Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

This entry marks the first blog post of our summer intern, Shanika Gunaratna.  Shanika is currently an undergraduate student at Northwestern University, and she will be making waves with us through the end of the summer.

Recently, TIME Magazine published a special issue tackling America’s obesity epidemic. On the cover of this issue, entitled “Our Super-Sized Kids,” was an obese child curiously eyeing a double-scoop ice cream cone – one scoop sugary pink, the other an artificially bright orange. The magazine was stocked so full of information on national overeating that it was double its regular size. It is with this renewed awareness of American obesity that I attended a Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) lecture on a very different topic: the international crisis of malnutrition.

According to MSF, there are five million annual deaths related to malnutrition in children under five years old. Twenty million children are currently malnourished, meaning they are being supplied with less than the bare minimum amount of food required for health and growth. In short, these children stand stagnant between growth stages, unable to move from one to the next because of the conditions of their childhoods – often, conditions caused by the adult-made conflicts in which they live.

With CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour as moderator, the panel featured experts on food aid: Bruce Cogill, Global Nutrition Cluster Coordinator at UNICEF; Nicolas de Torrente, Executive Director of MSF-US; Susan Shepherd, Medical Advisor for the MSF Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines; and Alex de Waal, Director of Justice Africa. The panelists – pulled from the different spheres of field work, academic research and professional aid coordination – brought diverse opinions to the discussion. Slowly, their conversation evolved into a broad, complicated and passionate debate over the long-term benefits and dangers of food assistance programs.

The problem is this: international organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, fight malnutrition by providing large-scale food assistance; but these programs face a persistent tension between meeting immediate needs and undermining long-term stability in developing nations. How does an organization deal with the fact that, for instance, its much-needed provisions are shifting the market equilibrium and driving local suppliers out of the market? Or, that its involvement is changing local tastes in food, making it hard for a population to transition into a post-assistance period? 

As Alex de Waal argued, debt relief and reform of the international trade system are much more effective ways to fight hunger. But, he noted, when politicians come together to discuss these issues the conversation inevitably strays from reevaluating policy to simply enlarging aid budgets. This is a short-term solution, a crowd-pleasing, mediagenic band-aid on the festering wound of third-world poverty. The key, rather, lies in pro-growth economic policies and debt forgiveness in addition to a healthy aid budget.

It is the job of governments to provide these policy solutions. Yet every time I attend an event with Doctors Without Borders, their spokespeople are asked to provide policy recommendations and justify the nonpolitical nature of their organization. MSF answers honestly: saying that only by sidestepping the underlying questions of politics can they serve the millions of adults and children who, at any given moment, are in need. On principle and due to necessity, the organization is independent and does not explicitly talk politics. (This is the case with Darfur, a conflict MSF cannot call by the name “genocide” without risking the loss of access to Darfur’s worst hit zones.)

It is time we redirect our energy and put more pressure on governments, both ours and those in the developing world, to back sound economic policy for the world’s poorest and most malnourished. We need to be asking these questions at press conferences, presidential debates, at every spare moment we can. Now, during the mid-summer lull in the presidential election, is a perfect opportunity. Let’s use this time to bring international aid and trade reform to the front of the public consciousness.

Read Nicolas de Torrente’s theory of apolitical aid here.

Paul O’Brien of the Harvard Human Rights Journal on why humanitarianism should be political, here.

--SHANIKA