Hunger is a national security issue; hunger foments revolutions.

Hunger is an economic issue; the annual cost is $167 billion.

Hunger is a social justice issue; the restoration of human dignity should motivate all our efforts.

To change the way we talk about hunger, we must combine development with relief. The creation of new jobs is as critical as feeding programs.

Experts agree that hunger will end when there is enough political and public will. Kansans should be pleased that Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., co-chairs the Senate Hunger Caucus, and Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Topeka, co-chairs the House Hunger Caucus.

We can end hunger – the world’s most solvable problem – but we have to change the way we talk about it.

This story was originally published September 12, 2015 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Rick McNary: Change how we talk about hunger."