The executive director of the UN World Food Programme knows we can end hunger if we work together.
The executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme grew up in Lawndale, a threadbare Chicago neighborhood where people sometimes go to bed hungry. The daughter of a social worker and a community organizer, Ertharin Cousin now ranks 45th on the Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. As leader of the largest humanitarian organization on the planet, she oversees a staff of 14,000 and helps provide assistance to more than 90 million people a year, from the poorest neighborhoods to war zones in over 80 countries.
Cousin, who graduated from the University of Illinois and the University of Georgia School of Law, worked as an assistant attorney general of Illinois before joining the Clinton administration for four years as White House liaison to the State Department. She then served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. In 2012, President Obama recommended her to be executive director of the WFP.
Her typical workday might wear out an NFL linebacker, yet Cousin, based at WFP headquarters in Rome, never seems to slow down. The Rotarian sent frequent contributor Kevin Cook to intercept her in September in New York, where she was a headliner at a United Nations conference on world hunger. Cousin was the star of the show.
“She’s quite a presence,” Cook reports. “Dressed in a bright red ensemble with nail polish to match. I’d spent a week preparing for our talk, but sometimes it was hard to keep up. She knew the road plans of Syrian and African towns I’d never heard of, and gave me the feeling she could run them if she had to.
“Cousin comes at you with a hearty handshake and a smile,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Let’s get going.’ So we did.”
THE ROTARIAN: How urgent an issue is world hunger?
COUSIN: People say, “We’ve always had hunger, and we always will.” But we don’t have to. In 2008, after President Obama was elected, the global community made new commitments to end world hunger. The G20 countries pledged money. The leaders of the world embraced hunger as a priority. That creates momentum. It’s urgent to seize this opportunity now, while the will and commitment are there to do the job. We can achieve zero hunger in our lifetimes: no more chronic malnutrition, no more stunted children, no more wasting food that could keep people alive and healthy.
TR: Is that realistic?
COUSIN: Not if we have to do it alone. The WFP isn’t up to that job. Nobody is. But if the world community works together, yes, zero hunger is realistic. It’s a goal, a reachable goal.
TR: How has your job changed since you became head of the World Food Programme?
COUSIN: If you’d asked me in 2012, I would have told you that climate change was our biggest challenge. Now it’s conflict. Syria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Iraq – every major conflict brings a health crisis that’s also a hunger crisis. At this very minute, we’re taking food into parts of Syria where there is no food. For refugees fleeing Syria with nothing but the clothes on their backs, we provide food vouchers they can use like credit cards.
TR: You’re working in a war zone.
COUSIN: It’s dangerous. I was in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan; that’s a place where you’re soaking wet and covered in mud, but at least nobody’s shooting at you. Syria is different. Working in a conflict zone is more expensive, for one thing: We’re paying for vests, our blue helmets, specially outfitted trucks. Just recently, two of our trucks were on the road between Homs and Aleppo, and they were targeted by ISIS. Militants fired 20 shots into our truck. It appears it was a kidnapping attempt, and our people got out of there. They’re OK. But you worry. I was watching CNN one night when I saw my country director in Syria helping women and children get out of Homs during a cease-fire, using his body to shield them. I called him on his satellite phone. I said, “I’m proud of you, but could you be more careful? I don’t want to have to call your wife if something goes wrong.”
TR: Your staff members risk more than getting shot. Isn’t the WFP involved in fighting the Ebola virus in Africa?
COUSIN: The World Health Organization asked us to feed a million people over six months in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. If you isolate a population to stem the epidemic, those people will need food and water so they won’t have to leave the isolation area to meet their basic needs. That’s where we come in. If a head of household gets infected, a breadwinner, we may have to feed that person’s family. It’s dangerous, but our people are committed to helping the most vulnerable people in the world. They’re heroic. Sometimes they amaze me. When we sent out a staff email asking for volunteers to work in those three countries, we got 200 volunteers.
TR: People think of your mission as airlifting food to a famine-stricken area of the globe and then flying away.
COUSIN: The WFP began as a pilot program in the early 1960s. Like the U.S. Food for Peace program, which it grew out of, it was about using excess commodities from wealthier parts of the world to support hungry people. Over the last 10 years, we’ve evolved from food aid to food assistance. What’s the difference? Well, food aid is food. It’s about filling stomachs. Food assistance is more diverse. It’s those vouchers we provide for refugees from Syria. It’s helping millions of small-freehold farmers get the food they need all year round, so they don’t eat the seeds they’ll need in the spring. We’re always keeping a watchful eye on potential conflicts – right now that means Yemen and Somalia. We watch the weather too. We track El Niño patterns a year out, to project who’s going to have a good harvest and who’s going to need help.
