The Foreign Service Journal, March 2012

32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 2 Christian traditions came together to call for a “Circle of Protection” from budget cuts around programs that serve hungry and poor people. More than 60 national church leaders and thousands of other individuals have now signed the Circle of Protection statement. I also participated in dis- cussions with President Barack Obama and top leaders from both parties in Congress on why these programs deserve protection. What is needed is a program to achieve lasting solutions — progress that is sustainable because it addresses the causes of hunger rather than just its symptoms. Poverty-fo- cused development assistance supports efforts to build re- silience among poor people. And, as we point out, preventing hunger and malnutrition is far less costly than emergency assistance, both in terms of money and human lives. For instance, the U.S. Feed the Future initiative focuses on such important but long-neglected areas as agriculture, rural infrastructure and rural development. The rationale is straightforward: families are less vulnerable to hunger and poverty when they have viable strategies to grow suffi- cient nutritious food and to earn enough money to provide for their basic needs and a “Plan B” when things go wrong. Death by a Thousand Cuts There are, of course, compelling moral reasons to help hungry people, but we also marshal logical arguments and hard data. For example, proponents of cuts to food secu- rity assistance generally argue that the United States needs to reduce its budget deficit. Yet the facts show that development assistance did not cause, and cannot fix, the deficit. Nor does even the argument that “every little bit helps” in balancing the budget holds water. The 17-percent cut to food aid for Fiscal Year 2011 would have paid for basic ra- tions for millions of people. Yet its dollar amount was $354 million (or less than half a billion dollars), a pittance com- pared to the 2011 U.S. budget deficit of $1.7 trillion. These numbers show that the cut did not contribute in any mean- ingful way to improving the U.S. fiscal situation. So its im- pact could not possibly have justified cutting food rations for refugees and schoolchildren. Our efforts have met with some success. P.L. 480 food aid survived the many attempts to eliminate it and was funded at $1.466 billion in the FY 2012 budget, slightly lower than its 2011 appropriation of $1.497 billion. Un- fortunately, total poverty-focused U.S development assistance fell by 7 percent during FY 2011, with some programs suffering much larger cuts. But in the Fiscal Year 2012 omnibus appropriations bill ap- proved by the House and Senate, poverty-focused devel- opment assistance fared well, with proposed funding of $21.3 billion, only a fraction below the FY 2011 level of $21.4 billion. As Congress began its work on FY 2012 appropriations, more than 120 organizations, both secular and faith-based, signed a letter urging Congress to protect the international affairs account, particularly poverty-focused development assistance, from disproportionate cuts. Why We Are Hopeful Threats to funding for food security strike a discordant note, both because starvation continues to kill thousands in the Horn of Africa and because, for several years now, the United States has been a global leader on efforts to reduce hunger. There is, in fact, a strong track record of progress against global hunger, one reason we maintain that it can be elim- inated. Over the past 40 years, the global rate of hunger has been cut in half. Only about one-sixth of the world’s pop- ulation currently suffers from chronic malnutrition, com- pared with one third of the human race barely a generation ago. During the past few years, however, progress has been stalled by a constellation of new and old problems, from the more frequent droughts associated with climate change and dramatic volatility in the prices of staple food crops to neglect of rural areas and gender discrimination. Yet despite these setbacks, U.S. leadership has champi- oned efforts to build global political will and generate mo- mentum to do more to reduce hunger. For instance, the United States responded promptly to the 2007-2008 global food price crisis, which pushed an ad- ditional 100 million people into hunger. Grasping the es- sential point about that crisis — that it stemmed from several interconnected factors, some of which were beyond F OCUS The kind of hunger that babies are enduring in Somalia is not subtle. Nor are votes to zero out hunger programs.