PRESIDENT Mary McAleese arrived here yesterday for a four-day visit to commemorate the Irish Famine, promote economic ties with the US and renew the bond with the Irish community.
More than half of the events in which the president will participate have hunger as their theme. This focus reflects Ireland’s history, but also its role in forging an international consensus on the importance of using agricultural development to fight hunger.
Mrs McAleese will today open a seminar at the Irish Consulate General entitled “Hunger in the 21st Century; Ireland and the fight against famine”, co-sponsored by Self Help Africa and Concern.
Other hunger-related events include a visit to a school in Brooklyn this morning where students are studying the Famine curriculum, the launch of the “Famine Echoes” art exhibition at the Consulate General, a ceremony at the Temple Shearith Israel to commemorate the generosity of the Jewish community in New York to the Irish during the Famine in 1847, a Famine commemoration Mass celebrated by Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, and the official New York commemoration of the Famine at the Irish Hunger Memorial.
Writing in this newspaper in early April, Tom Arnold, the chief executive of Concern, said that Ireland should seek to be the “Norway for Hunger”. Just as Oslo promotes peace through its foreign policy and ownership of the Nobel Prize, Dublin should strive to lead the fight against hunger.
Ireland is well on the way to reaching that goal. At CARE’s national conference on May 11th, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, spoke of the nutrition and food security event which Ireland and the US will co-host in New York in September. Ireland is “a country with firsthand experience of the devastation caused by food shortages, and a leader in the global fight against hunger and under-nutrition,” she said.
Ireland reserves 20 per cent of its development aid for reducing hunger through agricultural development. A British parliamentary group recently proposed that all countries should reserve 10 per cent for the same cause.
The Irish government task force on hunger is chaired by former agriculture minister Joe Walsh and counts Bono, Tom Arnold, the US economist Jeffrey Sachs and the World Food Programme director Josette Sheeran as members. Its 2008 report concluded that aid must concentrate more on small farmers and women, who do 80 per cent of agricultural work in Africa but have little access to seed and fertiliser. “Ireland is six to eight months ahead of the curve,” says Will Galvin of Self Help Africa.
For decades, the fight against hunger has mistakenly concentrated on food donations rather than promoting local agriculture, says Roger Thurow, who heads global agriculture and food policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The 2003 famine in Ethiopia and food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Senegal, Egypt and Haiti in 2008 were wake-up calls, he says. Donors are beginning to correct the flawed policies that decimated agriculture in Haiti and much of Africa, in part thanks to the Chicago Council’s 2008 report on ending poverty through agricultural development.
That same report caught the attention of the Obama administration, which decided to make fighting hunger through agriculture the hallmark of its “soft diplomacy”. President Barack Obama alluded to it in his inaugural address: “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.”
Last month US treasury secretary Tim Geithner announced an additional $408 million contribution to a global fund to boost food production and encourage good farming practices in the developing world. “A global economy where more than one billion people suffer from hunger is not a sustainable one,” Mr Geithner said.
Last night, Mrs McAleese honoured Irish-Americans in the life sciences sector at a reception given by the Irish Voicenewspaper. The scientists "are Ireland's children and America's children whose giftedness ... allows us to believe in ourselves as problem-solvers in a world full of problems," she said.