 This afternoon's talk, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Kathy Bertini back to the Ford School in our new digs, quite a bit different than where she was before. I first met Kathy when she was running the food stamp program for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the first George Bush administration. She went from there to an appointment as the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, which is the largest food relief and assistance organization by orders of magnitude in the world, and she was absolutely instrumental in a whole variety of food relief efforts from North Korea to Ethiopia to things going on in Eastern Europe at that time, and really was known as an incredibly effective director of that program. She was time limited and out after 10 years, and we lured her here as our very first Towsley policymaker in residence at the Ford School, where she taught a class and spent the entire semester here, and I know a number of you here in the audience met her at that point. She left us to go back and become essentially the chief operating officer for the United Nations, so your official title, Under Secretary General for Management, which meant she was in charge of running the place, not an easy job. As one person said, you know, what's more difficult than solving world food is running the United Nations, so she did that for a number of years and has now decided to go back into the academic world and is professor of practice at Syracuse University, which is close to her home. She lives in Portland, New York, and from there I know travels all around the world doing many interesting things. In any case, it's just an absolute delight to have Kathy back at the school this afternoon, and she is going to be speaking about humanitarian actions and the circumstances under which they can and cannot be effective. Join me in welcoming Kathy. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be back here, and it's wonderful to see this absolutely gorgeous facility that you have, and I give congratulations to the dean and to the university and to all those who participated in making this beautiful place for a very impressive public policy school. Now you have the facility that you deserve. It's a far cry from being crunched up in Lorch Hall and the other places. I'm sure Lorch Hall is wonderful, now more wonderful, that it has more space for whoever is there now, so salute to the dean. And it's so nice to be here and have a few moments to see other friends and colleagues with whom I worked when I was here in the fall of 2002, and also to see Mel Levitsky, whose office I now sit in at the Maxwell School since he's come here to the Ford School. You know, when I was here I so much enjoyed teaching that I said to myself sometime I'd like to do this again, and so when I was recruited to join the faculty at Maxwell I was really pleased to do it and to be able to go home, but I haven't left you far behind because I have hanging in my office there at Syracuse University, the University of Michigan t-shirt that the students gave me, a lot of graft, and it's hanging on my bookshelf there in my office. Also I remember, I saw Bob Axelrod earlier, and I remember his being right on, I'm sure many times, but two that I remember in particular was in a brown bag lunch he did for the faculty talking about what might happen if there was a war in Iraq, and he had various scenario that might occur, and they all seemed fairly rosy except for one which was guerrilla warfare in the streets, and I said oh well that's not going to happen, and he said well it's one of the options and unfortunately, or one of the possibilities unfortunately he was right, but he also did say what Becky just said that when I left to knowing that I was going to back to the UN to be in charge of management he said yes I think maybe the only thing more difficult than solving world hunger is managing the UN. He was right about that too. We haven't solved either one of those challenges, but today I'm here to talk about humanitarian action and as the flyer said, saving lives, facilitating change, and working toward peace, and humanitarian action has really become much more than saving lives although that's its basic premise. Of course humanitarian action is as old as societies are, we all go out of our way to help people who are in need, and particularly those who are in need because of a disaster, a natural disaster, it could be as small as that their basement is flooded and as huge as that their country is flooded and that there's absolutely no place to live, no place to work, no place to go to school, no place to be able to be safe, and of course that does also include war and civil strife. As we look at what has gone on in humanitarian action though in the last 15 years or so, we see a huge change in both natural disaster, the numbers of natural disasters increasing and at least in the decade of the 90s a huge increase in the numbers of disasters that were considered man-made disasters. Now I maintain that the latter was in large part because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, and as a result there were so many more ethnic battles, so many more boundary changes, border changes, and at least for a while a considerable amount of unsettlement around the world that caused many more humanitarian catastrophes for people living in those areas. But also as far as natural disasters are concerned, there's been more than a four-fold increase in natural disasters, particularly floods and droughts in the last 15 years, and of course global warming is considered one of the main reasons for these additional problems that people have had throughout the world because of floods and earthquakes and droughts. When we look at all of those, we look at really a new almost industry that's grown up within the United Nations and throughout the non-governmental organization community for organizations working to help people in need. For instance, the United Nations in 1992 create, well with the resolution of December 1991 beginning in 1992 created a Department of Humanitarian Affairs that became now the Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs or OSHA for their responsibility is to supervise the coordination really of all the major humanitarian disasters around the world and try to have non-governmental organizations, UN agencies, governments all working together as they work to help end people's suffering. There's also been a proliferation of NGOs around the world to help work on disasters, many more NGOs searching for funds to increase their work for disaster relief and of course a big change as far as the United Nations organizations are concerned on ability of UN organizations to work on disasters. For instance, at the World Food Program we used to be mostly a development agency and even in 1989 two thirds of the work of the World Food Program was helping deliver food in peaceful countries to people living in peace but in poverty. But it changed very swiftly and now 90% of the work of the World Food Program is for essentially humanitarian relief, disaster relief, relief for people who are living amidst natural or man-made disasters. It doesn't mean that there's not a great need of people living in poverty who are hungry but it means