The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger In Our Time - Hardcover

McGovern, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684853345 ISBN 13: 9780684853345

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

The former senator and presidential candidate outlines an achievable plan for ending hunger in a generation by creating a Farmers Corps to train agriculturalists in the developing world. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

George McGovern was U.S. Senator from South Dakota from 1963 to 1981, and the Democratic candidate for president in 1972. He was the first director of the U.S. Food for Peace Program. McGovern is now U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies on Food and Agriculture in Rome.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: A Strategy to Defeat World Hunger

In the blistering, heart-rending drought and depression days of 1932 I was a ten-year-old boy growing up in Mitchell, South Dakota. Most of the time I was a contented youngster, but some memories are not pleasant. A lifetime later, I recall the huge boiling dust clouds that rolled across the parched Dakota plains, hiding the sun in a darkness like midnight. The finely ground dirt not only blackened the sky; it came hard at the crevices of our eyes, ears, noses, and throats. The tiniest cracks or openings in windows and doors ushered the dust inside.

The first such fearful storm that I remember happened during a summer hike several miles east of Mitchell with my boyhood friend Vernon Hersey. After failing efforts to grope our way in the blinding dust to a country road, Vernon suggested that the Milwaukee railroad tracks would lead us back to Mitchell. We followed them homeward, listening over the howling wind for a train whistle.

When the Dakota sun was not blotted out by dust storms, it was frequently shrouded by flying grasshopper invasions. They could strip growing crops down to the ground in a matter of hours. Farmers who had invested their cash and months of labor in planting and nurturing crops would watch their harvest disappear. The voracious pests would even devour the wooden handles of hoes and pitchforks.

My father was a Wesleyan Methodist clergyman who believed in God, John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), and the St. Louis Cardinals. This "Holy Trinity" helped our household get through the Depression. I knew about the Twelve Apostles, but I knew even more about the Cardinals' "Gashouse Gang" -- Dizzy and Daffy Dean, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Frankie Frisch -- and from that day to this, the first item I have looked for in the morning paper is the standing of the St. Louis Cardinals. (As I write, they are in first place in their division, of course!)

One day in the autumn of 1932, my dad took me pheasant hunting, which included a stop at our friend Art Kendall's farm, ten miles southwest of Mitchell. Kendall was one of my heroes, a hardworking farmer and a devout member of my dad's congregation. I admired his prowess in hunting pheasants, which was not only an enjoyable sport, but also enriched our tables. Art was the best shot with a 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun I ever saw. He also had a sense of humor -- of a kind. On my first trip carrying a small-gauge shotgun, he told me that there was a rabbit just ahead of me. I saw something move and promptly filled it with buckshot. It was a skunk, as Art knew, and it sprayed its dreadful perfume all over me before expiring. I was invited to ride on the outside fender of the car for the rest of the day. I can still hear Art Kendall's laughter.

Not only did I learn about skunks that day, but I received another, more serious lesson. When my dad and I arrived at Art's farm to pick him up, we found him sitting on his back porch looking at a slip of paper. As we approached him, I realized that he had been crying. How could this be -- big, strong, brave Art Kendall crying? It was the first time I had seen an adult cry, except for my mother the night Grandma died. Why was he crying? Because he had just received a check for all of his hogs barely big enough to cover the trucker's fee for hauling them to the livestock market in Sioux City, Iowa. Art had worked for a year feeding his corn crop to those hogs and getting them ready for market. In the end, he netted nothing. This was the kind of ruinous price level that choked a farmer's spirit and sent him into bankruptcy.

Over the years, when I saw how hard farmers worked and how little they frequently received for their labor, it broke my heart. That happened for a long, hard decade when I was a boy. A similar downturn has hit the farm economy during the present decade.

In the mid to late 1920s, American farmers were primed to produce. They had geared up a magnificent agricultural machine in response to the demand generated by World War I. Farmers were similarly primed to produce in the mid-1990s Global demand for American agricultural products was high, and projected to grow higher.

