A better way to feed the hungry

Bill Gates thinks he's got a brilliant idea: fighting malnutrition abroad by fortifying food.

The scheme, backed with $50 million from the Gates Foundation, in part encourages Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris' Kraft, and other companies to develop vitamin and iron-fortified processed foods. It then facilitates their entry into Third World markets.

Gates seems to believe we don't have time to address the complex social and political roots of malnutrition. But in opting for this single-focus, top-down, technical intervention, Gates can end up hurting the very people he wants to help.

His strategy ignores a crucial reality: Many, if not most, of the hungriest people in the world are themselves farmers. They eke out a living by selling what they grow, and eating it. Helping foreign food purveyors penetrate their markets will only further rob them of livelihood. For example, India's dairy cooperatives -- many run by poor women -- would be hard-pressed to withstand the onslaught of Kraft's marketing power.

The Gates approach also hurts the poor if it shifts tastes toward processed foods -- typically adding fat, sugar, and salt while removing needed fiber and micronutrients. This diet trend already contributes to the spread of diseases currently burdening the industrial world. Obesity and diet-related diseases including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are becoming a global crisis. In the Third World, grossly insufficient health care budgets are now being diverted to treat these conditions, and away from treating deadly infectious diseases.

Aiding market penetration by global food processing companies also ends up making consumers dependent on foreign suppliers for life's essentials. But while corporations such as Kraft or Proctor & Gamble might well participate in Gates' do-good scheme, ultimately their interests diverge from those of the hungry. By law, theirs is assuring the highest return to their shareholders -- foreigners -- not the improved well-being of local people, and certainly not hungry local people too poor to make their needs felt in the market.

Even the piece of the Gates scheme focused on fortifying grain (presumably locally grown) misses critical lessons learned since the first World Food Conference in Rome declared war on global hunger almost three decades ago.

Then, many still believed that hunger could be solved by simple, mass-production approaches. After decades of failed, technologically-driven solutions, a new wisdom is emerging.

We recently traveled on five continents, witnessing a heartening array of local initiatives addressing the complex, interwoven roots of needless malnutrition. These are not pie-in-the-sky solutions; they are working.

In 1993 Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, de