that the first priority for the international community has begun, has become so much helping people who are cut off from food because of natural or man-made disasters and that's really where the humanitarianism comes in as opposed to development. There will be soon published a book called Humanitarian Diplomacy published by UNU Press, that's UN University Press, edited by Larry Menier who is with Tufts and Hazel Smith who is with Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick in the UK and essentially what they do through a bunch of contributors by contributions from individuals who worked on humanitarian relief, they make the point through their stories that there's now something that they call humanitarian diplomacy and that are helping people to live through disasters. The saving lives part has really expanded because in doing so, although that's our absolute commitment to save lives, we end up, we being humanitarian workers, end up being diplomats. Not diplomats that are in the State Department career path, not diplomats who have learned how to be diplomats or diplomatic for that matter and not people for whom diplomacy is their main line of work but it becomes almost a natural progression in so many of these problem areas around the world for the relief workers, the humanitarian workers to end up being diplomats by doing their humanitarian work itself and in that process to help facilitate change and in many cases to help working toward peace. And what I'd like to do today is to take three examples of where we saw during the decade of the 90s and into this decade of where humanitarian work turned into diplomatic work or at least laid the groundwork for really important changes that occurred in the future. The first I want to talk about is Southern Africa and in particular the drought that affected Southern Africa in 1992. And in that drought, which you have not read about, I can guarantee it because no one covered it. Another thing I think that shows how humanitarian relief has become so much bigger lightly. There's hardly a disaster now of any major impact that you don't read about or watch on television. But this disaster in 1992, which potentially impacted on 16 million people, was written about, to my knowledge, only once and that was in an article in the Christian Science Monitor. And however, it was a huge disaster which, because of the drought over several years, was hitting the ten countries north of South Africa in this region, well including Lesotho and Swaziland within South Africa itself. And this drought was having a major impact on essentially the bread basket of Southern Africa. Then Zimbabwe was still a stable country and was really the country that sold the most, produced and sold the most wheat in the region and was critically important for the region. But all throughout that region there was a lot of grain that was grown and sold throughout and that was no longer existing now because of this drought. And the whole region was hit by it. We were afraid that so many people would starve because of a lack of food. And this was the beginning of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs operation at the UN and they said, well, this is a drought, therefore people aren't going to have enough food. So one of their first assignments was to assign the World Food Program to be responsible to be the lead agency to get not only food but assist UNICEF in providing assistance for water, assist other agencies in providing help with agricultural development and health concerns and so forth in this area. And we saw that so many people potentially could be helped by a coordinated effort organized by the UN. But one of the problems was that there weren't any ports that we could use in the countries that were at risk. In Angola, first of all it was at war. So even the ports in Angola aren't very big to begin with but we couldn't use Angola as a staging point even for Angola let alone for the rest, all of Angola, let alone for the rest of the region. In Mozambique there are a couple of ports. Mozambique was at war and the ports again although could serve some of Mozambique certainly because of the war we couldn't use that very well either and the infrastructure didn't serve to be very supportive for the entire region. In Namibia the port wasn't big enough to be able to serve so you can clearly see what the option was where the ports were that were big enough to where the capacity was in order to move food into the region. They were in South Africa. Apartheid was the way of life in South Africa so the conventional wisdom was and in fact operations up until then were you can't operate out of South Africa. But we had a long discussion about this and said well wait a minute people are going to starve because we can't move food because we can't use the ports and the railroad systems in South Africa because of apartheid. Now what's wrong with this picture? And what we did was say we asked for representatives of each of the countries of Botswana, of Zimbabwe, of Zambia, of Lesotho, of Swaziland and also of the countries on the coast to come together for a meeting to say how can we solve this problem and what can we do? How can we help children like him be able to live through this crisis and the answer was through the South African railways. A very sophisticated railway system from the ports in South Africa that could actually come up to the northern points of South Africa and then move through to the other countries if that was allowed. There were other issues as well though. One of the issues was they called the tracks that railways run on gauges or at least they have gauges as the measurement of how far apart the rails are. And there are different sized gauges between South Africa and the other countries. Much as there is between for instance the Soviet Union and Western Europe. So that was an issue as well and that meant that you had to have incredible amount of coordination because you just couldn't run an engine through. You had to have another engine on the other side to offload and load up again to be able to move through the rails through the system. So what we did was set up an operation in Johannesburg and this was a guy who was giving us a briefing when we came to visit there at one point in that operation. And we had one person from each of those 10 countries that were affected by the drought working in Johannesburg with obviously the agreement of their governments. They all worked in Johannesburg and they were there to ensure that the process worked. We didn't work with the government of South Africa although obviously they tacitly agreed to it. We worked with the railroad system and with the port system. And since we had railroad experts from each of the countries, the countries in the region in Johannesburg, they could follow it through. They kept the whole process honest from their own perspectives and then they could help ensure that the food really went through and got to the borders where it was needed and then moved through in order to feed people throughout the regions. It was a hugely successful operation. As I said, it wasn't covered by the press. And some people didn't want it to be covered because they were afraid people would then criticize us for operating in South Africa. I would rather