 Evening everyone. Thank you all for being here. I'm feeling just slightly guilty knowing that tomorrow people will be wondering why the ratings for the World Series games were depressed here is because we had this great program and although with luck that any fans in the audience should have plenty of time to get to a tube. Thank you for coming. But familiar litany, a cradle of astronauts, cradle of quarterbacks, well of course we're also the cradle of world food prize winners. No one out there has too and we do. And Dr. Gabisa Getta, we're in the world, I saw him already, he's got, he's here somewhere. Oh, his typical modesty, he's a few rows back. I reached Phil Nelson, his predecessor who hates that he can't be here but he's trapped on business far from here, sends his best to everybody but what better place than Purdue University to welcome and seek the insights of a world food prize winner. In route to that prize our guest tonight, Cathy Bertini, said a lot of firsts. She was the first woman to head the UN World Food Program. She was the first American to head that program and was only the third woman to head any UN program of its scope and dimension. So she's been a pioneer in many ways and of course has had the I'm sure enormous fulfillment that we might all envy of knowing that she has saved the lives and improved the lives of millions and millions of people through the work she was able to do. So I just can't tell you what a pleasure it is and what I think an appropriate evening it is for Purdue to welcome my old friend and world food prize winner, Cathy Bertini. So as is our usual practice I've formulated a few gentle questions for Cathy but you'd be thinking about your own and after I've run through a few we hope that you'll take over the questioning and guide the discussion for the bulk of the evening and I think yes as usual we have microphones there and there so starting in a few minutes the braver of you souls should should claim a place in line. So can we just start she wouldn't want this but let's do it anyway. I want to just hear about you a little bit. As I understand it you knew from probably first grade on that you were going to be the head of the World Food Program and planned for it every step of the way is that how it works? Absolutely. Absolutely. And everybody does that right? Well if it wasn't quite that way how was it? When I was 15 years old I went to a seminar for high school students interested in government and it was a five day seminar at Colgate University I grew up in upstate New York so it wasn't very far away and it totally sold me on government and politics and I decided instead of being a music teacher I was going to go into government so that's where it started actually. So I went to school at the state university in New York in Albany which was in the capital so I could work in the legislature work in the governor's office and then from there I worked in politics for five years and then I said okay I before I go into government I need to know something. I didn't want to be a 25 year old who's only been a politician and I wanted to be able to offer something else so I went to a public affairs job because that was the way to translate my political background into learning about corporate and I worked at Container Corporation of America in Chicago for ten years and then finally at one point I said okay I better get around to getting to government I always wanted to go into government. The governor of Illinois had appointed me to a couple of different positions but I wanted a real job in government and I wrote to a man in the Reagan White House who I met from the time he worked for Senator Luger and his name was Mitch Daniels and said I was interested in joining the government and he said you're just the kind of person that we'd like to have in government what do you want to do oh okay well I better define something so what I said was I wanted to be in social services service delivery line management and so he arranged or somebody he asked to arrange for me to have various interviews and I joined the government as head of the then the Aid to Families Dependent Children Program now called TANF the Welfare Program essentially for poor American women and I went from there after George H. W. Bush was elected and I knew President Bush and I knew Clayton Yider who was chosen to be Secretary of Agriculture so they nominated me president nominated me to for to be Assistant Secretary of Agriculture running the domestic food assistance programs and Clayton knew that it made sense that I'd been at welfare now to be at food stamps now called Stamp WIC school lunch and so forth when I was there and Clayton said you know there's this agency in Rome called the World Food Program and U.S. gives about a third of its resources now by the way it's about 40% so the U.S. gives about two billion dollars voluntarily to about a five billion dollar budget this now in 2015 to WFP so he said we've been given about one third of the resources but we never had an American running the program I think it's about time we do and you would be my first choice but I have to convince Secretary of State Jim Baker that it would make sense to put forth an American because one country can only have so many of these top jobs so Baker said okay and they ran a campaign for the secretary general and the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization to appoint me and that's what happened now I got to ask you if you were become that music if you had become that music teacher what would you have been teaching an instrument I play the clarinet do you still yes I'm in a community band we call it the old timers band I joined the band when I was very young and now I'm on the older timer end of the band but yes I play in the band and I would have been a high school music teacher well we love music teachers here too so it's not it's never too late you know and congratulations to you I've told hundreds thousands of young musicians don't quit that clarinet you're playing you're gonna want to lay it down because you're gonna think I've got this whipped and you're gonna get busy with other things then you won't pick it up again as many of us made that mistake so you did you play I played badly the trumpet and you don't play anymore no but congratulations the band couldn't get you involved now it proved they wouldn't have me very competitive band so Kathy your main mission of course was feeding millions of hungry people but as you did it you you really