Currency of compassion halts global food crisis

While the United States is reeling from the stock market’s plunge and the credit crisis, there are severe worldwide consequences to America’s economic woes that have been almost entirely ignored. Most people have not given any thought to the millions of victims of our economic situation: the children in the poorest areas of the world now supported by U.S. donors. While financial struggles may reduce the number of donors to organizations such as mine who are working to release children from poverty, the still-greater impact is being felt as the result of rising food and fuel prices. People — and children in particular — are going hungry around the world as the global food crisis continues to silently plunge millions of people deeper into the depths of poverty.

At its onset, the global food crisis was about food distribution and dwindling supply. It was about import and export policies, natural disasters that ruined crops, land use and new economies which encourage industry but undercut resources needed to grow food. It was even about the new prominence of biofuels. Now it’s about rising inflation in food production and transportation, which have triggered substantial increases in the cost of food at the market.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), people in 50 developing countries around the globe remain at risk through 2009 because of deteriorating foreign exchange reserves, rising inflation and slowing world economic growth. People in these nations are losing their ability to purchase food — meaning parents are deciding not what their children should eat but whether their children will eat.

As Americans, we all can relate to making tough trade-offs in order to tighten our belts, especially with the recent rising cost of fuel. But, imagine if your food budget is not 15 percent of your income but 75 percent of your income. Imagine that you live on less than a dollar a day. Imagine that inflation in your country has risen as much as 300 percent for necessary food like rice, oil, flour and sugar in the past year.

For far too many people in the world’s poorest regions, they don’t have to imagine.

In Central America, the average monthly income for an urban family is $180 a month and the monthly cost of food is now $157.78 dollars per month. The reality is worse in rural areas where the average family does not have a secure income, and most earn between $3 and $5 per day working on plantations. They earn between $60 and $80 per month, far below the $120 needed for the most basic food supplies.

The devaluation of the U.S. dollar over the past few years is also adversely affecting the impact of assistance given to stem the global food crisis. In Uganda, it now costs twice the amount to secure basic food staples like millet, corn and flour than it did just six months ago. While the dollar amount of giving to the global food crisis has increased, the beneficial returns to local communities have actually diminished.

In the face of diminished dollar values, the need for assistance remains great. Compassion International statistics show that 51 percent of the children in hurricane-ravaged Haiti have nutritional deficiencies. Of the children we have evaluated in El Salvador, 35 percent are malnourished. These statistics don’t come from Africa or Asia where we frequently hear about poverty. This startling information comes from our neighbors here in the West.

The effort to end the global food crisis must not remain dormant until America’s own financial problems are resolved. Now more than ever, organizations fighting on the front lines in the war against poverty must create long-term solutions that address sustainability and grow local resources. This is the only way to ensure that the effects of global economic crises are mitigated for the world’s poorest.

The Global Food Crisis will not be resolved with a quick fix, throw-some-money-at-it approach. The subsistence of large segments of the world’s population must not be left at the mercy of the foibles and fantasies of Wall Street. It is time we traded in a new currency, the currency of compassion. Only a long-term, locally based strategy will have any chance of truly ending the global food crisis.

• Wess Stafford is the president and CEO of Compassion International, a nonprofit child development agency.