be criticized for operating in the South Africa at that time than for sitting there and saying we can't and having so many people unable to have food. And instead, we were able to provide food to camps like this where people were living in displaced persons camp where they would have rice and beans in this case that they'd be able to serve to each family. We were able to provide food in schools. The school was in Angola. We were able to have the children eat there at school. My whole ten years at WFP, this was my favorite picture, from a displaced persons camp in Mozambique, I wanted to take that boy home, but his mother didn't think it was a good idea. Other people have since done things like that and gotten criticized for it, by the way. But anyway, this was a displaced persons camp and we were able to, I'm sorry, in Mozambique and we were able to get food to them. And then this was in your brochure actually, but in Zimbabwe, we were feeding children in school a high protein mix that they were eating. Now, why was this important? Afterwards, it was important afterwards because of the relationships that were created between the technical people in South Africa and the technical people with those countries. So that as soon as apartheid ended, the fact that we had essentially created the system to be able to move across the borders and learned how, they had learned how through this process that was a generator that was able to be put in place immediately to be helped promoting commerce in the region once those countries had the ability to trade officially and legally with South Africa. It isn't just my opinion, although again, there's not much written about it. But if you go back and find the guy who was the head of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs at the time who since then has become the president of the UN General Assembly and the number three in the foreign ministry of the government of Sweden, people like him will say this absolutely was a important contributor to commercial development, post-apartheid, and it certainly was a contributor to keeping people alive in South Africa at the time. Next region I want to go to is, well, a country, North Korea. And North Korea, if you're, of course, it's been in the news a lot lately and I'll come to that in a minute, but if you recall, North Korea has mostly two borders with South Korea and with China, although there's a very small, as you can see in the northeast corner border with Russia as well. You all know the story of North Korea. Let me tell you what I saw a couple of things firsthand. But first say that in 1994, North Korea came to WFP and said, we've had some problems with the weather and we need some assistance. And we said, well, what are the problems? Well, we had a bad hail storm. And WFP had had some issues with North Korea before where they were very misleading about wanting help and then not cooperative about what they were going to do on their end, so nobody paid much attention to them. But in 1995, they came back and said we had another bad storm and it really hurt our agricultural area. So we said, all right, well, you ask in a timely manner, we'll check. We sent a mission. They found out, yes, indeed, the most productive agricultural area of North Korea was impacted by some bad rains and so they were in need of some food because of what was produced in that particular area. But once we started working there in 1995, it didn't take very long before we realized that the problem was much greater. The reason why it was so great is because in North Korea, the people actually rely on the government for their food as a socialist society and except for the people who are farmers who are allowed to keep part of their production, everyone else goes to the government store once a month and gets their food to bring home. And that amount that they're given per capita was decreasing and decreasing and decreasing and what they would do, the government would say, well, the government has decided you don't need as much food anymore. You're stronger. You don't need as much food and it would just be decreasing and decreasing. They used to be supplied beyond their own capacity to grow food which is not enough to feed themselves no matter what they do. They used to be supplied by the Chinese and by the Soviet Union. So after the end of the Soviet Union, that whole supply ended and that was a major reason why they had less and less available for them and for the people. And as a result, they had less and less available for themselves. If you're familiar at all with the peninsula, you know that the south has always been more productive agriculture than the north and the north is fairly rocky. So agricultural experts will say that they can't grow enough even if they wanted to. They can't grow enough for the whole population. They used all the... let's assume they want to but they don't have modern agriculture production even if they changed to much more modern agriculture production. They can't produce all that they need. So they always have to import in one way or another and they either don't have the capacity or not chosen to import enough food for all of their people. So we decided that there was a great need here in North Korea and we would actually need to have additional food come in to the country. And it's a formula that we use with agricultural experts to make essentially a per capita assessment based on the 22 million people in the country and multiply that by a certain formula, come up with how much the country would need subtract from that how much they produce how much they import and then the deficit we try to help meet. That was essentially the idea when we first went into this business we have no idea what anybody would think about it. In fact, for this 1995 small area where their agricultural land was impacted we asked for a program for about nine million dollar program which was very small for WFP. We had no idea how we were going to have it be funded and whether or not my government or others would say we were crazy but we thought they need it we're going to ask for it. So I called first the Swedish ambassador a different swede than the one I referred to before and said you've given world food programs some cash that we can use anywhere where we need it and I'd like to use it for North Korea and he said well why are you asking? This is a good donor. Why are you asking? We gave it to you and said no strings attached so okay thank you very much so I used for North Korea about two and a half million dollars and then we got some small contributions from Australia and New Zealand but then the US came through with two million dollars then we knew we were okay we knew we'd make our goal and we knew we would also be okay politically and they had to go through their own hoops because it was in terms of being able to donate for North Korea because of American law at the time but they made those changes so that we could move food by the way at least during my time at WFP the only time we lost a ship at sea was the ship with the US bought food on it on its way to North Korea and it was Thai rice and the whole ship went down in a storm and we were self insured so we were insured for the ship but unfortunately many people lost their lives on the ship the crew