did break some new ground for women it's my understanding both inside the agency itself but also out in the field where the service was delivered can you tell us a little about that because I think that play we're in a very different place now because of you thank you well first of all when I got to WFP I looked at the statistics for of all of our international staff what percentage were women what percentage were men and the female percentage was 17% 17% and the UNICEF and UN High Commission for Refugees numbers were 35 38% and I asked my new colleagues why weren't our numbers more like their numbers and they said well because we do guy things here so I said what I mean like eating well I guess that's a guy thing well I'll come back to that in a minute so guy things are trains and trucks and planes and ships that we needed to move the food and I said you mean there's no women in those fields I don't believe it and when people tell you all there's no women you know we can't have any there we don't have women in this area because there aren't any that's a baloney statement please it's a blow you'd go out and find women because there's women in every field now and thanks to some of the kind of work that you're doing here Mitch and your leadership on STEM for instance and there's gonna be a lot more women in those fields too that have been guy places but so I said we'll find them we'll find them and we did so the number of by the time I left was 39% that was the percentage but one of the things we ended up doing it ended up being mission-driven it wasn't just because she said we needed more women what happened was we said our mission first of all we didn't have a mission statement so we create an emission statement we move food around we have all this food aid but for what and really the reason is to end hunger in the places that we target where we think we can make a difference so if the mission is to end hunger how are we gonna do that we're not just by moving food people have to eat the food so who cooks the food well in the developing world virtually everywhere it's women so if women are cooking the food and by the way they're also finding the water and the firewood and or growing the food working in the fields while they have babies on their back taking care of their children milking the cow in the morning and at night and taking the milk into the co-op and I mean they're doing everything then getting home and cooking their meals somehow we need to find a way to partner with the women because they're the ones that are really going to end hunger if we help them a bit with our food aid so it became mission driven once we said that then we said okay now we need to consult with women we need to find out what they need and when we didn't we made big mistakes like in Rwanda in the refugee camps in then Zaire we sent hard kernel corn it took them three times as long to cook that then it would have if we had ground it before they got it for instance or in Angola we're in areas where farmers wanted to go back to work and fields that have been recently demined during the war they asked we sent them hose hose H O E S not these and I gave this I mentioned this once in New York City and people thought something else but but they so so they so we sent them hose and the hose look like a hole that I have in my in my garage that you may have in here so it's a long wooden pole and then it meets at a 90 degree angle right a rectangular spade there were a whole lot of them lined up against the fence in this community and I said what's wrong with those they said those are male hose now did you know in Angola there's a gender differentiation in hose I did not you didn't know that everybody no I didn't know that so so we so I said female how well they showed me it's a shorter who knows does anybody here know they're all these great there's a man here who knows this different so it was a shorter pole and it met kind of a pointed shovely kind of spade at a less than 90 degree angle and to use it you didn't stand up like a hole you know because the hole in my garage is like a rake almost the way you use it but these other hose you have to squat down in order to use it because it's closer to the ground and the women preferred it because they had babies on their backs and it was less backbreaking to do this this way who know we didn't add we didn't have any women on our staff to ask the question beyond oh yes and hoes so those are some of the ways in which we changed and we ended up organizing leadership groups so that we could hear from women because women aren't the mayors they're not the city councilman they're not the one that goes to meetings if you show up in the town and and say okay we're here for a meeting in order to help give you agriculture advice who comes it's a man's job to go to the meetings generally speaking first so we had to find ways to reach the women in South Sudan where we dropped food out of the back of big C-130 airplanes we worked with the chiefs in order to have a majority women in each in each community on the committee to decide who is going to get the food in Latin America we work with mothers clubs in in which we're already existing in other places we helped to build some capacity for female leadership so we could have some interlocutors so we did a lot in Afghanistan when the Taliban came in and said girls can't go to school women can't work women can't go out of the house without a male relative we had very brave female staff members in Afghanistan who actually went to see the Taliban leadership and say you know widows are gonna sit home and shrivel up and die because they can't go out and we have a solution we'll have bakeries the world food program will run they'll send in the flour you need to approve that certain women could work at the bakeries you need to approve that the widows can go out daily and get their bread and they did in seven major cities in Afghanistan we ran those bakeries so we did a lot of things like that at WFP before we change subjects I'll just have to mention one footnote to this which she would never tell you but I did discover that when she won the world food prize she didn't keep the money tell them what you did with the money oh I asked the world food prize rather than to give it to me to give it to a newly created fun called the Catherine Bertini trust fund for girls education and it's that WFP USA which is a 501c3 a charitable group in the US that raises money for WFP and so there's this trust fund and it