Statement by Joan Holmes at the first strategy meeting of The Hunger Project in Latin America

Thank you, Hugo, and thanks to all of you for coming together for this historic first strategy meeting of The Hunger Project in Latin America.

I particularly want to thank Lorena for urging me to come to Latin America and experience first hand the difference The Hunger Project is making here.

Latin America is a region that has ended hunger society-wide for millions of people. This is an achievement that must be acknowledged and celebrated. Yet – if it is your family that remains marginalized, hungry and impoverished – then hunger still persists. And this is the reality for tens of millions of people in Latin America.

We in The Hunger Project stand in solidarity with those courageous people who are struggling to end their hunger, and particularly the women of these families who are at the front lines of ending hunger.

The most defining characteristic of The Hunger Project is that we are shaped by an unyielding commitment to the end of chronic, persistent hunger. We focus on the human component of ending hunger – the recognition that the persistence of hunger is most fundamentally a human issue, not primarily a technical or financial issue.

We are what organizational experts call a “strategic organization” – an organization that is committed to confront every new challenge on the pathway to the end of hunger – and to reinvent ourselves time and again to meet those challenges.

The Hunger Project works by repeatedly making a strategic assessment of what’s so now in the work of ending hunger. We then ask the question: “What’s missing?” What is missing, which, if provided, would enable humanity to take a quantum leap forward in the work of ending hunger?

That is our goal today. Today, we would like to look at the “big picture” of hunger in Latin America – identify what’s missing – and review our own strategies to determine the best strategic role for The Hunger Project as a catalyst in the process of ending hunger in Latin America.

Our experience to date has led us to the focus of today’s meeting “Ending Hunger in Latin America: Empowering Indigenous Women.”

All our experience – and the data presented in the working paper – lead us to focus on empowering indigenous women as the highest leverage action for ending hunger.

Today we will come to a deeper, shared understanding of this issue.

We will identify new openings for action.

And we will identify clear priorities that we can translate into immediate action.

To give us a shared background for these discussions, let us review the last twenty-five years in the global effort to address chronic, persistent hunger.

Given the strategic design of The Hunger Project, the evolution of our organization – in Latin America and everywhere in the world – reflects the history of humanity’s struggle with this issue.

When we began in 1977 – in the wake of the first Rome World Food Conference – hunger did not exist as a distinct, widely recognized issue. It lived for people as an inevitable part of the human condition. There were experts who knew hunger could be ended, but the world lacked that understanding.

Therefore, the first era of The Hunger Project was dedicated to carrying out large-scale campaigns of information, education, mobilization and commitment to alert the world community that hunger persists, that it didn’t need to, and that the world possessed the financial and technical capacity to end it.

The Hunger Project-Mexico began during this era, and enrolled thousands of Mexican citizens into the commitment to the end of hunger.

Within a few years, the international community demonstrated a new level of engagement with the issue of hunger and with the recognition that it could be ended. There still persisted in the public and the international community a confusion between famine – that is, emergency shortages of food – with the larger issue of widespread, chronic hunger. The primary international response to all forms of hunger was in terms of “relief” – an interim measure effective in fighting famine, but counterproductive in fighting chronic hunger.

At that time, The Hunger Project launched education campaigns to alter this thinking – to have people come to see that chronic hunger was not a shortage of food, but – as Robert McNamara stated – “a condition of life so degraded by disease, illiteracy, malnutrition and squalor as to deny its victims basic human necessities [as well as] human dignity – and yet a condition of life so common as to be the lot of some 40% of the peoples of the developing countries.”

Slowly, the international community came to understand chronic, persistent hunger involved not only nutrition, but also literacy, clean water and access to basic health and education.

Even though the world had a more accurate understanding of chronic, persistent hunger, the most prevalent response to this new understanding was the attempt by central governments to build large-scale, top-down service delivery systems.

During that period, I was invited by the President of Costa Rica to serve on his Presidential Commission on Hunger. We recognized in that commission – as did other experts in the coming years – that top-down, bureaucratic approaches were far too inflexible and inefficient to make a significant difference. And – more importantly – the underlying thinking of the service delivery paradigm was flawed in that it misidentified the most important resource for development – the creativity and productivity of the poor themselves.

The service delivery paradigm treated the poor as beneficiaries – as recipients – rather than as the primary authors and actors for development.

Many experts are slowly beginning to awaken to the understanding that mobilizing the energy, responsibility, creativity and resources of the poor themselves is a critical component in the end of hunger.

Bottom line: it could be said that hunger persists because hungry people lack the opportunity they need to bring their own hunger to an end.

In 1990 – following the historic World Summit for Children – The Hunger Project re-invented itself to pioneer a decentralized, people-centered approach to empowering hungry people to end their own hunger.

We began this work in the two regions with the largest numbers of hungry people – sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

At first, we did not begin the program in Latin America. In the 1980s, it looked to many people that trends were going in the right direction in Latin America, and that it would end society-wide hunger long before other regions – and it did.

However, by late 1996, it was clear that Latin America’s general economic progress was not overcoming its enormous inequalities. Many enjoyed economic progress, but large pockets of hunger and abject poverty remained – particularly in the rural, indigenous communities.

At this time, at the urging of our board member, former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, we committed to launching a program in Latin America.

