From Areas of Plenty to Areas of Need

By Mark Wagoner, Touchet, Washington USA

When the president of the Rockefeller Foundation witnessed the horror of famine in Africa, he knew he needed to act swiftly—and he learned how much humanitarian good can come from the commercial networks of free trade.

Rajiv Shah’s story starts in Kenya more than a decade ago, when he was the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.

“As the U.S. Air Force plane began its descent toward the Dadaab Refugee Complex in August 2011, we could see hundreds of people, mostly women and children, streaming across the Kenyan desert,” writes Shah in his new book, “Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens.”

They were desperate Somalians, fleeing what some have called “the worst famine of the twenty-first century.”

Somalia starts out in a bad spot: a war-torn nation, full of fanatics and warlords. Americans may know it best as the setting for the movie “Black Hawk Down,” which dramatized the true tale of a U.S. military disaster in the capital city of Mogadishu.

When bad weather strikes Somalia, it can mix with political instability to create deadly deprivation.

Shah saw the result from a plane above a refugee camp in Kenya.

Then he saw it up close.

“I stood beside a bed, talking with a woman giving water out of a blue cup to her four-year-old son, who weighed less than twenty pounds,” writes Shah. “As I spoke to her through an interpreter, I saw that the mother’s eyes kept drifting toward the foot of the bed, where a small bundle lay draped in a deep blue cloth. I was shocked when the mother said that the cloth covered another of her children, who had died that morning, too ravaged by hunger on the journey to the camp.”

All they needed was some food.

“That small cloth bundle haunts me to this day,” writes Shah.

As the famine worsened, Shah wanted to respond. He also knew that USAID, despite a budget of billions, could accomplish only so much.

It’s one thing to wish food into a remote and embattled region. It’s another thing to get it there.

That takes the international system of free trade.

Shah called Greg Page, who at the time was the CEO of Cargill, the Minnesota-based global food company.

“I quickly walked him through where we were on the response in Somalia, but he cut me short,” writes Shah. “Greg knew the story.”

Shah jumped to his request: “Would you consider doing something extraordinary to help resolve this crisis?”

Page replied: “This is what we do.”

Indeed it is, as Shah describes in his book: “Cargill had built a vast network to move its product from one side of the world to the other on time and on budget.”

This didn’t happen on its own. It was the result of smart leaders like Page as well as the workers who pack and load cargo, transport it across oceans, and deliver it to customers.

Behind them is an infrastructure of global trade that encourages the exchange of goods and services across borders. Successful trade relies on profit motives and mutual benefits—and it also creates opportunities for humanitarian action.

For the starving Somalians, Cargill and its trade network came to the rescue, according to Shah: “Cargill gathered ten thousand metric tons—the equivalent of 425,000 fifty-pound bags—loaded it all aboard a ship in Kakinada in the Bay of Bengal, and shipped it across the Indian Ocean. The whole of that effort took more than two months, but when it arrived it made a world of difference, helping to feed a million Somali refugees in nine districts across Kenya.”

As Cargill’s shipments showed up, a Somalian widow with six children described her relief: “The past few years have been almost unbearably hard … because of the stress of trying to feed myself and my children,” said Rachel Gharo. “With this assistance I can now think of other things, because at least I am assured that there is food.”

The assistance probably would not have arrived without Shah seeing a haunting bundle of blue cloth.

It definitely would not have arrived without a resilient network of global trade that improves lives everyday—and saves them, too.

Mark Wagoner grows alfalfa seed and wheat in Washington State. He volunteers as a board member for the Global Farmer Network. This column originates at www.globalfarmernetwork.org