gives anywhere from one to four grants a year 10 to $20,000 to two small organizations all around the world working to get more girls in school or keep them in school and that are yeah the broadly speaking not limited to food aid but the history of American foreign aid is not a very successful one in terms of ultimate effects and effectiveness and so forth and at least that's my observation and been a lot of a lot of I think analysis that supports that all too often a program program either poorly targeted corruption enters in dollars or food good get to the wrong places and so forth how's the world the world food program as I've observed it has a much better record how do you avoid those kind of mistakes how do you how do you optimize try to optimize the that every bit of assistance that comes into your stewardship actually gets to somebody good question we had first of all a rule that we have food aid monitor so one of the entry level jobs for people coming into WFP out of from Purdue or wherever is a food aid monitor so we have lots of energetic young people who go around and follow the food and follow the systems so we and then we had a kind of an analysis which would tell us where the food was going when and when and so anytime we thought we had a two percent loss we would take corrective action and we we one of the things we did was create an office of Inspector General I remember when I said this to a staff member in Capitol Hill one time he said well who made you do that and I said nobody nobody made me do it well didn't somebody tell you had to do and he said no I just think we need to have an independent reviewer rather than saying oh I'm gonna you know send my friend Susie over to check out this out well maybe maybe she was friends with the country director maybe there's some other problems so anyway we had an independent inspector and he he saved his his budget five times over the first year he was there because for instance the country director would report that he was losing losing food but he couldn't figure out why it was on the marketplace where it was losing it from so the inspector would go in and and collect and get the local police and surround the market when everybody tries to run out of the market then he they grabbed the guys that did it and all sorts of things like that we had a we had one mark one shop where one of our guys went in and and saw some WFP cans of food and we hardly ever had cans of food they're very valuable in being sold and he said I'd like to buy one of those and the shop owners said a can or a case and so we shut down that country we didn't send any more food to that country until they fixed that problem was the guy who ran the store was the uncle of the ambassador in Rome so we we we had a lot of political problems with them but we absolutely didn't change that our biggest challenge actually was during my time was in North Korea and we went to North Korea starting in 1995 and if you recall there was this incredibly devastating famine in North Korea starting mid 90s for a few years and we ended up sending a lot of food there but it was largely self-imposed yes North Korea does not grow enough can't grow enough food can't be self-sufficient but they could yes they could have better systems to considerably better systems but nonetheless there are a lot of people starving somebody asked me why we were helping them given the their view of the government and I said I'm gonna quote a former president of the United States that Mitch and I knew well President Reagan who said a hungry child knows no politics so it's my job not to assess the government but to get food to those children and but it was very challenging move around because they ran the systems so we had a really clever guy who created a system based on numbers and numbered every bag every every carton every truckload and then followed the numbers no I mean I think you're the organization has faced this general ethical or even moral question before you and many many countries by helping the people you're enabling a regime which is possibly oppressing the people the difference with North Korea is that regime has nuclear weapons and might be willing to use them someday so it's a tough call yeah and the issue is okay so do well now they're not being there's almost no one helping North Korea yeah that reason yeah but our our issue was in the 90s okay nobody likes the government the government is extremely oppressive the government has well I won't go in the whole litany but do we say well they're bad guys and we're not gonna help them or do we say we still have the responsibility to help the the children in that community and we that's that's what we opted for and with a lot of support from the US from Japan from South Korea but interestingly one time during the Clinton presidency we had a there was a hurricane in Cuba and WP had been in Cuba for some time with general development work and the US was getting ready to give food for this people that were impacted by this hurricane now this was gonna be a big deal because we hadn't done anything like that before and they'd even gone to Congress and got Republican leadership on Congress to say okay it was okay so we were the WP was going to announce we're gonna give this big have this big program in Cuba and then the US was gonna announce and we're giving this much which would have been huge it would have been huge really important for the humans but much more important geopolitically and then one of the guys on my staff said wonderful man Neil Gallagher American worked at USDA before he came to WFP he said has anybody asked Fidel if he'll take the food I mean can you imagine if this all happened and then they said no so we said Jim mostly sitting yeah that's who that is then one of my colleagues at USDA where do you think he learned all that stuff so we so anyway I called in the Cuban ambassador and asked him and he was excited he left excited and came back two days later and said no no because the official position of the government is the Americans if it weren't for the Americans and the blockade and all the boycott and whatever we would be much better off and we would be hypocritical to take the food I said yes but it doesn't matter those women that are can't feed their babies where the food comes from well no it matters to us I've got a couple more but it's not too soon for the more inquisitive among you to start stepping forward let me ask you a different question about leakage and loss and so forth