[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.