Given Latin America’s great tradition of pioneering, progressive NGOs, we decided that we would launch this program in 1997 as a partnership with like-minded organizations – ACLO in Bolivia and, initially, DESCO in Peru.

Dr. Hugo Gonzalez also stepped forward in 1997 to revitalize and re-invent The Hunger Project-Mexico as the third country in our Latin America program.

In The Hunger Project’s methodology of people-centered development, we directly address the social context within which hungry people live.

Hungry people live in an environment of traditional prejudices, unjust laws, corruption, broken promises, failed economic policies, and severe subjugation of women.

People are left with a deep sense of resignation and no hope for a better future.

The starting point for us in people-centered development is – interventions that break through resignation, and awaken people to a new possibility – to a sense that the future lies in their own hands.

That new sense of possibility is fragile. What sustains it and has it take firm root is when people take effective, self-reliant action – when they translate their vision into solid progress for their families and their community.

The Hunger Project around the world works directly with people to empower them to create their own vision, set their own priorities, and organize effective, self-reliant action to improve their lives – and the lives of their families and communities – on a sustainable basis.

As we pioneered our methodology of people-centered development around the world, we observed that most of the work centered on women.

Given that women were the most affected by hunger – and that, when women’s health, education and income improved it had the greatest positive effect on the entire population – it was natural that our people-centered strategies would give greatest focus to women.

Yet – as we reviewed all our programs in 1997 – we were forced to recognize that, even though our strategies were women-centered and women-focused, we had not yet fully confronted the full truth of the situation.

And the full truth is – gender discrimination is not merely an aggravating factor in hunger and poverty – it is the primary root cause of most of the remaining chronic hunger in our world.

It is a tragic irony that, on the one hand, society holds women responsible for all the key actions required to end hunger: family nutrition, health, education, food production and – increasingly – family income. On the other hand – through laws, custom and tradition – women are systematically denied the resources, information and freedom of action they need to carry out these responsibilities.

Once there is the authentic confrontation with these truths, the inescapable recognition is that people-centered approaches to development will only truly succeed when they are coupled with powerful strategies for social transformation.

Therefore – in 1998 – we again re-invented The Hunger Project to make the empowerment of women our highest priority. We began designing strategies to directly confront the severe subjugation, marginalization and disempowerment of women, and to catalyze a society-wide transformation in this condition.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has said, "Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance.

We are committed to translating this statement into strategic action.

To see the difference that gender equality can make in economic progress, we should consider the example of China. Very few people today are aware that after the Chinese Revolution, the first law that was passed – the 1950 marriage act – illegalized the practices that subjugated women and established the principle of gender equality. Laws were passed requiring equal pay for equal work. A nationwide campaign was then undertaken to have this new way of thinking take root, and to ensure that the new laws were enforced.

China still has gender issues. At the same time, women have played a major role in China’s economic growth. Today, even in the rural areas, the ratio of women’s income to men’s incomes is better than it is in the United States.

Let us then turn to our first discussion for today, which is to gain a shared understanding of hunger in Latin America.

The research which has been summarized in our working paper point to three very important conclusions:

1. While poverty remains throughout society, it is most highly concentrated in the rural, indigenous communities – communities that, for 500 years, have suffered severe social, political, economic and cultural discrimination.

• For example, 81% of indigenous people in Mexico live below the poverty line, compared with 18% of the non-indigenous population.

2. High percentages of indigenous population correlate with high levels of hunger.

• For example, Bolivia has the highest percentage of indigenous people in South America – 64% – and has the highest child mortality rates.

3. While the gender gap in most social indicators is not very wide for most of Latin America, it is very pronounced in the indigenous communities.

• For example, male and female literacy are nearly equal in most of Latin America, yet in highly indigenous Peru, nearly three times as many women (14.3%) are illiterate, compared to men (5%).

In the indigenous communities of Latin America – as in hungry communities around the world – women bear primary responsibility for all the issues related to hunger: family health, education, nutrition and – increasingly – family income. Yet by tradition, women are often denied access to the education, resources, freedom of action and voice in decision making that they need to fulfill those responsibilities.

Two days ago, I had the opportunity to meet with over 300 women and men from 6 states in Mexico. They were participating in The Hunger Project’s Animators and Catalysts Trainings.

At this meeting, we gave them the opportunity to say what challenges affect their communities as they work towards mobilizing them to take self-reliant action. Their response was a follows:

Resignation – people exhibit apathy - a lack of self-confidence, trust, motivation, enthusiasm. People are afraid to participate due to lack of self-esteem. Customs and traditions sometimes don’t allow people to be open to new ideas.

Education – lack of access to education due to low incomes and long distances. Lack of commitment by parents, teachers, government and society in general. Weak professional preparation of teachers. Alcoholism using up family funds that would go to education.

Government participation - Political paternalism. Lack of coordination among agencies. Lack of people’s knowledge of programs. Differences in ideology. Lack of communication between people and government.

I was particularly struck that the issue of gender did not initially make the list, and yet when asked whether gender was a challenge people spoke potently.

They spoke of opportunities denied to women. Machismo – male dominance over women. Lack of communication between women and men. Lack of trust. Women working twice as hard as men. Women being treated as objects rather than as human beings. Women lacking voice in decisions that affect their lives. Women are often denied the right to vote by their husbands. And domestic violence.

What I’d be interested in now, is for this group of people to create its own list of challenges that the indigenous people face – especially on the issues of gender and government participation.