Farmers in the post-World War I period saw the bottom fall out of their markets when foreign countries cinched their belts as war debts forced them to economize. Similarly, the growth projected for agricultural markets in the 1990s has been stunted by the Asian financial crisis. To compound the difficulties, both the mid-1920s and the late 1990s were characterized by larger than average crops -- a blessing turned into a curse. Farmers were not earning enough from the sale of their crops or animals to cover production costs in either of these two periods.

Financial stress, then as now, accelerated the trend toward reducing the number of farmers -- a trend that technological advances have amplified throughout the century as more food is produced with fewer farmers.

When Henry Wallace became secretary of agriculture in 1933, he put his keen mind to work on crafting the most innovative package of government farm programs ever -- a package that became a central part of the Roosevelt administration's New Deal. Wallace's approach was to provide incentives for farmers to cut back on production while markets were glutted and prices were low. His plan for an "ever normal granary" enabled farmers to protect their markets by storing surplus grain in times of bumper crops. They were allowed to borrow from the federal government against their stored harvests. When production was down and prices were higher, they could then profitably sell their grain and pay off their loans. This ingenious approach worked and is a prime reason that Henry A. Wallace is acknowledged by many as the most important agricultural leader of the twentieth century. This system, or some version of it, was the basic agricultural law of the land from the mid-1930s for the next sixty years until Congress terminated it, I think unwisely, in 1996. The Freedom to Farm Act of that year did give farmers more freedom to plant as much grain as they wished, but it left them with no price stabilization system. Once acreage restrictions were lifted, surpluses mounted, and in the absence of any price support floor, farm prices collapsed. I have heard more than a few farmers describe this congressional action as the Freedom to Go Broke Act.

As a youth in South Dakota, I saw anxious parents trying to stretch scarce dollars to feed their families. I also saw the steady stream of hoboes who came to our door asking for food. My father and mother never once said no to these young men, who were riding the rails looking for work. But not until I arrived in Italy in 1944 had I seen the kind of hunger that stunts young bodies and can end lives prematurely.

In September that year, I was on board a troopship as it eased into Naples harbor. In the approach to the docking area, I could see scores of Italian children lining up and shouting to us to throw Hershey bars, Babe Ruths, and Wrigley's gum. At this point the ship's captain broke in over the loudspeaker and ordered us not to throw anything to the youngsters. He explained that children in war-torn Italy were hungry -- on the edge of starvation -- and that a few days earlier, when American troops had thrown candy from an incoming ship, some of it fell into the water and a number of children had drowned scrambling for it.

I served in Italy for the next year as a bomber pilot, hitting targets in Nazi Germany and the oil refineries of Eastern Europe. Frequently I awakened to the sound of Italian mothers scratching through our garbage dumps for scraps of food.

This was the beginning of my lifelong interest in finding a practical formula for using the surplus production of American farmers to feed needy people in America and around the world. Such a plan could strengthen the markets of our farmers while feeding the hungry. A decade after my experiences in wartime Italy, I was elected to Congress with the first opportunity to translate my ideas on agriculture and feeding the hungry into public policy.

In the 1950s, after the war, large surpluses of grain accumulated in American storage facilities. The secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, began to speak publicly of "burdensome surpluses" as the source of a serious American farm problem. I had a different view. It seemed to me in the 1950s, as it does now, that farm surpluses could be a blessing rather than a curse. It is true that without positive, imaginative action, surplus crops would depress market prices to the point where farmers would be unable even to recover the cost of production. This is the route to bankruptcy, mortgage foreclosures, and an agricultural depression that is damaging to the national economy. The serious troubles in the farm belt during the 1920s helped bring on the 1929 collapse of the New York stock market and the Great Depression of the 1930s. When farmers quit buying tractors, cars, appliances, tires, clothing, paint, lumber, and a host of other items, the entire economy is dampened. But if the government were prepared to purchase the surplus part of the crop and distribute it carefully to hungry people in our own country and abroad, we could both protect the markets of our farmers and reduce the number of hungry people.

