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 More than 30 million Africans are threatened by food shortages, yet critics of emergency food donations argue that food distribution alone is a short-lived solution, at best. While simply giving away food does little to promote sustainable change in poor communities, humanitarian organizations like World Vision use emergency food supplies as a catalyst for long-term development.
For example, in Mozambique, World Vision has developed a monetization program through which the organization sells donated wheat and vegetable oil to fund food security programs affecting more than a million people. Through this program, parents learn about child nutrition, farmers learn better techniques for growing food and cash crops, and communities learn to save food as a hedge against drought.
“More than 70 percent of Mozambique’s population lives in absolute poverty. Giving them grain for a day helps them for only a day. We cannot possibly continue to feed a whole country indefinitely,” said Martha Newsome, World Vision’s national director in Mozambique. ”However, if we use some of the grain to fund education, we can teach them to grow their own food. They are happier to take care of themselves, and we can focus our attention on an increasingly smaller population of truly desperate people.”
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