[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 52 (Monday, January 1, 2001)]
[Pages 3201-3204]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
Remarks Announcing the Global Food for Education Initiative
December 28, 2000
The President. Good morning, everyone; please be seated. First, I
want to thank Senator Dole and Senator McGovern for joining me and for
their leadership. I thank Senator Dorgan and Senator Leahy for being
here; Representatives Hall and McGovern; Catherine Bertini, the
Executive Director of the U.N. World Food Programme; Jacques Diouf,
Director-General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; Sven
Sandstrom, the Acting President of the
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World Bank; representatives of nongovernmental organizations; and all
those who have worked to make this global feeding initiative a reality.
I also want to especially thank Secretary Summers, Jack Lew, and the
White House staff who worked so hard on this in what, in Washington
time, is a very short period of time to put this all together.
[Laughter]
This morning we gather just 3 days after Christmas, the second day
of Eid Al-Fitr, a few hours before the last night of Hanukkah, a time
sacred to men and women of faith who share a belief in the dignity of
every human being, a time to give thanks for the prosperity so many
enjoy today, but also a time to remember that much of humanity still
lives in astonishing poverty. Nearly half the human race struggles to
survive on less than $2 a day; nearly a billion live in chronic hunger;
half the children in the poorest countries are not in school. That is
not right, necessary, or sustainable in the 21st century.
The most critical building block any nation needs to reap the
benefits of the global era is a healthy population with broad-based
literacy. Each additional year spent in school increases wages by 10 to
20 percent in the developing world. Today, however, 120 million children
get no schooling at all, 60 percent of them girls. So this year in
Dakar, Senegal, 181 nations joined to set a goal of providing basic
education to every child in every country by 2015. At the urging of the
United States, the G-8 nations later endorsed this goal at our summit in
Okinawa.
Experience has shown here at home and around the world that one of
the best ways to get parents to send their children to school is a
healthy meal. That's why today I'm very pleased that we are announcing
the grant recipients who are going to help us put in place our $300
million pilot program to provide nutritious meals to schoolchildren in
developing countries.
The program will provide a free breakfast or a free lunch to some 9
million children in 38 developing nations. It will work closely with
some 14 private volunteer organizations, many of whom are represented
here, with the U.N. World Food Programme, and with recipient nations and
farm groups so we don't disrupt local farm economies. The result will be
increased school enrollment and attendance, especially among girls, and
real improvement in these children's nutritional well-being and ability
to learn.
We know from experience that this approach works. In Cameroon, for
example, efforts led by the World Food Programme and USAID are feeding
almost 50,000 school children, helping to increase school enrollment by
over 50 percent, and cutting the dropout rate for girls to virtually
zero. We also know we can take that kind of success and extend it across
Asia, Africa, the Balkans, and beyond, because a little funding goes a
very long way, indeed.
Under this pilot program, for example, we will start providing
nutritious food to more than 500,000 children in Vietnam. We will start
providing high protein bread and milk each day to some 60,000 students
in 170 schools in Eritrea. And in Kenya, we will start giving some 1.4
million elementary school children a nutritious meal every single day.
Of course, this initiative by itself is not a solution to the global
hunger problem, but it's a downpayment and a beginning. Now it's up to
Congress, the United Nations, other developed countries, the NGO's
represented here, and the next administration to continue this fight.
We're going to need the World Bank to implement its pledge to increase
lending for education by 50 percent. Developing countries need to make
basic education a real priority. We need to mobilize private sector
resources, something we've worked hard to do, by raising awareness of
this issue among foundations.
And in addition to the $300 million for school feeding, we have also
fought hard for and won a new $37 million initiative called School
Works, to support basic education in developing countries, and an
overall 50 percent increase for all international basic education
programs, including the fine education work being now done at USAID.
Finally, we secured $45 million this year for the U.S. funding for the
international program to eliminate child labor, a 15-fold increase since
1998.
The fight for better education is only part of the battle we must
wage to make the global economy work for everyone. Implementing landmark
trade agreements we've
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reached with Africa and the Caribbean is a part of it. Leading the
worldwide fight against infectious diseases, like HIV and AIDS, is
important. Removing the crushing burden of debt from impoverished
nations that will, in turn, invest those savings in their people and
their future is fundamental. We must also continue to offer more
microcredit loans and close the digital divide.
