INTERVIEW-UN food aid chief bows out of "overwhelming" job
Source: Reuters
By Robin Pomeroy ROME, Oct 31 (Reuters) - The World Food Programme's outgoing chief believes the responsibility of feeding 100 million starving people makes it one of the most important, and distressing, jobs on the planet. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to choose a successor before the end of the year after Executive Director James Morris chose not to stand for a second five-year term at the world's biggest aid agency. Josette Sheeran, an under-secretary in the U.S. State Department, is considered by many to be the favourite to take over. She is Washington's official candidate for a job that is regarded as highly likely to go to another U.S. citizen. "I don't think it has to be a North American. My hope is that they will choose the best person in the world to do this," Morris told Reuters in an interview at WFP's headquarters near Rome airport on Tuesday. "Setting aside a number of elected political leaders, you would be hard pressed to find a more important job in the world than this one. In 2004, WFP fed 113 million people." Since taking the job in April 2002, Morris has been in charge of getting food to victims of the Asian tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as famines throughout the developing world. The 63-year-old said he made the "heartbreaking" decision to quit WFP because he felt he was starting to get too old for the job. As well as badgering donor governments to part with their cash, he endures a gruelling travel schedule into the field. "The impact when you see a little girl in a hospice who's head of household of five or six brothers and sisters because her parents have died of HIV -- it's just so distressing and so sad, and so wrong that we haven't been able to more completely address this issue," he said. OVERWHELMING The upside of a job in which you are often face-to-face with abject poverty and suffering is ensuring at least some of those people get the chance of a better life, Morris said. A few days ago he secured a promise from the Luxembourg government to feed 100,000 children in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. "I said to my colleagues when we came out of the meeting with Luxembourg: 'There wouldn't be many people in the world that were part of a more important conversation today than we were - you know 100,000 kids are now going to be fed because of that commitment'. "So I think this is an enormously important job and the responsibility is overwhelming and so they have to choose the best talent available." On Monday, WFP's sister body, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), released a report that showed no reduction in the number of hungry people in the world since 1990, and that the number -- currently 854 million -- is on the rise. Does that make Morris think that providing masses of food aid -- WFP had a budget of more than $2 billion last year -- is ineffective and he might as well not bother? "Is that a realistic option when you have 854 million people at risk, half of them children?" he said. "Maybe if you were in the bicycle business and things weren't going well you could give up and do something else. But we're in the humanity business," he said. "It's sad and tough and wrong but you simply have to double your efforts, we have to find a way." Morris said the world still lacked sufficient awareness of the scale of the problem and hoped a global movement similar to the civil rights or anti-apartheid movements would form to fight world hunger. "I am overwhelmed, consumed with the notion of 400 million hungry children, 18,000 dying every day, knowing that we can do something about it," he said. "This cries out for leadership and for a movement which says its no longer acceptable for children to be hungry."
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