so just more more broadly you've seen the food systems now in almost every country on earth and we think a lot around here about the fact that we can grow enough people to feed everyone but that's a disappointing percentage of it finally makes it to someone's home or table so they're all sorts of factors involved here infrastructure and storage and sometimes you know price controls and dumb problems like that prevent more indigenous food from being grown and technology not using technology corruption sometimes when you think about that issue of the loss which which ones which of those factors you think are the most important well post-narvist loss is a real serious issue because so much food is produced that is never never gets to the table never gets consumed and it's also an issue that doesn't get enough attention but I know that at Purdue there's some really good programs to work on packaging the the food and killing the bugs pick pick yeah picks yeah storage so lady does her homework are there are there yeah are there people here who are involved in that yes and but this most of our research money for goes into the other side of of the development of seeds and and the production on the production side and much less of it goes on the other side in terms of post service loss prevention marketing distribution all those things and I think that that's a high priority for those great research institutions like Purdue to pay more attention to but I think it starts right in the field when people are not able to save the crops they have and when when when the crops are abundant and the prices are so low and then and then they're gone and and what's left the prices are so high there's no way to either refrigerate or store some basic things even like storage and the monitoring of what's in the storage and and the certifying what's there and what came in first and what can go out and who's belongs to what if it's a community storage facility and then keeping this the food safe in that place those are all issues that are critically important to the to the process and and many communities don't have it world food program under my successor now and and there have been three people since since I was there Jim Morris from Indiana Josette Sharon and now earthring cousin from Chicago they have a program that was funded by the Gates Foundation called a purchase for progress where they try to give support to smallholder farmers about these kind of things how do you deal with the quality of what you're growing how do you keep it safe how do you keep it stored how how when you make a contract with someone for a future purchase how you don't sell it to a middleman before then and a whole lot of issues to try to build the capacity of those smallholder farmers but it's a it's it's a process that could make a big difference if we did a better job of it okay I think we've got our first audience questioner please hi good day my name are you hear me yeah my name is Travis I'm a first year PhD student here in Ag Econ and also from Jamaica and it's based on that background I asked these two questions first given conversations I've had with friends back home there's a perception that much of international aid goes to high impact areas so that's areas where impact per capita is higher and operational costs are lower when compared to smaller areas such as small island developing states so my first question is did you have those challenges and how did you balance those trade-offs and my second question is given the significant contributions of developed countries to the UN with resources that small countries couldn't hope to compete with and your observation of how underrepresented women were I was just curious to find out you know how how represented are small countries in top UN jobs and what advice would you give to students like myself who would love to eventually have one of those top UN jobs oh great question but if you're getting a doctorate from Purdue you're gonna be in good shape for looking for those jobs first to your first question first of all there's so much more resources for emergencies refugees displaced than there is for development it's not just in the food aid business it's across it's across the board ever since the shift the shift really came at at the end of the Cold War and when so there were so many changes in the 90s and so many so many problematic issues in Europe and Africa and elsewhere and and in places like Latin America generally and and certainly in the small island states were not the beneficiary because of those programs because they're reasonably peaceful and because they had had even even if some of those countries are still relatively poor they had still had a lot more economic growth than some of the least developed countries for instance in Africa so with the exception of Haiti most of the countries in our region are considerably better off than countries in in many countries not all certainly in Africa so so there was a shift to some of the other countries that were more in need and yes there is an issue of capacity and an issue of overhead and there were a few countries very small countries where we ended up having to close our operations because the overhead cost was higher than the actual food cost for the distribution that doesn't mean that all development stopped there but that certainly was the case for high volume commodity movement in our case one of the things that WFP is doing differently is one thing we did then actually with funding from from the Bush 41 administration was to create a vulnerability mapping system and they still exist you can find this on WFP's website where they put all sorts of data into computer and then come up with a map showing the most food insecure areas of the country now we use that for targeting but we've also helped countries create this themselves so a country like to make our could use this in order to develop their own strategies for where would be the biggest need it doesn't have to be food insecurity could be health needs or some other needs so I think there are different there are different technologies could be used the other one is that there's much more cash in the system now not just food not just in kind so a lot of donors almost everybody except the US is giving almost exclusively cash there's a few exceptions and I know that President Daniels worked on this when he was at OMB to try to get the US to use more cash actually at that time is much more cost effective but but that's another