The Challenge of Deciding Who to Feed by Spiegel Online 11:27pm 10th Jan, 2011   Jan 7, 2011    The United Nations World Food Program tries to stop the poorest of the poor from going hungry. But its budget has dwindled during the crisis as donor countries focus on their own economic problems. Aid workers face the unpleasant task of deciding who gets food -- and who doesn"t.    John Aylieff was once shot at in Burundi in eastern Africa, by a gunman standing on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Aylieff only survived because his driver aimed the vehicle directly at the gunman.    Aylieff also lost a colleague in Burundi. She was forced to stand in front of her murderers and was executed.    He has witnessed the deaths of children, including babies who starved to death in front of his very eyes. He has also seen old people starve to death, both men and women, and he has seen women weeping and begging for food -- as recently as half an hour ago.    Aylieff was sitting on a tree trunk lying on the ground, in a village in hot, humid northwestern Bangladesh. The village consisted of wretched huts made of branches and straw. To the left of the village was a path. During the flood, the villagers would spend their nights sleeping alongside the path. To the right of the village was the river, where floodwaters kept rising from one day to the next.    Five men and women, old and frail, were crouched on the ground in front of Aylieff. They had seen him -- a well-fed man in jeans and athletic shoes, with thinning hair and a soft face -- arrive in the village with two white Toyota Landcruisers and a team of four men. They had welcomed him, invited him into their huts and offered him the spot on the tree trunk -- and then stared at him, full of hope.    They didn"t know Aylieff. In fact, they had never seen him before, but they did know that he had brought them rice once before: an entire 50-kilo (110-pound) sack for each villager.    "We are grateful for that," says the woman in the middle of the group. Her name is Alif Jan, the widow of a day laborer. She has four children and many grandchildren, and she is the courageous one in the group, perhaps because she is the most desperate. She dispenses with formalities and gets straight to the point: "When will you bring us rice again?"    Aylieff turns to his interpreter, and then he looks at Alif Jan and says: "I don"t know." He says this calmly, not indifferently but not with much emotion, either. A considerable distance remains between him and the woman on the ground.    Aylieff"s response is incomprehensible for the men and women squatting in front of him. They see the two Landcruisers and the men accompanying Aylieff. How can someone who behaves like a prince be unable to get them rice? Alif Jan looks at Aylieff, holds up her empty hands and says: "Please."    Aylieff doesn"t need his interpreter to understand the word. He shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head and says: "I"m sorry." But the women sitting at his feet remain undeterred. They say that none of them has eaten any rice in recent days. They have begged for rice water, the water other families used to cook their rice, and they have eaten banana leaves.    They are embarrassed to be saying this to a man who is young enough to be their son. At the end of their lives, after spending more than 50 years working in the fields, it is humiliating for them to have to beg this man for a sack of rice.    "Please," says Jan. There are tears in her eyes. "I"m sorry," Aylieff repeats. "We have nothing left to distribute." The interpreter translates, and Aylieff hears the women weeping.    He leaves the village a short time later. He had come there to check on the progress of an earlier project, and now he is sitting in his vehicle, with the windows rolled up, as the villagers say goodbye. They line the path, forming a wall of emaciated bodies. The men and women stand there, almost motionless and inconceivably thin, staring into the interior of the vehicle. Aylieff stares back in silence.    Aylieff has been combating hunger for the last 18 years, trying to make the world a better place. A British citizen, he has a degree in German literature and had intended to become a teacher, but then his life went in a completely different direction.    In the early 1990s, Aylieff watched television reports on a famine in Ethiopia. Feeling the guilt of living a life of affluence, he soon forgot the German classics and turned his attention to helping others. He wanted to do as much as possible, to provide direct and fast relief to the world"s poor. He cashed in his savings, flew to Ethiopia and pestered the workers at aid organizations until they offered him a job as a trainee. He is now 42 and has a Thai wife and a child. When asked about his first years in the field, he says: "I was very impressionable at the time."    Aylieff remained in Ethiopia for two years. He went to Burundi next, and then to North Korea, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq. He organized food shipments for more than a million refugees after the genocide in Rwanda, and he negotiated with warlords on the Horn of Africa. He had to convince them that he was only delivering food and could not provide them with speedboats and machine guns.    For all but two of his years in humanitarian aid, Aylieff has worked for the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the world"s largest humanitarian organization. He is currently the WFP"s deputy regional director for Asia.The WFP"s mission is to identify the most serious cases of the world"s hungry and feed them as effectively and inexpensively as possible. Acting on behalf of the global community, the WFP is also charged with attending to the poorest of the poor, to adults who don"t know if they"ll have anything to eat from one day to the next, and to children who are so malnourished that solid food would kill them.    The program targets about 100 million people in 73 countries. The task Aylieff and his colleagues face is to help these people -- not just to alleviate their suffering but to eliminate it altogether. Their mandate seems unrealistic at times, and yet the WFP has made encouraging, albeit intermittent, progress. In 1970, one in four people was hungry, a number that has since declined to one in seven, despite the fact that the world"s population has doubled in the interim, from 3.5 billion to almost 7 billion people. The improvement can be attributed to the green revolution and globalization, which, as unfair and deficient as it may be, has enabled many people to emerge from poverty and join the global middle class. Once they have made that leap, their lives no longer revolve around mere survival. Instead, they can now devote their energies to things like their children"s education.    But the ranks of the hungry have been growing again in the last few years, to the current level of over a billion people. As the number of needy people grows, so does the number of the hungriest of the hungry. This is mainly a result of the 2008 food crisis, the 2009 banking crisis and the 2010 financial crisis. The bailouts for banks has meant donor countries have reduced the amount of money paid to the WFP.    Its budget declined from $5 billion (€3.85 billion) in 2008 to $4 billion in 2009. In 2010, the WFP expected to receive only $3.7 billion of the requested $7 billion, despite such major disasters as the earthquake in Haiti and the flooding in Pakistan. The reduced budget is insufficient to reliably feed the world"s most suffering people.    * This story continues visit the link below for more. The Universal Rights Network considers the underfunding of WFP as most alarming and an international disgrace and demands the 2010-11 budget and beyond be fully funded. Over 10 Trillion dollars was made available to the financial sector during the GFC, and it is a abject failure of international and national leadership at the highest levels that this circumstance has been allowed to arise and to continue.    WFP runs school feeding programs in some 75 countries for some of the poorest children in the world. whose health and brain growth will be damaged in circumstances of malnourishment, and whose future livelihood prospects can be subsequently diminished. The G20 must act to fully fund WFP budgetary requirements in full, defined by the specialist expertise of the WFP needs analysis requirements. Visit the related web page
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