that caused a political problem because they then became press over having lost the ship and I was concerned of course about people saying why are we supporting North Korea instead the issues were from rice growing congressmen from rice growing districts in the United States who said how come you bought Thai rice how come you didn't buy American rice so that was okay too for a problem rather than why are we there at all we were standing there on a small scale in North Korea and then we realized that we had to grow that program because it's very desolate there this is a better off farming community better off because they have the oxen that can pull the cart and many of them didn't the first time we went there the first couple of years we went there even the oxen that we saw were very skinny we didn't see any birds it was a famine and people didn't have enough to eat certainly the small animals didn't have enough to eat by the way sometime later I went and I saw one of these villages and saw a woman with several dogs in her pen and I thought they were pets, silly me you know what they were for their food but anyway this is a very desolate place and as people had less and less food of course they had not ability to grow a lot of people work in the fields a lot of the factories are closed and the spare parts and the scraps have been sold to Japan or others so there were many people available to work in the fields but of course to do this kind of work you need to have a fair amount of sustenance in order to work successfully in the projects in the field the schools the schools and the hospitals were some of the worst places but at least the schools ended up being the best way to get food through because we had to use the government systems in order to move food once you got the food into the country and so there was always the issue of the follow up and is the food getting to the right place we had a couple ways of ensuring that one was feeding children in school because we could see children who look like this when they started and then we'd see more and more children go to school once the food started coming and when our monitors went back to these schools they could see these very same children who were much stronger in better shape and also they could there were more children in the schools because more children were sent to school once the food was arriving also in North Korea in the kindergarten they serve hot meals they have little kitchens in the kindergarten and it's not where you and I would think of a kitchen but they have a way to cook hot food and so as a result the littlest children got hot food at school and we were able to feed them feed them that way in the schools system and it was one of the ways that we could ensure the food actually got to the right places another thing was that we that we sent although this girl, this was not at the very beginning and this girl is eating rice at the very beginning the Japanese sent a lot of rice but at the very beginning we didn't send rice we sent wheat and corn and in the North Koreans preferred it because for the same value you could get much more wheat or corn than you could rice and that was one of the indicators to us that they were in grave shape otherwise everyone would prefer rice but also the military's first option was rice they didn't want wheat or corn and that other governments would confirm with us that our food actually was going to the people that we thought it was going to and then we ended up with with little cakes like this little boy has and by the way my husband is a photographer and he took all of these pictures and this one was on the cover of Asian versions of Newsweek during the North Korean crisis but we ended up putting a lot of a mixture of food together refitting factories and being able to make little little cakes for the children to eat some of them eat them at school, some of them brought them home but again we delivered them only to school and we worked with them only only in the schools the hospitals were a different than the situation in hospitals in North Korea I think you become sicker if you go to the hospital when you were sick enough to go to begin with but we found that when our monitors went over and over again to hospitals the food wasn't really getting to the hospitals it looked like they were putting it there so we could see it when we were there it wasn't the same kind of consistency as there was in the schools so we ended up stop feeding in hospitals as difficult as that is but we just didn't think that the food was staying in the hospitals so there were work projects that go on they were building rice paddies here and taking muck out but they were just huge and they have bands that play martial kind of band music to keep up the beat while you're working doing this kind of work and well that was at an orphanage very tragic there why is this important? a couple of reasons on the saving lives that we did first World Food Program has only got a very small operation there now why? there's still a great need the Chinese are still providing food but now the South Koreans are essentially I'm not sure they would like this description but they've almost taken over where the Russians where the Soviet Union left off they're providing the bulk of food assistance that's needed to the North and they're doing most of it directly and so the North is more stable but they still need to import this food and primarily it's coming from China and South Korea so at the end of 2005 North Korea said thank you very much international community we really appreciate what you've been doing but we don't need your help anymore and that was this is why because they now have it from other places so it's not great well there's the good news that it's not a famine it's not great news it's not like they've totally changed their methods of operation but at least they're stable and they don't need this big all this international support in order to help keep them that way and why wasn't South Korea there before well because they didn't speak before they didn't speak at all and in any way shape or form and I can tell you the first time that I went to Seoul was in 1997 a couple of months after my first trip to North Korea and I brought with me a videotape that we had done during our visit to North Korea and I was mobbed everywhere I went in South Korea we had a press conference and we showed the videotape of the videotape of what I was showing about what was going on in North Korea in my hotel room the phone rang off the wall from reporters who wanted to talk who didn't have enough time even though we spent a lot of time talking to the press about what was going on in North Korea we had meetings with NGOs hundreds of people coming to talk about what was going on in North Korea government listened every word we said and by the way, Ban Ki-moon went during one of my trips I met him there now he's the secretary general of the UN and by the way when I met him at a cocktail party in New York in December and introduced myself and congratulated him for his new job, upcoming job first thing he said oh what you did with WFP in North Korea was so important but my point is in 1997 in Seoul nobody had been to Pyongyang and there was very, very, very little interchange between North