[originaltext]M: Ms. Bertini, you were the executive director of the World Food

M: Ms. Bertini, you were the executive director of the World Food Program for a decade from 1992 to 2002. Why do so many people go to bed hungry?
W: Most people who go to bed hungry are so desperately poor that they cannot feed themselves. They can’t grow enough. They can’t buy enough, they can’t find food to feed their families. Hunger and poverty are interchangeable. If you are hungry you are poor. If you are poor you are usually hungry. There is a large population of people also who are hungry because they have been caught in the midst of a man-made or natural disaster, and numbers of those people unfortunately have increased in the last 12 years, and they are the people who receive the maximum amount of food and other support, but they are actually the minority of the 800 million people who go to bed hungry.
W: Is there enough food for everyone?
W: The world produces enough food for everyone. The issue is access. For those living in conflict or natural disaster, they do not have access to food. For those people who are desperately poor, they do not have access because they can not purchase or grow it.
M: You have been credited during your tenure as the head of the United Nations World Food Program with taking the organization from that of development assistance to a humanitarian relief organization. Could you comment on what steps you took to make this transformation?
W: WFP, which had been a bureaucratic organization directed toward helping people living in peaceful times with development aid, now had to become an agency that was fast, and very effective and would be quickly able to assess needs and resource food and move that food and then get it to the right people. So, we went through a whole process of first defining our mission, and then communicating with our donors, getting feedback from the potential beneficiaries and from those who represented them in their governments and then moving the food quickly, and the right kind of food in the right place.
M: Faced with such enormous challenges such as Hurricane Mitch in Latin America, drought in the Horn of Africa, floods in Mozambique, acute hunger among refugees in Kosovo and civil war in Afghanistan, how does an organization like the World Food Program go about confronting such tragedies?
W: The World Food Organization prides itself we did then and I know under the executive director, Jim Morris, they do now, with being able to quickly assess a need and get food to the beneficiaries.
M: We’ve mentioned that nearly 80 percent of the 800 million people who go to bed hungry are women and children. What role can women play in channeling food to the most needy?
W: Woman are the food channelors for all people. When you think about any society in the developing world and you think about who cooks, the answer is the women. Woman in virtually every household are the cooks, and they are not only the cooks, they are the people who have to find the food, they grow it or they chop for it or they bargain for it or trade for it, or they stand in the aid line for it. Women are also the ones that go off and get the firewood, to get the water, sometimes walking hours and hours each day to bring water home for cooking, washing and so forth. The women are the ones totally invested in the family’s ability to eat and in vested in putting cooked food on the table for them to eat. So working with women, if our mission is to end hunger, working with women is the only option that we have in order to be effective.
M: Looking ahead, what do you see as the greatest challenges in delivering food to people who need it?
W: The greatest challenge is to help use food in an effort to help people be able to improve their own well-being over the long term. I say that because in the last ten years we have been more successful in raising the resources and delivering food to people caught in conflict or natural disaster. Now it’s been very challenging because we have had to get food through warring factions and lines. We’ve had to get food across Somalia, which is normally a desert and all of a sudden has a flood. We have to get food into drought stricken places in the Horn of Africa. That, although very challenging, has been what we have done pretty well. What we still need to do is to Convince people around the world who have the ability to influence their governments or influence other private sector entities to contribute more food and money to getting food to people who have no food because they are poor. And those people are the ones that are still most at risk around the world and the ones to whom we have to devote new energy.
M: Thank you very much. Thank you for coming in and speaking with us.
W: Thank you for having me. You’re welcome.