Tom Arnold on Fighting Hunger | Big Think

Tom Arnold on Fighting Hunger

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Here’s Tom Arnold of Concern Worldwide on fighting global hunger

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Tom Arnold:

Tom Arnold was previously Assistant Secretary General with the Irish Department of Agriculture and Food and was Senior Economist with ACOT, the Farm Advisory Service.

At an earlier stage of his career, he worked for the European Commission on Agricultural Policy and on development programmes, representing the Commission for three years in the Ivory Coast and Malawi. Tom was Chairman of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Committee of Agriculture (1993 – 1998). In 2003, he was appointed to the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force (2003 - 2004), established by Kofi Annan to devise a strategy to halve world hunger by 2015.

Tom was a member of the Irish Hunger Task Force (2007 - 2008), which was charged with proposing a strategy through which Ireland could make a distinctive contribution towards ending world hunger. He is a member of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2020 Advisory Council and the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund’s Advisory Group.

At European level, he is chairman of the European Food Security Group, a network of 40 European NGOs engaged in food and hunger work and is Vice-chair of the Trans Atlantic Food Aid Dialogue – an alliance of American, European and Canadian NGOs working on the reform of international food aid.

Tom was recently appointed to the trust governing the Irish Times, Ireland’s leading newspaper and to the Irish government’s Commission on Taxation.

Tom Arnold is a graduate in Agricultural Economics from University College Dublin and has Masters Degrees from the Catholic University of Louvain and Trinity College Dublin.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is the most acute problem you confront?

Arnold: Hunger is the ultimate expression of poverty, and that’s why there are still almost, at this stage, a billion people suffering from hunger everyday, and that hunger is a combination of acute malnutrition, but that’s of small proportion. I mean, that’s less than 10%. And the really serious problem is chronic malnutrition. About 90% of about a billion people are suffering from chronic malnutrition, and it’s about people being caught in a desperate poverty trap and they’re not, at the moment, able to get out of it, and I think the challenge is to see, find ways of both dealing with the immediate problem and also then helping people out of these poverty traps they are stuck in. We’re very focused on the whole area of acute malnutrition, and we were very instrumental in developing a different approach to dealing with that, called Community Therapeutic Care, which has been adopted last year by the UN as Best Practice, but we’re also dealing with a whole area of chronic malnutrition, and that’s where we’re trying to really break the cycle, and that cycle involves women who, pregnant mothers who are underweight and badly nourished producing children who are underweight, and particularly in the first two years of life, if children are not properly nourished, there’s already stunting comes in there and there’s a huge proportion of the children in the countries we work in are affected by stunting, and that means mental and physical stunting, which is irreversible. So, really, that’s a key focus as well. And then, at the other end of the scale, as we, people, we’re really trying to find pathways out of hunger for people, people, you know, who if we can improve their livelihoods, if we can get them earning that little bit extra amount of income, then, you know, they can grow their own food and they can really help themselves out of hunger.

Question: What is the impact of climate change?

Arnold: Many of the countries we work in are working in very fragile climates, and particularly areas like the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia and Northern Kenya, Darfur, Chad – all of these are very vulnerable bases where climatic change and, you know, we’re facing into more of this, are making the farmers’ livelihoods much more vulnerable. Rains that don’t come on time or that come irregularly, and sometimes come too much rain, shorter growing seasons, all of these things.

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