and South and it's my belief that one of the things that helped make that change was humanitarian action on the part of the UN WFP UNICEF and others that helped to help build an atmosphere in South Korea which then Kim Dae-jung built on when he had the Sunshine Policy as the new president of South Korea it started opening up relationships with the North this humanitarian action helped be able to do that but it didn't just help with South Korea it also helped with other countries as well and all of a sudden when I was working on North Korea issues North Korea started to be very aggressive trying to work with other countries to get recognition of other countries and just between look at the list of what countries recognize North Korea you know who exchanges ambassadors with North Korea you'll find that every year there might be one or maybe every couple of years one a new relationship with North Korea but from just in 2000 and 2001 the following countries recognized North Korea Australia, Philippines UK, Belgium, Italy, Turkey Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Luxembourg Germany, Greece, Brazil New Zealand, Kuwait and Bahrain what's going on here again I maintain that the humanitarian action which opened up the country at least in some small way helped open up the relationships with all of those countries who had sent staff, humanitarian staff there who sent missions there to review what was going on who never had anybody there since the war who are now creating relationships with the government North Korea. Now North Korea is still a very problematic country in terms of what it does or perhaps threatens to do I'm not trying to say the issues are fixed and that everything is fine but the fact that there is this interchange that didn't exist before I think can be in large part goes back to the humanitarian diplomacy that was created through these actions and if we have time to talk about it in Q&A I have a graduate student who has some other theories about some of why North Korea is doing what it's doing but that will take away from my point here. Now the last area that I'd like to talk about here is Afghanistan and there are two different kinds of issues in Afghanistan that I will address first of all we all know far too well now where it is and when I was here as the Towsley Foundation scholar I ended up talking about in my speech that time why wait for the next Afghanistan and essentially made the point that there could be many other countries like this that are desperately poor and that are able to support somehow in this case terrorists would literally terrorize the world and of course my answer to that was more aid and more understanding but anyway I talked about Afghanistan then and one of the things I talked about then was that we had to do a lot of work there even while the Taliban was in charge World Food Program had been in Afghanistan for 20 years before 2001 and had been working in the country which is one of the poorest countries in the world and a country that had of course been through war when the Soviets were there as well as having then a terrible drought in 2000-2001 and then when the Taliban came in the mid 90s and put out the edicts that women couldn't work, girls couldn't go to school women couldn't leave their house without a blood male relative, we at first nobody believed this was even possible to be true. When we found out it was WFP and UNICEF together worked on a strategy to be able to change our programming and say if we're having programs to save lives then it doesn't matter what we think about the government we have to save lives but there are programs to help with development the international human rights ought to be prime and in this case if girls for instance aren't going to go to school we're not going to feed we're not going to send food to the children in school, to the boys in school to that the Taliban said well but boys are important too, we suggest they are but so are girls and we will feed girls and boys and so we had a lot of issues with the Taliban but one of the main issues that we raised to them was that if we didn't go outside the house without a blood male relative that widows are going to die at home and nothing can be done about that so what we convinced them to do that to allow us to do was to set up bakeries and we set up bakeries in each of the major cities in Afghanistan and those bakeries were run by women for widows and we were able to keep those bakeries running and be able to serve widows in this very obviously very desolate kind of place but we this was a worker at a bakery and she is bringing out this bread this would be what each woman could take home that day and huge lines of women at these bakeries that came in to be able to sustain themselves it was extremely successful and women in all the major cities had access to that bakery even during the US UK bombing in October 2001 the bakeries kept going and then the rare days when they couldn't then they'd give the flour to the women and the women would be able to keep this bread we had a lot of issues a lot of pulls and tugs with the Taliban but ultimately we were able to we couldn't do much about the girls in school but at least we could reach women in this way but the the transportation was an issue too in Afghanistan and the remoteness even of the of the country and of many of the many of the villages and places where people live so after September 11th when we had to rush very quickly to figure out what were we going to do and when we realized there was going to be a focus on Afghanistan we worked to try to open up the the different routes to be able to move food into Afghanistan up until then we really only used Pakistan routes and if you see here there was a route this way and there was a route in Peshawar in that way those were the two major ways that we got food inside Afghanistan but we could see if there was going to be fighting in Afghanistan and not knowing exactly what would happen but assuming something was going to happen which ended up being the UK US bombing we had to do something to be able to get food into the country especially because once it's wintertime a lot of the roads would be blocked and we had to be able to get food into the mountains and get food throughout the country so we did several other routes one from Iran on the western side and move food from Iran into Pakistan we had a lot of food there or pre-positioned in the region because of the drought so we didn't have to wait a long time for food to arrive the Iranian food was tricky though because moving through Iran was tricky because it was American food so we had to negotiate with the Iranians and with the Americans to be able to do this and meanwhile you know the American food bags have big American flags on them and so anyway we re-bagged that we put the American bags in additional bags and that was the way the Iranians allowed the food through and the Americans didn't mind having that done so we opened up routes through Iran the north, Uzbekistan there was a big facility there on the border but the Uzbeks had closed the border once the Taliban took over so not just us but the State Department others were negotiating with Uzbeks to open that border so we could use that for a positioning point to move food in that way