Food for thought: Tom Arnold, Concern Worldwide

THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:TOM ARNOLD is, in a sense, managing what might appear to be unmanageable. Two years ago, there were 850 million hungry people in the world. But a spike in food and energy prices left food aid campaigners nostalgic for that total: the number of malnourished people now stands at an unimaginable one billion, and counting.

The Concern Worldwide chief executive does admit to being dispirited at times.

“Since the 1970s, there’s been a very large gap between the rhetoric on hunger and what has been done about it,” he says. “It is dispiriting, and that’s why the Irish Hunger Task Force report last year was very blunt. It pointed out that if the world’s hungry could be fed on all the pledges that have been made, there would be nobody hungry.”

Like all charity campaigners, however, he cannot afford to be defeatist. Instead, his talents for efficiency and innovation will be recognised next week when the Institute of Management Consultants and Advisers presents Arnold and nutritionist Dr Steve Collins, from Concern partner Valid International, with an award for their pioneering work in revolutionising the United Nations’ best practices for managing acute malnutrition among children.

“Bring the food to the hungry, rather than bring the hungry to the food,” is how Arnold summarises their pioneering work on making the case for community therapeutic care (CTC).

Rather than bringing mothers and their babies into a small number of resource-heavy feeding centres, Collins proposed that larger numbers of children could be treated by distributing specially formulated food to the affected communities.

Critical to the approach was the development of a vitamin-enriched food that was oil-based and so didn’t require clean water. In food aid jargon, this is known as ready-to-use therapeutic food, but it also goes by the name Plumpynut.

In 2001, the year Arnold succeeded David Begg as Concern chief, Collins asked if the aid organisation would provide the testing grounds for the CTC model, which it did in Ethiopia, Sudan and Malawi.

“It became clear that this was indeed a more efficient way of dealing with the problem of malnutrition,” says Arnold. “There was a big reduction in mortality rates and you were getting a much wider coverage of the population.”

It was, he adds, a “story of good science”. They captured the evidence, analysed the data and by 2007, had persuaded the policymakers at the UN to put out a statement backing the approach. Over a six-year period, Collins and Arnold had changed everything in the UN’s malnutrition rulebook.

There are constraints. Demand for Plumpynut outstrips supply. Health services in developing countries are still overstretched and under-resourced. The “big explosion” in commodity prices in late 2007 into the first half of 2008 may have subsided, but this hasn’t been “adequately reflected” in many of the 28 countries that Concern works in – “because of inefficient price transition mechanisms, inefficient markets, I suppose”.

If there were any positives to come out of the crisis, it was “the dawning on the political establishment that food actually was important again. The penny dropped. It dropped because there were riots – food riots – in about 30 countries.”

And so hunger made its way onto the agenda of the G8 summit in Japan last summer, the European Commission made a pledge of €1 billion to go towards a food fund and at home, the Irish Hunger Task Force recommended that a greater proportion of the Irish aid budget – about 20 per cent – would go on nutrition.

But the political momentum promptly evaporated in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers fell. Recession sank in. The Irish aid budget was cut four times. A “hugely disproportionate” €255 million has been sucked out of it since July 2008.

“We certainly hope that there’s not going to be any more of them,” says Arnold. The cuts have derailed the Government’s commitment to increase its aid budget to 0.7 per cent of national income by 2012: further cuts would make that target, a matter of international record, impossible.

“Our word must mean something. To further cut at this stage would really be politically silly, certainly politically unwise. The damage it would do would be out of proportion to any gain.”

Concern’s own budget amounted to €132 million last year; in 2009, it is looking at about €120 million, against a background of increasing need. “So far the public has remained fairly generous, I have to say. We haven’t seen any major fallback and we’re hoping that that will continue, but we are facing uncertain times, so . . .”

Corporate donations have already proven less stable than the cash from the person in the street. Diversifying the funding base and what he calls the “aid effectiveness agenda” are now more important than ever. Concern, which has doubled its annual turnover over the last decade to €120 million, secures 45 per cent of its funding from the public and 55 per cent from governments in Ireland, Britain, the US and at European and UN level. But Arnold is enthusiastic about “linkages” with the private sector, such as its existing tie-up on malnutrition research with Kerry Group and the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

According to Arnold, Kerry made a financial donation for corporate social responsibility reasons alone, but he also believes that it is good business for a global food company to help find solutions to world hunger. “We could ultimately help them find good business opportunities,” he surmises.

In the meantime, Concern is forced to cut back. It has shed 500 staff in the last six months and now employs 3,200 people, most of them local to the areas in which it provides aid. Arnold anticipates that there will be consolidation in the Irish charity sector. “Organisations have to look at how they can collaborate with each other. I don’t see how we can be immune from what’s happening in other sectors.”

At home, although “not a tax expert”, Arnold’s public sector background made him a natural choice for the Government’s 18-member Commission on Taxation, which is due to report in July. He smiles when asked about his work on the commission.

“We have all been sworn to secrecy, I obviously can’t tell you what’s in it. Well I don’t know anyway, because we will shortly be getting to the point of our first draft report. Bit by bit the thing is being constructed. Over the next six weeks, we will be trying to turn a lot of the bits into a coherent report.”

A forensic analysis of the entire Irish tax code sounds like a full-time job for anyone, even though its intricacies presumably pale in comparison with Arnold’s day job.

In any case, at the moment he is balancing work with more work. An “intensive” series of meetings of the commission was due to kick-off with an all-dayer on Wednesday, after which Arnold, freshly back from Tanzania, was scheduled to fly to Germany for a meeting of Alliance 2015, a network of seven European NGOs, then on to London for a meeting of Concern’s UK board. Next up is Rome, where the European Food Security Group, which he chairs, is due to meet.

The collapse in commodity prices since mid-2008 “could well be leading to a false sense of security”, Arnold believes. The underlying reasons for the food price spike – demand from China and India – will “reassert itself in the not too distant future”.

Developing countries are going to have to invest more in agriculture and boost their own food security, he says, while aid organisations will have to be smarter about how they both get and use the funds they have. “No matter how much money we have, it’s always going to be less than the need that there is.”

On The Record

Name:Tom Arnold.

Age:60.

Position:Chief executive of Concern Worldwide.

Family:He is married and lives in Ballsbridge, Dublin. He has two children.

Education and career:A graduate of agricultural economics from UCD, Arnold holds masters degrees from the Catholic University of Louvain and Trinity. Before becoming chief executive of Concern in 2001, he was assistant secretary general at the Department of Agriculture and Food and a senior economist at ACOT, the farm advisory service.

Interests:reading history and biographies, playing tennis.

Something you might expect:He says he is a keen reader of The Irish Times. (He is a member of the Irish TimesTrust.)

Something that might surprise:Although he worked in Africa for three years and did some voluntary work for Concern in the 1980s, Arnold says he never thought that he would end up working in the charity sector.