Social disruption: Why is world hunger America’s problem?

Nicholas Kristof

Some readers are fed up with me!

“Don’t guilt trip me” is a refrain I heard from many readers of my recent columns from West Africa and South Sudan about children dying because of cuts in American humanitarian aid.

Let me try to address the kinds of concerns critics have raised:

These may be tragedies, but they are not our tragedies. They are not our problems. I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted, but we are not the world’s doctors, and we can’t end all suffering.

True. We cannot save every dying child or every mom haemorrhaging in childbirth. But our inability to save all lives does not imply that we should save none.

A starving child on the brink of death can be brought back with a speciality peanut paste, Plumpy’Nut, costing just $1 a day. The anaemia that often causes women to haemorrhage and die in childbirth can be prevented with prenatal minerals and vitamins costing $2.13 for an entire pregnancy.

Don’t those seem reasonable investments?

It’s widely acknowledged that there were problems in American humanitarian aid. Why should American taxpayers, already strained and facing rising debt, have to foot the bill for dysfunction?

I’ve followed the United States Agency for International Development for decades, and by far the worst dysfunction has been the chaos following USAID’s dismantling this year.

A child dies of malnutrition-related causes every 15 seconds or so, even as 185,535 boxes of Plumpy’Nut are stacked in a warehouse in Rhode Island — already paid for by American taxpayers. Navyn Salem, CEO of Edesia Nutrition, which makes the peanut paste and owns the warehouse, says the US government owns the boxes but now doesn’t seem to know how to move them to where they're needed.

Another 500,000 boxes of a similar peanut paste, also already paid for by taxpayers, are sitting in a warehouse in Georgia, according to Mark Moore of Mana Nutrition, which manufactured it. He says that with the shutdown of USAID, the government seems “confused” about what to do with it.

So the government accumulates storage costs for Plumpy’Nut as children die for want of it. Is there any kind of dysfunction more callous and capricious?

We have immense needs here in the US. Families can’t get kids into pre-K, find child care or afford college. Millions of Americans can’t access health care for themselves. People are homeless in our cities. So why spend scarce resources on Sierra Leone children instead of American children?

I struggle in my advocacy and in my personal giving to balance domestic needs against those abroad.

Three principles guide me. First, needs are simply greater abroad. This year, my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student along on a reporting trip, was in West Africa; my travel partner was Sofia Barnett, a foster child of Native American ancestry from Texas who just graduated with a 4-point GPA from Brown University. Sofia considered herself low-income — yet on this trip she told me how she sees that African poverty is of a different level, leading children to starve to death.

Second, money goes much further abroad. We talked to a mother in Liberia who lost a son earlier this year because she didn’t have $20 to buy anti-malaria medicine he needed; try saving a life for $20 in the US. Third, while it’s natural to care more about people close to us, our empathy shouldn’t depend on someone’s skin colour — or their passport colour.

Until this year, American humanitarian aid saved about six lives each minute at a cost of only about 0.24% of gross national income, based on rough estimates from the Center for Global Development. That seems a bargain, and I doubt that it reduces help for American children.

Providing food aid may seem merciful, but it just leads to population increases and more people starving down the road. What America needs to provide isn’t food and medical assistance but family planning.

Yes, family planning is important, and it’s tragic that the Trump administration cut some funding for contraceptives as well as all support for the United Nations Population Fund, a major provider of family planning. But poverty drives large family size as much as the other way around. When parents aren’t sure their children will survive, they have more.

Yet as living standards improve and girls become more educated, birth rates plummet. I have a copy of a 1959 book uncomfortably titled “Too Many Asians,” predicting Malthusian disaster. But a woman in India now averages just two births, less than the 2.1 replacement rate needed to keep a population steady in the long run.

So by all means help women and men access family planning, but let’s not think of contraceptives as substitutes for food and medicine.

You make it sound as if we’re the only country in the world. What about Europe? What about the other rich countries? Why don’t they help?

Most of our peer countries donate more per capita to humanitarian aid than the US does: Norway is the champion, donating more than four times as much per capita.

Many people would be willing to support the truly needy, but USAID became a mismanaged left-wing pot of money to finance all kinds of liberal programs around the world that American taxpayers don’t like. Aid programs are just paying the price for liberal excesses.

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