through we had the mountains that were issues and somebody told me that we hired an Arctic expert to tell us how to move best move food through the mountains well what's the definition of an Arctic expert and of course I don't have to ask this today here in Arbor but they said Canadian so we found all different ways to move food in through the country and be able to be able to get food inside now it became obviously that important to be able to get food even to health centers and then ultimately once the Taliban left to girls in school again now why beyond keeping people alive and beyond battling with the Taliban and by the way one day the Taliban spokesman you read this thing about some guy who was now at Yale who was the Taliban some of you yeah and he was the Taliban spokesman well for those of you who haven't read it he was the spokesman for the Taliban he had good English so they'd send him around to be the spokesperson for the Taliban and came to Washington one time and he was quoted in the Washington Post complaining about everybody trying to tell them what to do and it was before they blew up the Buddhas and he was complaining that UNESCO was telling them that they couldn't blow up those Buddhas and he was complaining that the World Food Program was telling him that they had to get food to women and girls and he said we might as well call them the women's food program which I thought would be fine if they wanted to do that but well why was this important beyond the fighting with the Taliban beyond keeping people alive and that is because it was critical to the anti-terrorism effort to be able to have the military campaign in Afghanistan and I'm not a shill for the military campaign but to say obviously that was the next step that the US government in the UK had to take but we had to keep people alive then too and when we did it was certainly known and recognized I have a picture in my office at the university of sitting at a meeting with President Bush Kofi Annan Colin Powell Andrew Nazios who was head of USAID at the time and other UN agency had because the president invited us to thank us for the work we were doing in Afghanistan this was November of 2001 and the same month when I was in London to appear before a committee meeting of the House of Commons I got a phone call to say please go to number 10 Downing Street so I went to meet the minister the development minister at number 10 Downing Street but really the reason why is that she set up a meeting for me with the prime minister because he wanted to say thank you for what we were doing and he had he had charts that he had been given every day as part of his briefing of how much food was delivered that day in Afghanistan by the World Food Program a daily chart about how we had done and then finally when we visited in Islamabad in February of 2002 and met with president Musharraf he said to me you were you were UWP were brave and creative and imaginative and you are the reason why I didn't have a lot of refugees at my doorstep because you remember a lot of the concern was that refugees may leave in large numbers and cross the border and that didn't happen and he said the reason why it didn't happen is because we fed people inside Afghanistan and it caused him less of a problem on his border and I know we were we did some things we weren't supposed to do because sometimes we got our hands slapped by different other UN bodies but we were able to get food in and somebody said to me once when I was explaining this well yes so you helped the bombing well I think it's very hard to argue and I would not be one to argue that it was wrong for me to conduct that operation and this but at the same time we had to keep people alive and we were able to do that by this humanitarian action in what Menier and Hazel Smith call humanitarian diplomacy and it is that diplomacy that this different kind of diplomacy I think is what we will see more of in the world in the future it's not going to replace the traditional diplomatic routes but it's critically important that we stay focused on saving lives and at the same time how that action is going to play out in the future how it's going to help people survive today but how it's going to help build societies that can survive in the future and peace that can survive forever thank you yes there are literally thousands of local NGOs with whom WFP works as well as UNICEF and the other agencies as well and they are critical to building sustaining operations none of us should be operating even in an emergency setting without building the base for sustainability in the future so for instance the schools that we're sending food to we've got to be able to help with capacity through mothers or local NGOs and other organizations to help keep those programs going in the future so there are quite a lot of partnerships also one of the things that happened in the last 10 years with World Food Program and with UNHCR is developing much closer relationships with international NGOs and having a memorandum of understanding with them so that you don't start from scratch in every country so the people in Afghanistan don't have to create the relationship because the one already exists on paper and those would be with the big organizations like Save the Children in Care and World Vision and Catholic Relief Services and others but the local ones are essential can't operate without them and most of these operations are not retail operations they're wholesale operations and the local NGOs are the retailers in terms of the actual relationships with people and the distribution yes I was trying to think of some current ones and I was falling short I mean Darfur is the biggest tragedy that exists and it's deplorable that it's not been able to be handled in any reasonable way by the international community so it's pretty hard to have any kind of diplomacy with whom and until the international community gets its act together and get some peacekeepers there and gets the government of Sudan to be responsible it's hard to literally do anything so that's problematic tsunami was huge and potentially was able to build some relationships Bandachi is an area where perhaps it's more peaceful now as a result of the terrible tragedy and the influx of humanitarian workers as a result but that being a natural disaster is probably not as many overlaps so anything you can think of yes well Haiti could potentially be an example of I mean maybe the humanitarians can come forward in Haiti and say look these social issues are really going to unless they're solved we're never going to solve the broader issues in Haiti because that is the base of the problems but of course that's a lot easier to say than to do yes I was struck by your introductory remark that there's been a four fold increase in the number of natural disasters in the last 15 years or so how is that reality working diplomatically both with developing countries and the over developed technological countries that's a human made phenomenon both in terms of deforestation I assume and in terms of global warming variety and population and things like that how can the nations of the world from both sides be able to deal with that well first as far as droughts for instance there's a man, a prominent man in Kenya named Richard Leakey