(cue sci-fi special effects). Tschiowngg. Viioooh. Pdoinggg.  Feet running down a corridor.  Pschow pschow pschow : light bolts hit the wall.  A wookie cries out, an R2 unit whistles, and someone bemoans their parentage.

No it’s not Star Wars, although I’m certain there’s several items above which are (c) George Lucas in one way or another.  This is this World Food Program’s largest ever project to eradicate childhood hunger : Project Laser Beam.  Pschownnggg.

PLB has actually been going since 2009.  Since then it’s brought together leading global corporations and UN agencies ” to find new solutions to old problems”, targeting Indonesia and Bangladesh in particular.  So successful was the 2009 launch that the project was launched again in 2011.  Wow!

Now it’s easy to snipe at a project like this because the scale of childhood hunger is truly staggering.  UNICEF estimates that around 200 million children under 5 are malnourished, or a quarter of all under-5s in the whole world.  Of these 10 million, or 5 percent, will starve to death every year.

The situation in Bangladesh and Indonesia is particularly chronic.  In Bangladesh over 40 percent of under fives are malnourished: in Indonesia it’s slightly less, at 37 percent, but peaks at 60 percent in some provinces.

The question is, what are we doing about this?

Well, PLB aims to throw $50 million at the problem over 5 years, of which $10 million apparently comes from Unilever.  This will largely support the manufacture and distribution of high nutrient pastes such as Wawa Mun, which can give a day’s worth of nutrients in a 50 gram serving.  Really brilliant, yes?

Um, no.

Much as I hate to say it, projects like this are all about the centralisation of food production and the commodification of nutrients to even the most needy.  They rely upon money in the misguided belief that everything needs to be a commercial relationship, ignoring the fact that these communities would be able to support themselves if the need to profit was removed from their day-to-day lives.

Project Laser Beam (tchowwwnnggg) may be the WFP’s largest ever project to eliminate childhood hunger but it’s pretty woeful.  Unilever itself has a post tax profit of around $6 billion.  If $50 million will fix the problem, just imagine what $6 billion would do!  And surely investors would support that as a one-off donation … wouldn’t they?

More to the point though, it does nothing to solve the underlying problem of such malnutrition.  No one is planting crops (aside from peanuts or chickpeas to make the paste), no one is looking at irrigation or soil improvement, no one is wondering why people are living in an environment too harsh to support them.  Was it ever that way?  I don’t think so.

I try hard, very hard, not to be anti-capitalist but on days like this I find it almost impossible.  No injection of capital will make the lives of the starving more bearable in the long term.  Only a change in peoples’ behaviour will achieve this, and that change starts with you and your dinner plate.

Rather than reply upon WFP or Unilever to give aid to solve these problems, take action yourself.  Don’t waste food, only cook what you really need to eat.  Composting is not the solution to over consumption: consuming less is.

If consumers in the western world only consumed what they needed to, my guess is that hunger in the poorer quarters of the world would automatically be alleviated simply because the cost of nutrition, as a commodity, would automatically fall.

That would be the largest ever project to eradicate hunger, but because it doesn’t involve capital expenditure it will never be popular.  Shame.

Picture credit: Streets of India by Partha Sarathi Sahana under CC Attribution License

Tagged as: plb, project laser bean, star wars, unicef, unilever, wfp, world food program