With the Cold War over and defense spending down, the U.S. government has its first budget surplus since 1963. Some of this surplus could be used to meet the cost of bolstering our farm economy and feeding the hungry. In this kind of effort, we would need to be careful not to disrupt the commercial markets of other farmers and exporters, both in the United States and abroad. Nations that produce surplus grain, including Canada, Australia, France, and, in due course, India, China, and Russia, should be enlisted to share their abundance with the world's hungry. Developed countries that do not have farm surpluses could contribute cash, shipping, field personnel, utensils, processed foods, and other things needed in a well-planned feeding program.

As matters now stand, according to the most recent estimate of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, slightly fewer than 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger. Most of them live in rural areas of the developing countries. They depend on farming for both their food and their income. To attack the world's hunger, we must move on two fronts: first, we must institute direct special feeding programs especially for schoolchildren and pregnant and nursing mothers and their infants; second, we must improve local agricultural practices.

Women should be given the opportunity to play a central role both in the direct feeding programs and in the production of food. A number of studies by the World Food Program in Bangladesh, Angola, and other Third World countries have demonstrated that women are more likely than men to budget and handle food resources carefully. The children in a family are more likely to be fed well if their mothers are in charge of the food.

I suggest the following five-point program:

I would like to see America take the lead in working toward a school lunch program that embraces every child in the world. Such a program is well within the reach of the international community. We, and other countries, have the food resources and the know-how to establish and maintain such a program. There is no practical reason why any child should go hungry anywhere in the world.

While writing this book I discussed the concept of a universal school lunch program with President Clinton at the White House on May 26, 2000. Knowing how intensely busy the President is, I had expected only ten or fifteen minutes of his time. Instead he assembled his top assistants -- White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, national security advisor Sandy Berger, economic advisor Gene Sperling, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, Deputy Aid Administrative Hattie Babbitt, a top executive from the Budget Bureau, and Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts, who has long been interested in the issue of hunger.

The animated discussion lasted for an hour and a half with the President obviously fascinated by the idea and asking frequent questions. When I finished my presentation, he struck the cabinet room table in front of him and exclaimed, "This is just simply a grand idea! I want us to go forward with it."

True to his word, on July 23, 2000, while attending the G-8 Summit in Okinawa, Japan, President Clinton announced to the seven other heads of State that the United States will take the lead in establishing a school lunch program for the world's children. The President then committed an additional $300 million, largely in farm surpluses, to launch the effort in its first year. He invited other nations to join in this effort.

Then on July 27, 2000, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee, scheduled a public hearing on the international school lunch proposal and invited former senator Robert Dole and me to be the lead-off witnesses. Senator Dole and I testified as a team, which lent a strong bipartisan flavor to the hearing. As former presidential nominees of our respective parties, we had also established an effective bipartisan coalition in the Senate on matters related to agriculture and nutrition. While still testing the universal lunch idea with my colleagues in Rome, in the spring of 2000, I telephoned Bob Dole in Washington and asked him if he could support my effort. After asking a few questions, he said that he would be proud to team up with me on the proposal. He was the first person I called in the United States. It has been reassuring and most helpful to have his support. Our former Senate colleagues gave us the warmest, most supportive reception that I have ever witnessed at a congressional hearing.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the ranking Democrat on the committee, observed that "your idea is so compelling and so morally and economically sound that I wonder why we didn't think of it a long time ago."

Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic Leader of the Senate, came to the hearing to register a ringing endorsement of the proposal as did the other South Dakota Senator, Tim Johnson, who has developed a keenly informed knowledge of hunger issues.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a longtime member of the Agriculture Committee, was equally forceful in his support of an international school lunch program. Chairman Lugar planned and conducted the hearing admirably. Also on the Republican side was a man with whom I once served on the committee, Thad Cochran of Mississippi. He also lent his support to the lunch idea.

Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois and Congressman McGovern followed Senator Dole and me to the witness stand -- they've been supporters of the school lunch concept from the moment that they first heard it mentioned. Then came supportive testimony from Dan Glickman and the director of the UN World Food Program, Catherine Bertini. These two people will play crucial roles in supplying, funding, and administrating the program. Working in concert with them will ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0684853345
• ISBN 13: 9780684853345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 173