thing for instance the Syrian refugees in Turkey or in Jordan get debit cards go to a grocery store so it's there's a lot of more grocery stores now well stocked and then the debit card works like a snap card and then so that kind of thing could work in a in a country like the ones that you mentioned so now jobs well at WFP you're absolutely right is a very thoughtful question we we pushed to try to have more women but at the same time I realized exactly what you just said that since our contributions were coming from almost exclusively from Western countries wealthier countries I didn't want the population of the organization to be to reflect that I guess would be the best way to say it and and so we didn't have any rules so I eventually made goals at WFP for hiring and 50% female hiring international staff this is and 40% developing country nationals I remember some other UN colleagues were annoyed at me that I sent this 40% developing country national staff kind of quote I didn't call it that and they said well we somebody might tell us we have to do it well that's your problem but I don't want this to look like all European men and we need to have a more diverse program and we even hired recruiters to find women from the south I have to tell you now some years after I left I left WFP in 2002 I every once in a while I go somewhere where I meet some of these people that were hired for you to give you an example I took my class I teach at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and I teach a class on humanitarian action a class on the UN girls education surprise surprise and and other food security but I took a class to the UN and I asked Ocha the humanitarian arm of the UN to send me a speaker and I said please could you be sure to send me a female speaker because I have other men on the program I don't have all men on the program so they sent me a speaker of female Ghanaian and she her name is Kiki Gable and she I didn't know her and she started her speech by saying I'm so glad to have a chance to meet Mrs Bertini they called you Mrs no matter I mean the Ms word doesn't work in in the international community so everybody says Mrs if you're married I guess even if you're old enough to be married Mrs so so anyway she said I'm so glad to meet Mrs Bertini I never thought I'd have a chance to meet her and say that I always wanted to join the UN the closest I got was being a tour guide and I couldn't get a job and I couldn't get a job and then I heard that this young American woman at the UN was had hired a search firm to find women from the south entry level women from the south and you hired me and also you hired this all these people she names and now she was about to go off to Namibia to be the head of the UN in Namibia so it's really exciting so there's lots of opportunities for you in the UN and and if you think about the agency heads for instance they're there from all all around the world and in the UN proper there's usually one American and the secretariat and a couple of them running agencies and people from a lot of different countries it's great legacy yes sir hi I study industrial engineering and I focus in supply chain I'm a grad student here and a lot of research in the past years is on supply chains for humanitarian assistance and installing food security problems but all those papers look really good on pay on just theoretically but when it comes to applying those models in real world there's a big gap there so how can this gap be reduced so that it can be actually applied and my second question being that a lot of positions at world food program even on the logistics cluster side of it most of people have political science or public affairs kind of a background to reach to that kind of jobs how can someone from engineering and technology apply to and be a part of those kind of positions okay I'll take the second one first there are a lot of technical people at WFP even much more now than when I was there there's and there's a huge transport and logistics component and so if your background is anywhere close to those there there are potentially a lot of positions but because of all these new technologies a couple of which I mentioned before they're looking they they have hired lately a lot more people with technical background than they have in the past and not for the food aid monitor jobs that I mentioned but for other jobs that are more technical the problem is with world food program with UNICEF and with many other programs they people who are looking just out of school or just after you get your degree several things first of all they're looking for one for your graduate degree of some sort two is for languages to be fluent in more than English in a UN language so you know somebody comes and says you know well okay I speak Urdu that's not going to probably get them hired but if they speak French or Spanish or Arabic or Russian or Chinese Portuguese even it's not a UN language but there's enough there's enough countries that speak it that helps and then the third thing is some sort of field experience some sort of experience in the field because they don't want to hire people and then have them get somewhere and say oh this isn't for me so those three are basics but the bigger problem lately is that they hire more consultants than than people in in real jobs it used to be that consultants where somebody you hire you know I want to have a leader I want to hire president Daniels because he does just great things at Purdue and I want to have him come and re-figure the whole organization and I hire him as a short-term consultant I'm knowing he's busy but I mean you know that's that but now consultant means a person doing a real job it could be doing that just along with somebody else is doing a international civil servant job so it's it's and the reason why they do that is because their budgets go up and down so they don't want to get stuck with too many long-term staff so they call them consultants and it's not so transparent so it's harder to get those jobs I tell my students the best thing to do is to intern somewhere and then impress them and then get a consultancy which then hopefully turns into a regular job so anyway but if you have a particular expertise you can look for when they post jobs that might be looking for those kind of expertise and that's that's a little bit different now that I've spent so much time sending your second question your first question was those are publications that somehow don't match