and he had a position for a while in the Mui government kind of senior cabinet official in charge of weeding out corruption I mean that's not exactly the title obviously but the World Bank and the IMF cut off the government said you're too corrupt unless you fix something we're not going to do anything with so they convinced Leakey who was opposition member to give this broad portfolio and by the way he did a lot of good things and then once the World Bank and the IMF came back Mui fired him but he was the guy I interacted with one of the guys I interacted with in Kenya during the 2000 drought in Horn of Africa and he said droughts are like African winters because they happen here periodically and just like you have snow and cold and you've figured out a way to deal with it and we haven't figured out a way yet to really deal with the drought which keeps coming over and over again so one issue is that Secretary General Kofi Annan tried to have some people kind of think that through but it didn't get very far but there have been several pieces of that little pieces for instance WFP since my departure has now got in Ethiopia has kind of drought insurance they pay I don't know the words of London or somebody some money and if the production goes down so far then they'll be paying on their insurance policy they're the Ethiopians and some others have pretty sophisticated food bank systems now run by the government and sophisticated transport systems so these don't answer the question but there's little pieces here and there that are going to well how do we deal with droughts but the bigger issue is droughts happen no matter what global warming or nothing their droughts how are we going to deal with it so the more people starting to think about it but not a lot of of answers the flood issues are early warning both drought and floods there's early warning technical issues that could be fixed that just need the money in order to and the priority to do them and their varying degrees of people's interest to do something about it so it's kind of on the agenda but it's not very high up on anybody's agenda to deal with these issues in North Korea deforestation was clearly an issue because when the weather was bad the hills would fall in fact in Hurricane Mitch remember Hurricane Mitch and was at 99 that was one of the issues that it just rained so much that the hills came down and then went into the river banks and then the rivers flooded so not only did the villagers get buried also then people living along the rivers got buried if you go on the border of North Korea and China and you know put on a blindfold and go like this and then you look out and somebody says are you looking at China or North Korea you can tell in a flash because the China side is loaded with trees and the North Korea sides are bigger I have a comment the first part of food problem in East Africa was they introduced the idea of which are farming which did not work when they had these floods and had land massive erosion so they had to change the technique and as regards Dr. Leakey he's better known as for his ability to find an early man in the alibi board that's true but one thing as regards Southwest Africa the only major town is Windhoek and the only port is South of Spain now after the First World War South Africa brought that as a colony the main tribe I believe is the Hereros in terms of characteristic country it has enormous quantities and its coast which has no harbor is known as the skeleton coast because of the fog and ships going around you may find years later a ship that had sunk higher than several miles inland it's also rather interesting that people tried to get into this area to collect diamonds and they got to technique of salvaging from the sea so it's rather interesting what happens now the railways South Africa has a street for six games that was extended between the wars into Southwest Africa the reason that was to get at the diamonds and other things now it is also as you know the Tallahari desert from Botswana land goes near the coast and it's rather interesting phenomenon because the land was so harsh you will find a stream of vegetation along the coast which gets the salt from the sea because the cooling of the air and heating of the air cause the current to come in and to drop vegetation and creates a cross and this in turn allows microbe insects to survive you have far more knowledge about the region and the history of the region that's true and Dr. Leakey he's not known for being a super minister of the government that was one of the reasons why they brought him in because he was very highly respected and they thought he could I will tell you one little story about that what happened with him is that one thing he let us do this is in the drought in the Horn of Africa in 2000 he essentially cut out the local government says the middle men between what the world food program was sending in and the distribution and so we had a much actually much more efficient than usual process and I knew this separately from what we could observe because the Stanley Fisher was the deputy of the IMF said to me at one point gee we had all these things available for Kenya that I asked them why they didn't use them because of the drought and I asked them why they didn't use them for the drought because we otherwise weren't helping them and they said it's because WFP was so much more efficient this year than they were last year well it wasn't that we were efficient it's that we didn't have to lose the food on the way and that's one of the kind of things Leakey did for us that's really good what's something about the role of the UN in this because clearly individual countries have long used food assistance as a form of diplomacy both a threat as well as a promise and there are also large numbers of NGOs out there who do this what is it that you could do in the UN that was particularly important or unique that made your role different than the role of other groups that were delivering humanitarian assistance well first of all the UN agencies World Food Program UNICEF UN High Commission for Refugees and of course OCHA representing the UN secretariat we are representing 192 countries when we do something so it's different than Save the Children that's representing the donors and the board of directors of Save the Children in the US it gives you more I guess in terms of the negotiating your negotiating ability it brings you opens up more doors in the government inside the country and it gives you really more credibility you don't have to build your own credibility and because you have it along with the UN's credibility which is pretty high in most of these countries not every place but most places so that you bring that and it's a big plus also you're bigger than any other NGOs WFP or UNICEF or UNHCR and you're also the lead so for instance if it's a food issue WFP would do the assessment and everyone else would rely on that assessment they may do their own kind of micro assessment but if care is going to go to the State Department and say please fund this project it's going to be based in part on what WFP said what the need is and the same for UNICEF it's a UNICEF type project and particularly true for refugees because UNHCR is the refugee arbiter in terms of what's needed