TR: It sounds like food aid is about tactics, and food assistance is about strategy.
COUSIN: It’s a bigger tool kit. But as I said, we can’t do it alone. We’re only as strong as our partners. We have 2,000 NGO and nonprofit partners, including Rotary. And Rotary, of course, has made great strides all over the world, helping farmers, helping schools – important work that should be knitted up with our work, to make sure we get the best results we can.
We’re only as strong as our partners. We have 2,000 NGO and nonprofit partners, including Rotary.
TR: Is that happening?
COUSIN: No, not enough. We can do better. Too often, organizations do their own thing. They fail to coordinate. Rotary, for example, has been involved in fighting hunger in the U.S. and around the world for a long time. We fight hunger too. Could we work together better? Yes. If you’re providing books to schools in a needy part of the world and I’m delivering meals to a different set of schools, what happens? Your children are hungry and my children don’t have books. How can we get those children the full benefit of education and a full stomach? That’s the challenge. It’s not about the goals we share – it’s about effectiveness. Here’s an example: In 2012, we partnered with the Rotary Club of Dubai to mark the beginning of Ramadan. The club matched every dollar (four dirhams) donated to the WFP through a special Ramadan page on our website. The program paid for a year’s worth of meals for 2,000 schoolchildren in the Middle East. That’s hundreds of thousands of meals. The program grew in 2013, with the Rotary clubs of the United Arab Emirates joining us for a global campaign during Ramadan.
TR: According to Ahmad Belselah, treasurer of the Rotary Club of Jumeirah-Dubai, Rotary and the WFP “have in common a passionate energy and a go-getter attitude.”
COUSIN: We can achieve more together than either of us could ever do on our own.
TR: How can someone reading this interview make a difference?
COUSIN: The WFP is 100 percent voluntarily funded. Most of our funding comes from governments, but governments alone aren’t enough. We’ve been working hard to grow the number of people who help us financially. But whether they donate or not, I hope people will visit our website (www.wfp.org) to learn more about hunger. We need an army – an army of people around the world who care enough to raise their voices, to support the ending of hunger. And Rotarians are strong voices in their communities. I keep hearing elected officials say, “Hunger’s not a priority for my constituents.” If we could get every Rotarian telling them, “Hunger is a priority, and I want you, my elected official, to make it a priority of yours,” that could make a difference. Or telling their fellow Rotarians, “I want you, a business leader in our community, to make hunger a priority.” That’s how leadership starts.
TR: World hunger is such an immense, intractable problem. Is there reason to be optimistic?
COUSIN: I just spoke at the UN, discussing these issues. We had 400 people in the room, people who didn’t know one another and weren’t paid to be there. They wanted to hear about how to make something good happen in the world. We need to expand that number. We need to get 800 the next time, and then 1,600. Let me tell you about a time I was in Bangladesh, where we set up a school food program, a typical WFP program: Children came for the highly nutritious biscuits we gave them, and I got to spend some time with them. I’d ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” They all said doctor or teacher, because that’s who they saw. Other than their parents, who were farmers or fisher folk, the only adults they knew were doctors and teachers. At the end of my visit, there was a ceremony. The children danced, and then they sang “We Shall Overcome.” In English. I cried. And I never cry.
TR: You can’t break down too easily in your line of work.
If we can bring up a generation of kids like that in some of the poorest parts of the world – healthy, working toward a better life – then yes, I can picture a world without hunger.
COUSIN: No. But those children – they believed their lives could be different from their parents’ lives because we were there. And if we can bring up a generation of kids like that in some of the poorest parts of the world – healthy, working toward a better life – then yes, I can picture a world without hunger. Yes, there’s room for optimism.
TR: We’ve heard about some of your 20-hour workdays. Do you ever relax?
COUSIN: (laughing) Don’t tell anyone! I’m an avid reader – that’s a habit my parents gave me. I read lots of books on hunger, poverty, leadership, change management, all related to my work. And I read historical fiction. Bubble gum for the brain, I call it. It’s a way of coming down from the pressures of the day.
TR: Is there anything you want to say directly to readers of The Rotarian?
COUSIN: I think the last line is, Rotarians care. That’s why they’re in Rotary. We appreciate the role that Rotary clubs have played in fighting hunger all over the world for so many years. Now we’re asking them to make their voices heard again. Working together, we can do even more.