up to the real world oh yes research that doesn't that doesn't it's not practical somehow one of the things that I don't think we do very well as people working on development and humanitarian and also also on in our development programs that you referred to before is I don't think we do I don't think we have it demand-driven enough I think we're more likely to go and say hi I'm from America and I'm here to help you rather than hi here I am but what is it that you need and can I then match that up with with some expertise that I have available and so I think a lot of times we may sit in a lab or something and come up with some great project and say well this has got to be good somewhere and you know solar cookers are one of my favorites now I apologize to anybody who's a big solar cooker fan and I know the people are working on this forever and I know there's been some successes but I can't tell you how many warehouses I've seen around the world with piles of tin unused or used once solar cookers because everybody's got this great idea but they don't field test it with the people who actually see what they really need and what they really want and what they would really use it so that's what I think we need to do more of and if I might use another current example when the new administration comes in soon in January it's my hope that in the U.S. that we'll put more effort continue to put more effort on agriculture development President Obama decided the beginning of his term that he would help the country our country would help poor farmers in poor countries and we were at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs really proud of that because we had made proposals to the whomever was going to be the incoming happened to be President Obama to do this spend more time on this and he did and then AID created Feed the Future which many of you know about and all of that and they Raj Shah who was the administrator said that the intellectual underpinning of this was the Chicago Council report so we were we were real proud of that and helped them along the way so we're now hoping and putting a plan together that a new administration might use to be able to extend this further one of the things we're going to say in this plan as we did in the last one but we're going to say it in a different kind of ways is that we America one of the great underpinnings of America and our success in agriculture which which was a precursor of our success and so much else was the creation of the land grant system and the excellence of universities like this one in terms of of it's building its capacity and the capacity for Indiana and the United States and in fact the whole world and we've been we've been supporting in programs at Purdue and other land grants to help send some of our expertise overseas and we've been doing a I think a fine job with the research and with a lot of those projects but I'd rather have some of this and I hope we're going to recommend this to be more demand-driven so that you know a country could say you know we really need more we really need help in our sorghum production and we know that Gepisa at Purdue is a world-class expert in this and so let's go to him rather than Purdue going and saying hey hey here we have anybody whether you want it or not we're going to help you so that's the I love us to do more of that it's the female hose thing on it yes on a big scale yes those are great questions thank you was that responsive yeah over here hi um thank you for our presentation my name is Taisha I'm a master's student in agriculture and biological engineering um the whole topic of food aid is very intriguing to me I'm I'm from Haiti and so I have a couple of questions for you so I think we're going through a phase in Haiti where we're thinking when does aid when is it effective and I think I don't know it's it's it's been a lot of from tragedy to to to obstacles and for us and what do you think when we when we look at food aid particularly you know in the context of whatever it is emergency and when countries like Haiti cannot get out of that cycle um what exactly when do you think assistance contribute to economy growth and stop really being where it's at so I don't know if I'm framing this well but what do you think about that when do we start moving ahead nobody wants to be dependent but not no country no community no family everybody wants to be able to survive themselves and thrive themselves and hopefully food aid and many other kind of aid is used for that purpose to help people either in living in extreme difficulty or or people help people to be able to build their own capacity and their own resources their own livelihoods that's the whole whole purpose and if we did that well we would eventually put ourselves out of business I think the international community every facet of it has failed Haiti and it's tragic that that's happened in any country but it's happened right here in our own hemisphere whether it's it's development aid emergency aid military peacekeepers and especially governance and I there's been various efforts over time oh let's help Haiti usually around a crisis but not always but I think if we were if we were to be serious about one thing we should do in in in this hemisphere it would be to work with the people of Haiti to find the the key things that they believe that we're the international community could be most helpful and then concentrate on that I think it's a tragic example of everybody deciding what Haiti needs without interacting properly thank you hi good evening I'm a PhD student at Eigen biological engineering so I have two questions for you with the production increasing at the cost of the natural resources getting depleted at a faster rate we know that we need population to be fed and safe from the natural disasters caught by caused by anthropogenic activities in your administration how you deal with such situations this is my first question second question being from a country like India we produce we are the leading producers of paddy and weed all across the world but lacking storage facilities to store the grains how will you address this issue in helping such countries like India or some other countries who are the dealing producers leading producers of some food to assist in reducing losses and having more sustainable agriculture really good question and my India is is crucial successful development of food systems in India is crucial to the feeding of the future because so much of the