Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [157]
In part to alleviate shortages caused by the bombings, resulting dislocations, and the collapse of civic order, the United States began a program of food relief through airdrops. The packages, labeled “Food gifts from the people of the United States of America,” contained freeze-dried lentil soup, beef stew, peanut butter, jelly, crackers, some spices, and a set of plastic utensils, and provided one day’s food ration for an adult—about 2,200 calories. Beginning in October 2001, airplanes dropped about 35,000 food packages a day. The quantities alone suggested that their purpose had more to do with politics than food security.41 A British commentator did the calorie counts:
If you believe, as some commentators do, that this is an impressive or even meaningful operation, I urge you to conduct a simple calculation. The United Nations estimates that there are 7.5 [million] hungry people in Afghanistan. If every ration pack reached a starving person, then one two hundredth of the vulnerable were fed by the humanitarian effort on Sunday. . . . But the purpose of the food drops is not to feed the starving but to tell them they are being fed. President Bush explained on Sunday that by means of these packages, “the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.42
Even with a possible exaggeration of the extent of food insecurity, this comment suggests that food aid is a complicated business, and at best a temporary expedient. One problem is getting dropped food to the people who need it most. Figure 29 illustrates the fate of some of the food aid packages. As often happens, enterprising people collect the packages and sell them on the open market; this gets the food into public circulation, but at a price. In this instance, the packages also encountered unexpected safety hazards. The Pentagon warned that the Taliban might try to poison the packages or spread rumors of poisoning as a means of propaganda against the United States, but Taliban leaders denied this accusation: “No one can be that brutal and ignorant as to poison his own people.”43 The packages themselves presented hazards. They were packed in specially designed plywood containers that could be dropped from 30,000 feet without breaking, but several landed in the wrong place and destroyed people’s homes. Children sent to collect the food packages died or lost limbs when they ran across fields planted with land mines. While the food drop was in progress, the political situation made it impossible for food aid to get into the country through conventional routes. Later, warlords stole shipments, and riots broke out when supplies ran out.44 Political stability depends on food security, and food security is inextricably linked to political stability. Without such stability, food aid alleviates a small part of the humanitarian crisis—better than nothing, but never a long-term solution.45
Would increasing the amount of food aid alleviate the crisis? Former Senator George McGovern, U.S. ambassador to the World Food Programme said, “If these people have nourishment for healthy lives, this is less fertile territory for cultivation by terrorist leaders.” Bringing in another issue germane to this book, he said that the war on hunger in Afghanistan and elsewhere cannot be waged without biotechnology: “It is probably true that affluent countries can afford to reject scientific agriculture and pay more for food produced by so-called natural methods. But the 800 million poor, chronically hungry people of Asia, Africa and Latin America cannot afford such foods.”46 As we have seen, biotechnology is still a remote solution to food security problems, and it is difficult to imagine how it might have alleviated immediate food shortages in Afghanistan.
FIGURE 29. On October 13, 2001, New York Times photographer James Hill took this photograph of U.S. “Humanitarian Daily Rations” dropped over Afghanistan. The photograph appeared in the Week in Review section on October