We've worked hard these last few years to put the battle against
abject poverty higher on the world's agenda, and America must keep it
there. This is not just about our moral obligation to help the needy,
although it is great. It's also part of the answer to what kind of world
we want our children to inhabit a generation from now; what do we want
to avoid?
The world is becoming more and more interdependent, and America
needs strong and healthy partners. We need to invest in future markets,
and we need to do it in every part of the world. We want to avoid a
world that is hopelessly and violently divided between the rich and the
poor, a future in which hundreds of millions of people decide that they
have no stake in a peaceful and open global society because there's
nothing in it for them and their children. If we can prevent that from
happening, it will be good for our economy, for our security, and for
our souls.
We are greatly honored today to be joined by two leaders who clearly
understand this. George McGovern and Bob Dole served their country in
war and peace with uncommon courage, candor, and commitment to their
principles. Springing from the soil of our Nation's heartland, they have
long believed that America has global responsibilities and must
therefore have a global vision.
Over 30 years ago, these two leaders strongly supported the creation
of the domestic school lunch program. Last May they both advanced the
idea of an international school feeding program. Today we're putting
that into practice. The country will always be strong as long as we have
leaders like them, leaders with their energy and vision, willing to
reach across party lines to build a common future.
Following their example, I am convinced we can put together the kind
of bipartisan and international public/private coalition needed to build
the global economy in a way that leaves no one behind and, in the
process, creates a new century of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
It's a great opportunity and a great responsibility.
Now, I'd like to ask Senator McGovern to say a few words.
[At this point, former Senators George McGovern and Bob Dole made brief
remarks.]
The President. Let me make two brief comments. First of all, on the
way in here, the young man who was advancing this event pulled out a
copy of a picture of me escorting Senator McGovern across an airport
tarmac in 1972. And Senator Dole saw it, and he knew immediately that if
he had had that picture in 1996, the outcome of the entire election
would have been changed. [Laughter] My hair was rather long, and my
sideburns look like Burnside; I look like one of those Civil War
generals. [Laughter] But we were able to cover it up, thank goodness.
[Laughter]
Let me make a serious point, if I might. First of all, I feel very
indebted to all the people who are here. Senator Leahy and Senator
Dorgan have long been advocates of fighting hunger. Congressman McGovern
came to me with Senator McGovern--no relation, I might add--with this
and worded me to death on it. [Laughter] And my good friend Tony Hall
has been the foremost advocate of dealing with the problems of the poor
and the hungry in the world in Congress, and all of us acknowledge that.
But let me just sort of say one thing we did not explicitly say,
that I think we should say before we leave. I was talking to Senator
McGovern about it. What we would like, as Senator McGovern and Senator
Dole said, is to prove through this pilot program that, A, we can make
this work and, B, we can do it without disrupting local farm economies.
If we can do that, then the goal is to provide this sort of meal at
breakfast or lunch, depending on which works better in each country, to
every child in the world that needs it. And I think Senator Dole said
that we reckon about 300 million. The estimate is it would cost between
$6 and $7 billion
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to do that. So if we were to go that route and the United States were to
pay its fair share, it would be about $1.5 billion, give or take, over
the next few years, a year.
But if you think about that, if you think about being able to give a
meal to 300 million kids a year every single day of the year for an
aggregate international cost of somewhere between $6 and $7 billion a
year, and you think about all the hundreds of billions--indeed, the
trillions of dollars that are spent by governments around the world, I
mean, it's just walking-around money; it's such a tiny amount of money
compared to the aggregate expenditures of the governments of the world
on everything else they spend money on.
I wanted just to do this; we've worked very hard this year to get
this off. I'm not trying to saddle the future administration or a future
Congress with an unbelievable burden. This is a relatively small new
commitment that I think the United States should embrace in cooperation
with its allies and friends and others around the world, and one that I
hope and pray will be embraced, and it can be funded in any number of
creative ways. But I just wanted to say that I believe, 10 years from
now, this will have been done. And I believe when that happens, we will
be profoundly indebted to these people who have come here today to
advance this idea.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 10:35 a.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the
White House.