population is in India and the growing population is in India one day if the population trends continue that India will surpass China as being the biggest country in the world and and it's a democracy and it's a capitalist system and there's sort of sort yeah I used quotes and there but there's there are huge gaps huge gaps and in many different systems and certainly in the ability of Indians to have access to the to the food that's necessary and so so getting this right in India is key if you look at the I'm gonna duck though and say it's not WFP's job in the current structure this organization called Food and Agriculture Organization also based in Rome which is that in the UN are the parents of WFP actually initially and they are the ones that are supposed to help develop systems now how how good their ability is doing that is another is another question and and actually that brings me to a point to say that I think that we should we the US should ask for a mandate review of all of these organizations because they were created many of them right after World War Two for instance and the difference between what it says in their constitution or the bylaws and what they do now are sometimes considerably different also are they still effective are they still needed could they be different WFP is changing by leaps and bounds and going in a lot of different directions I think at least on the whole food side we should have a we should have an overall review of what do we need now and do we have it and what do we need to change in order to get there but that goes beyond your question about India as far as react I think reacting to natural disasters particularly earthquakes and was that was that the question yeah okay the the UN has gotten much more sophisticated on this because they have a lot of early warning systems and they can't warn of everything they can't warn necessarily of earthquakes for instance but they can have droughts and and sometimes of floods and they've gotten much better at planning and pre-planning and sometimes they spent a lot of money planning and then they don't need it but I consider a good thing and for instance during my time when they said there was going to be a big El Nino effect in different places and one of the places it was supposed to have an impact was the west coast of Africa so we did lots of pre-planning for how we were going to work with the countries in the west coast of Africa and then we didn't eat it because it wasn't bad but rather that rather have that than the other way around. WFP is extremely efficient in these kind of projects in Nepal after the terrible earthquake there they were very creative about using every sort of transport up into the mountains where there weren't any roads including hiring the Sherpas who didn't have jobs because the tourists had left so they hired them to deliver food so they've always been creative about how to get food. Well just being just three days off the plane from India that's where I got this cold for which I have to apologize every time there I have the same reaction maybe others have too on alternate days you can be awed by the immensity of the problems but the next in the next breath inspired by the enormous upside possibilities of the Indian people if those problems can be dealt with wisely I mean could be the driver of the next driver of global uplift so let's hope. Right and you probably have a lot of alums from India? Yes three to four thousand that was a principal reason for the various trips we've made is to try to make them feel a bit closer part of the Purdue family and I think a lot of them do and we're also proud to tell you we have 1900 Indian students on campus graduate and undergraduate which is probably more than anybody else and we're proud of that. So we've had a sudden surge of interest in just about enough time if the questions are brief I think we will finish right on time let's make these the last three. Alright hello my name is Ryan I'm a PhD student in food science here at Purdue you talked a lot about how there's a lot more emphasis and resources available for reactive programs for example there's an earthquake let's send food can you talk a little bit more about more proactive measures that may be in place or maybe being planned to be implemented regarding improving the stability or resilience of global food systems? Sure sure that's not so much in WFP's purview but it is part of for instance feed the future that the US has invested more money into and the you if I'm going to talk about that for a minute from the US policy is when we were when we were in government we led with food aid that was that was what we were doing and and it was important it's it's but it's a band aid usually especially in an emergency or refugee situation which is mostly how it's used now even when it's cash as opposed to food so now I think as a result of the changes in in the Obama administration and and Congress also passed a law the global food security act I wish they had called it the Luger global food security act because he's the first one that Senator Luger was the first one that that introduced such a bill but it finally passed this last congress to to essentially say that we should prioritize assistance for to help with agriculture development so now I think the shift is that the US is going to lead with helping poor farmers become more productive and food aid is one of the tools to help support that in small ways but also help keep people alive in bigger ways so the assistance is in so many areas in let's start with research and again the land grant universities are very helpful in this context there's there's a national research or a center in every country mixed reviews on the effectiveness but those are really country-based and could be much more supported by us collectively in order to improve national capacity and actual national expertise there sometimes there needs to be attention to laws to be changed Ghana for instance had a law that only if somebody may know this far better than me I might not be saying this exactly the right way but I believe their law said that you could they could only use seeds that were developed in Ghana and so so the law was changed Kofi Annan was was influential in helping to get a change course he is his Ghanaian it so that it could open the opportunities for more development in Ghana and their agriculture production so so and there's a lot of issues on the research and legal side and then there are issues just with farmers