Solving Hunger in Malawi

Folks, I just want to let you know what we're up against...

On March 26, I received a letter from the USAID Department exec. heading up the outpost in Malawi, Africa. For those who don't know where Malawi is, (and I sure didn't until I Google mapped it...) it's north of South Africa on the east side of Africa, just west of Madagascar Island.

Please read the PDF document of the letter I received. Basically, this guy said we have no chance in hell of getting any funding because we're too small, not rich, not smart and not organized. In other words, obtain funding from somewhere else, solve the world hunger crisis with your own money, and when you do find a solution, you'll still be too dumb to help us out here in Africa. I almost expected him to compare my lineage with the baboons residing in neighboring Madagascar. But thankfully, he spared me that one insult.

I did some checking on the status of the people of Malawi and found some interesting things.

1. There are over 12 million people residing in Malawi, even though it is relatively small in terms of geography. So it's very crowded.

2. About 5 million residents are on the brink of starvation at any point. That's about 40% of the nation.

3. In 2005, the World Monetary Fund came up with a brilliant game plan for Malawi, which the local government quickly adopted. It seems that most of the residents of Malawi were farmers at that point - it was their primary occupation, since jobs are scarce and there simply was no money. So people grew food to live on. The WMF decided that it was too costly for Malawi farmers to grow their own food, and it was cheaper to simply buy the excess food that South Africa was producing. So they quit subsidizing farmers in Malawi and told everyone to simply buy their food from South Africa.

Well, lo and behold, now that the Malawi farmers weren't growing food, they had nothing to sell, so they had no money to buy food. The big difference now is that they simply aren't getting any food at all, except for humanitarian aid.

Then along comes World Hunger Team and offers them a permanent solution to growing food right there in Malawi, at very little cost. And the head of our government aid outpost - the guy responsible for dispensing millions of dollars in US funds to make a difference in the region - thinks that creating a sustainable way to grow food is a bad idea... go figure.

I'm somewhat expecting that the government's next response is to order home delivery of steak dinners from Morton's Steak House for 5 million people in Malawi. And repeat the order every day for the next 3 years. That's one way to use up the grant money and feed people.

Sorry, folks. I had to vent. It just seems that sometimes, ideas are not given any credence until you prove them out. And nobody wants to invest in good ideas, only proven solutions that somebody else has funded in the first place. Who knows, maybe someone will fund us just because our idea makes good sense. We can hope!

What We're All About...

Welcome to our blog. At World Hunger Team, we're concerned with one thing and one thing only: generating food to feed the hungry. Whether it's 1 lb. of tomatoes in Detroit or 1 ton of soybeans in New Delhi, we simply want to increase the amount of available food to feed hungry humans.

That's it.

One in 8 human beings on this planet goes to bed hungry, every night. All the talk, the rhetoric, the 'well meaning intentions' are just noise; they're meaningless to the guy who cannot feed his family. They're worthless to the kid with a grumbling belly who dreams of a full meal. And they're not only meaningless, they're fighting words to the people in depressed countries who wonder why the rich people get all the food.

Feeding these people IS our responsibility. To quote the late Senator Ted Kennedy from a statement he made 35 years ago:

"Two hundred years from now, will people ask, "What was wrong with us?" We had exceptional prosperity, exceptional bounty, exceptional resources. Will they say, "They had the opportunity to do something about hunger, and they refused to address it?"

World Hunger Team is all about doing something, whatever you can do, to move the needle; to make a change, however small, that advances the cause of solving world hunger.

I believe that we can do more than 'move the needle'. We can enact widespread change in the way people view food, how we grow food, how we prepare food, how we distribute food. We can do it using good old-fashioned American ingenuity. And we can do it on a shoestring budget. Which is the way things used to be done in this country - and the way we can do them again.

Randall Putala
Founder and CEO, World Hunger Team