War experience led McGovern to combat hunger
By Michele Linckmlinck@siouxcityjournal.com | Posted: Friday, October 10, 2008
ORANGE CITY, Iowa -- George McGovern recalled the young men who came to his family's backdoor in Avon, S.D., looking for work during the Depression as they rode the rails west, hoping for better days.
"So I saw hunger," McGovern told about 1,000 students, faculty members and area residents Thursday in Christ Chapel at Northwestern College. "But I never saw anybody at the edge of starvation."
That came later, as a young bomber pilot during World War II. As his ship pulled into harbor in Naples, Italy, McGovern said, the airmen were greeted by a crowd of hungry children yelling out in broken English, "Hey, Joe, Baby Ruth! Hershey bar! Butterfinger! hoping candy bars would be thrown their way.
"I saw that hunger every day of the war," McGovern said. "I made up my mind if I survived the war, I was going to look for opportunities to reduce hunger."
Decades later, it's clear McGovern, now 86 and a former Democratic senator and presidential nominee, has kept that promise to himself and found many opportunities.
During his 22 years in Congress, McGovern, working with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Bob Dole, developed not only the American school lunch program and an international equivalent but also the Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, nutrition program and its international version, along with many other hunger-fighting initiatives over the decades since he left office.
McGovern and Dole will receive the prestigious World Food Prize in Des Moines next week.
Steve Mahr, a Northwestern senior from Orange City, said after the speech that he enjoyed seeing a politician who's done something good with his time in office.
"I feel we need to do more," Mahr said. "It's a big problem, but the church is big."
McGovern told the audience he learned that 1 billion of the world's 6.5 billion people never had enough to eat and were hungry, undernourished, weak, unproductive and prone to illness.
He realized that half of the hungry people were school children and if they could be fed, hunger would be halved. He set out to do that.
"When you start a school lunch program in a village," he said, "you learn that it's mostly girls who drop out, due to favoritism toward boys. This is unfair to the girls. It's unfair to society."
He said program statistics showed almost immediately that when children are fed, most of the girls stay in school and all students' performance goes up.
He countered a popular argument that hunger can't be beaten until the world's population is reduced. Illiterate girls tend to marry as young as 10 and have six children, on average, by the time they're 20, he said. Girls who learn to read and write, even with just six years of education, tend to marry later and have just 2.9 children.
"I'm told educating boys doesn't reduce the birth rate," McGovern said wryly, drawing chuckles from the audience.
"It's interesting to see that (alleviating) hunger does more than just feed the poor," Brandon Garner, a senior from Des Moines, said after the speech. "It actually decreases the population and solves other problems."
McGovern ended his talk by singing a song he said explains his passion for fighting hunger and which Greg Christy, Northwestern's new president, had requested. He was only a few words into "Jesus Loves the Little Children" when audience members began to join in, filling the chapel with their voices.
They followed the song with a standing ovation.
Christy introduced McGovern, with whom he worked closely at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, S.D., raising funds to establish the George and Eleanor McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service.
McGovern will speak as part of Christy's inauguration celebration at 2:30 p.m. today in the chapel.
Who's hungry?
* More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished.
* 153 million of the world's malnourished are children under age 5.
* 6 million children under age 5 die every year as a result of hunger.
* Lack of dietary diversity and essential minerals and vitamins increases the death toll from measles by 1.3 million to 2.5 million children each year.
* 54 nations don't produce enough food to feed their populations and cannot afford the commodities to fill the gap.
* Most of the world's hunger results from deeply rooted poverty.
* 5 percent to 10 percent of world hunger can be traced to specific events: floods or droughts, armed conflict, or political, social or economic disruptions
Source: care.org
"So I saw hunger," McGovern told about 1,000 students, faculty members and area residents Thursday in Christ Chapel at Northwestern College. "But I never saw anybody at the edge of starvation."
That came later, as a young bomber pilot during World War II. As his ship pulled into harbor in Naples, Italy, McGovern said, the airmen were greeted by a crowd of hungry children yelling out in broken English, "Hey, Joe, Baby Ruth! Hershey bar! Butterfinger! hoping candy bars would be thrown their way.
"I saw that hunger every day of the war," McGovern said. "I made up my mind if I survived the war, I was going to look for opportunities to reduce hunger."
Decades later, it's clear McGovern, now 86 and a former Democratic senator and presidential nominee, has kept that promise to himself and found many opportunities.
During his 22 years in Congress, McGovern, working with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Bob Dole, developed not only the American school lunch program and an international equivalent but also the Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, nutrition program and its international version, along with many other hunger-fighting initiatives over the decades since he left office.
McGovern and Dole will receive the prestigious World Food Prize in Des Moines next week.
Steve Mahr, a Northwestern senior from Orange City, said after the speech that he enjoyed seeing a politician who's done something good with his time in office.
"I feel we need to do more," Mahr said. "It's a big problem, but the church is big."
McGovern told the audience he learned that 1 billion of the world's 6.5 billion people never had enough to eat and were hungry, undernourished, weak, unproductive and prone to illness.
He realized that half of the hungry people were school children and if they could be fed, hunger would be halved. He set out to do that.
"When you start a school lunch program in a village," he said, "you learn that it's mostly girls who drop out, due to favoritism toward boys. This is unfair to the girls. It's unfair to society."
He said program statistics showed almost immediately that when children are fed, most of the girls stay in school and all students' performance goes up.
He countered a popular argument that hunger can't be beaten until the world's population is reduced. Illiterate girls tend to marry as young as 10 and have six children, on average, by the time they're 20, he said. Girls who learn to read and write, even with just six years of education, tend to marry later and have just 2.9 children.
"I'm told educating boys doesn't reduce the birth rate," McGovern said wryly, drawing chuckles from the audience.
"It's interesting to see that (alleviating) hunger does more than just feed the poor," Brandon Garner, a senior from Des Moines, said after the speech. "It actually decreases the population and solves other problems."
McGovern ended his talk by singing a song he said explains his passion for fighting hunger and which Greg Christy, Northwestern's new president, had requested. He was only a few words into "Jesus Loves the Little Children" when audience members began to join in, filling the chapel with their voices.
They followed the song with a standing ovation.
Christy introduced McGovern, with whom he worked closely at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, S.D., raising funds to establish the George and Eleanor McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service.
McGovern will speak as part of Christy's inauguration celebration at 2:30 p.m. today in the chapel.
Who's hungry?
* More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished.
* 153 million of the world's malnourished are children under age 5.
* 6 million children under age 5 die every year as a result of hunger.
* Lack of dietary diversity and essential minerals and vitamins increases the death toll from measles by 1.3 million to 2.5 million children each year.
* 54 nations don't produce enough food to feed their populations and cannot afford the commodities to fill the gap.
* Most of the world's hunger results from deeply rooted poverty.
* 5 percent to 10 percent of world hunger can be traced to specific events: floods or droughts, armed conflict, or political, social or economic disruptions
Source: care.org
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