specifically with farmers and I would refer you to the USAID Feed the Future website because I think you'll get to see a whole menu of different successes that USAID has talked about in that sense thank you thank you next good evening I'm Kainat from I'm a PhD student in the agriculture economics department and before coming here I was working in the vulnerability analyst and a mapping unit of WFP in Bangladesh oh so I'm quite excited to meet you today my first question is regarding the changing role of WFP so WFP used to be known as an organization or maybe it is still known as the organization whose primary strength is logistics and emergency delivery I mean when I used to tell people that I work in the WFP and they would say oh you deliver biscuits right and like no I have nothing to do it so and it has become now an organization with innovative programs food assistant programs trying to create new ways to have sustainable solutions to instead of just giving out food aid to have market market-based food assistant assistant solutions also going into nutrition as well prioritizing it among the three UN organizations which work on food having said that what do you see as the biggest challenge for WFP now in this transitory role um and second question is regarding the universities and WFP so do you see that universities can play a role like research university researchers can play a role in designing these you know new programs new assistance programs or do you think it is solely the it should be confined to the people who are running the programs who who have field experience so yes and those are my two questions great if WFP is changing and it's changing because the technology is changing it's changing because there's more cash in the system it's changing because it there's such a huge refugee flow that it's it's trying to support in different ways and it's changing because some of the donors wanted to change this week or next week they have an executive board meeting which is their governing body and i would encourage you to look up their their put out a strategic plan for what they want to do in the future so especially since you know WFP well and it's very nice to meet you this way you might want to look at what they're saying that their next five years are going to be looking like but it's it's it's changed significantly enough that i think that it's realistic to have a conversation about is this the right direction to go i don't i'm not trying to second guess what they're trying to do but i as i said i think on the broader perspective if we looked at all of what we're trying to do generally speaking and then take advantage of the expertise of the various institutions that we that might be the best thing to do over the long term. WFP always has been known for its transport and logistic capacity when i was working on reorganizing WFP and i had the the benefit of the man who preceded me who had been at WFP for 10 years Jim Engerham who was Australian who's written a book called bread and stones if anybody really wants to be a WFP groupie and read this book it is about how he worked during his tenure to divorce WFP constitutionally from FAO it was a good thing he did because by the time i was there in 1992 by the Soviet Union it collapsed in December of 1991 the Berlin Wall had fallen in 89 we had so many more emergencies we had to move very quickly and then FAO was really more bureaucratic let's say so so that it changed then and we were able to change it we had to we had to concentrate on keeping our resource our logistics operation really strong but at the same time expand everything else somebody asked me Mitch when i when i got there had i ever run an organization like WFP before and i said well i've run a government bureaucracy before and i've run a political campaign before i've just never run both of them in the same place at the same time great answer and and because the because part of it was this development bureaucracy of just going like this and part of it was oops there's an earthquake last night let's do something about it and it was we had to put put that all together yes there's more of a role for research but the organization has to reach out to to find the place but as i said they're hiring more technical people they're hiring more phd's in different areas so i think there could be more of a place yes last question hi my name is mohammed i am a phd student in environmental and ecological engineering um my first question was better framed by kainat maybe because we had the course together so i'll jump into the my second question have you experienced a location where would you envision relocating the whole community as a better option than trying to make things work out um if that was like the case is there any place that you can recall that wasn't suitable for human to live in well uh except for having to move refugee camps because they were either too close or too far away from a border i don't think we ever really had to move a community but there are some small island states in the pacific we have to think about this because of the rising water levels so i think that's where i'd go to look at people who live in in very stark circumstances very stark environments uh and with no roofs and hardly any water would and no other support or companionship would probably be except their own family would probably be the people that i saw that were living in the most inhospitable situation so anyway that's that that that was that was tough and it was tough the first time in a job like this when you see somebody a child was dying of starvation um but then you look around at all the children who are thriving because you fed them i mean your organization fed them and i think that's that's what i always try to do and i hope you that works for you in your careers no matter what they are which is to say that you see some of the failures or you see some of the things you wish you could have done something about but you will have a good and fulfilling career if those are if you if those are balanced many times over by all the people you're able to serve all the good things you're able to do or the new science you've been able to bring to the table i can't think of a better place to end than where your answer just did and so kathy we want to thank you of course for spending time with us tonight and another um and another time you're spending on our campus but more so for leading one of the great humanitarian lives of our time thank you so much