Target: Hunger

A crusade against famine

The problem is age-old and worldwide, but it has a new urgency. How hunger is conquered or left to spread will do nothing less than shape U.S. security and economic health in the future. So declares the 20-member Commission on World Hunger in a sobering report that will be presented this week to President Carter.

The commission, chaired by Sol Linowitz, 66, now Special Ambassador to the Middle East, presents both distressing findings and challenging recommendations. The hunger problem today is vastly different from that of the past, when recurrent famines killed millions. Now there is so little food in so many parts of the world, year after year, that fully 25% of the globe's population is hungry or undernourished, and one person in eight suffers from debilitating malnutrition. Children under five make up over half of the world's malnourished population.

The report predicts that a major shortage of food could occur in the next 20 years--with disastrous effects for the U.S. Writes Linowitz in his accompanying letter to the President: "A hungry world is an unstable world ..." The report goes a step further: "The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair and often hatred that result represent a real and persistent threat to international order." What is more, notes the study, the world's economy is going to suffer if today's poor countries do not increase their purchasing power.

Both political and moral will are required to solve the problem. Says the report: "The quantities of food and money needed to eliminate hunger are very small in relation to available global resources." As a first step, the commission recommends that the U.S. make the elimination of hunger "the primary focus of its relationships with the developing countries for the decade of the 1980s," and contends that the country has a moral obligation to do so.

The commission recommends that the director of the International Development Cooperation Agency be promoted to Cabinet rank. It also urges the Administration to move rapidly toward meeting the U.N.'s goal of having the U.S. spend .7% of its gross national product to fight malnutrition. (Today the U.S. spends only .2%.)

Finally, the commission makes a plea to all the developed countries of the world, warning that unless they "begin to act upon their rhetorical commitments to ending hunger, the principle that human life is sacred, which forms the very underpinnings of human society, will gradually but relentlessly erode."

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