The Third Freedom
by George McGovern
Simon and Schuster

After reading only a few pages into "The Third Freedom," twentysomethings will immediately be struck by the fact that they aren't in New Democrat country anymore. When was the last time anyone can remember a political leader offering his vision for ending world hunger by 2030?

For many, the answer is never. Ideas like this haven't been circulated by politicians since the early '70s, when the author, George McGovern, ran as the Democratic presidential nominee against Richard Nixon. Famous for his opposition to the Vietnam War ("I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in"), McGovern has long been a champion of hunger issues. As a senator from the agricultural state of South Dakota, McGovern worked with former Senators Hubert Humphrey and Bob Dole on food stamps, school lunches and the surplus food export program known as "surplus disposal." This last program was renamed to the more palatable "Food for Peace," and President John F. Kennedy appointed McGovern to be its first director. In 1998, President Clinton named McGovern U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Agencies on Food and Agriculture.

Hunger is not a glamorous political issue. Yet an estimated 800 million people are chronically hungry around the world. Statistics like this are too abstract and mean nothing to the reader, so McGovern states it this way: "No war in all of history has ever killed so many humans and spread so much suffering and disease in any year as world hunger now does annually."

"The Third Freedom" outlines a five-step program to address the political issues and to eliminate chronic hunger by 2030:

1) Create a worldwide school lunch program.
2) Expand the U.S. W.I.C. (Women, Infants, Children) program worldwide.
3) Establish food reserves around the world.
4) Help developing nations improve their farming techniques through a Farmers Corps program, modeled on the U.S. Peace Corps.
5) Embrace genetically modified agriculture and spread its benefits to the developing world.

It's easy to snicker at the Farmers Corps — McGovern thinks American farmers in their twilight years will volunteer, a la Peace Corps college kids, to brave developing world conditions. But more serious objections to this plan are likely to center on the following touchy subjects: cost, overpopulation, and "frankenfood." McGovern is thoroughly convincing countering arguments on all three fronts.

First: the cost. $5 billion a year from the international community, $6.2 billion a year from the United States. The United States' portion would devote $1.2 billion to foreign hunger and $5 billion to U.S. hunger. These figures are McGovern's estimates, informed by numbers from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.N. Food for Agriculture Organization and the Bread for the World Institute. McGovern contrasts the $6.2 billion with consumer spending on beer, cigarettes and cosmetics, on military spending and arms exports, and on declining foreign aid in general. $6.2 billion looks like a bargain — and even a cost-saving measure when one considers the World Bank calculations that malnutrition eliminates 46 million years of productive life at a price of $16 billion annually.

This leads to the second objection: If we fed the world's chronically hungry, won't overpopulation worsen? Here McGovern applies an underused argument: Women are disproportionately hungry; if we feed women and offer school lunch programs, the education level of women will increase; studies have shown that birth rates correlate to education levels of women; therefore, tackling hunger will cause rampant population growth to plateau. He convincingly uses the U.S. school lunch and W.I.C. programs as evidence for his argument. These programs had an enormous impact on education levels and falling birthrates in rural America, especially in the South starting after WWII and expanding during the '60s.

Now, for the objection from the Left: how can McGovern support "risky" gentically-modified (GM) agriculture, or "frankenfood"? Here, McGovern's age gives him a perspective not available to the yuppie consumers at Bread & Circus who worship at the altar of organic. While America was fixated on the Sexual Revolution of the late '60s, the developing world was rejoicing in the Green Revolution. Through gene modification, scientists created seeds capable of producing higher yields. This technology had the biggest impact on the developing world, going a long way to help countries feed their own populations.

To defend today's GM agriculture, McGovern quotes from a Nobel Peace Prize leader of the '60s Green Revolution, Dr. Norman Borlaug. Borlaug says, "Science and technology are under attack in affluent nations, where misinformed environmentalists claim that the consumer is being poisoned by high-yielding systems of agricultural production, including genetically modified crops."

The same worries about new food technology were put forth during the '60s, yet the resulting food was for many a salvation and a danger for none. McGovern argues that rigorous safety testing should continue, but the scare-mongering should not. Innovations such as the newly developed golden rice, which is packed with Vitamin A, should be available for the Vitamin-A deficient populations that need them.

McGovern is disappointingly silent, however, on agri-business attempts to patent seeds — one of the newest breakthroughs possible with GM agriculture. Patented seeds force farmers to buy new seeds each year, rather than replant from the previous year's harvest. This practice promises to make farmers in the developing world dependent on major agri-companies — a recipe for an even wider gap between rich and poor countries.

Luckily, patents are temporary things, and not always followed strictly in the developing world. And if an Indian pharmacutical company can make generic versions of the AIDS cocktail for export to Africa, developing world scientists can also create their own versions of GM seeds too.

"The Third Freedom" closes with five recommendations for everyday folks to help fight hunger:

1) Donate to hunger relief organizations.
2) Quit complaining about U.S. foreign aid, which amounts to less than one percent of the GNP.
3) Learn about the U.N. and support it by word of mouth.
4) Tell farmers their work is important, both here and abroad.
5) Ask wealthy individuals to make hunger a philanthropic priority.

I would add a sixth recommendation: read "The Third Freedom."

— Benjamin Arnoldy (benjamin@csmonitor.com)