and so if you go ask UNNGO go ask for aid it's to support the UNHCR objective so that's basically the standard and one of the things I think we did at WFP during my tenure was to make WFP the food agency and put it kind of in that UNHCR league in terms of you know these are the first ones that know what's going on and then everything else flows from there now if there were an NGO CEO next to me he may not exactly agree with that description but that's the way I see it I say he because I think except for care they all are he's yes you mentioned refugee program find a building sustaining infrastructure right tell me more about the refugee program that just has to pour in year after year after year because these people have no way of doing anything but waiting to go someplace else yes there are unfortunately too many situations where there's refugees can't go home and and they have a hard time being placed somewhere else although I don't know the statistics but I think it's far less now than it was for instance 10 years ago when you think about the crisis I mean Eastern Europe there are not many I don't think refugees left in Eastern Europe well there's the issue of the Palestinians which is still an issue and there's a whole agency in order to deal with the Palestinian refugee programs the huge social service agency about 25,000 Palestinians work there schools and housing areas and I think besides the fact that people are still living in temporary situations and they have children and maybe even grandchildren that are living in these kind of regions or areas the biggest problem for them is funding because donors say when is this going to stop all of these agencies UNRA, the Palestinian refugee agency the World Food Program UNICEF are all funded by voluntary contributions they don't get funding from UN dues even though they're UN agencies so they're the same as NGOs they get some funding from governments and they get some funding from from private individuals and so they're always reliant on that and although that's a problem for instance in many long term refugee cases I think it makes those agencies better than the assessed agencies in my experience the UN secretariat and other agencies that are funded strictly by dues are lazier about keeping up with changes and internal improvements then on purpose not using the word reform because I don't mean you know reform the whole place but I mean just keeping keeping efficient and effective but the voluntary funded agencies have to because if you don't you potentially lose your funding no it's all voluntary well it's the UN UNRA UN Relief and Works Agency which is the UN agency set up to support the Palestinian refugees and they are throughout the region but they're funded voluntarily by governments like US government and many others with dues paid to the UN so it's UN but it's funded differently now Lebanon there's a separate program programs in Lebanon because of the the most recent fighting in Lebanon Kathy maybe one last question okay yes can I go that way do you mind I was wondering if you have an opinion on flags and labels on humanitarian diplomatic efforts this often came up in a terrorism class that what we do from the United States perspective give massive aid it's undermined sometimes with the flag I was wondering if you had an opinion about that I don't think aid is undermined with the flag I think the flag is a way to make the donor feels good about labeling what it's giving and the people on the other can see where it's coming from of course in North Korea the government told people that when they saw Japanese flags or American flags it was war reparations but I don't see any problem with it I don't think that they should get really carried away with it UN sometimes in my time got really carried away with having to label virtually everything and one time I was visiting Angola and the country director said see that Jeep over there and it had an EU sign on the door and he said USAID bought that Jeep okay and why did they have well because they bought it and gave it to CARE and CARE got some funding from the EU and the EU insist anybody that has any funding has on all their vehicles so you know it can get kind of too silly and also I think one of the issues sometimes in UN coordination is even though we struggle for money all the time we've got more money than the people that were rushing around in our new vehicles we had shipped in because the other ones had been destroyed or stolen UNICEF was there we were setting up our fax machines and our office because our offices were all had been shot up and everything well same thing it happened to the government offices but nobody was there setting up helping the government and bringing in vehicles for them and putting in you know equipment for them to be able to get started again so I think sometimes we forget that and we forget that we really have to have to be there to first and foremost make sure there's a functioning infrastructure to essentially put ourselves out of business the labels themselves I don't have too much of a problem with in fact we would make a point of taking pictures of labels and sending them back to donors so they could see how they were how they were being used and and what they were doing but essentially it was pretty successful can I take one more Basel I was going to ask about the Iraqi refugees and just hearing those who went to Jordan can't be in school and this is public schools and this is Iraqi refugees they're even before the current war in Iraq there were a lot of refugees from Iraq outside of Iraq and I visited some in Iran for instance Iran actually hosts a lot of refugees from both Iraq and Afghanistan and the so there are a lot of from all region Iraqis outside the refugees no matter where offer a lot of challenges for the host populations because they need housing and they need food they need schools for the children and there's always frictions between them even if it's a more basic situation like Rwanda and refugees moving across the border to Tanzania and needing firewood so cutting down a lot of the forests in Tanzania and the people weren't very pleased again to support the refugees which is a better deal than the poor people that live in that area of Tanzania we're getting so the tensions mount then when there's long term issues presumably people have housing and food but then there's issues like schools and hospitals and then there's tensions that build in there how do you sustain that the international community expects the host government to be able to provide refugees but sometimes they don't and then UNHCR in this case would have to be would have to be being very diplomatic with the government of Jordan to be able to convince them to try to accommodate those refugees and it's it's not always it's not always very successful but it is a real challenge over the long term to be able to sustain lives essentially especially when it's generation after generation after generation so I thank you very much it's been a pleasure to be back thank you very much it's always good to have you back at the Ford School I want to invite everyone to join us for a small reception outside these doors and if you want to say and talk with Kathy here those of you who moved over meet her again please join us