To end world hunger, one must understand the many reasons behind it. There will never be one single reason, but many contributing factors why world hunger has & by most predictions will remain an endemic global issue in the foreseeable future. When David Beasley petitioned Elon Musk to give $6 billion to the United Nations World Food Program over a short exchange on Twitter, a series of interesting yet highly controversial parallels were made. One need not be a billionaire apologist to understand that money alone cannot solve grave humanitarian crises such as world hunger. According to South Carolina’s The State Newspaper, David Beasley earns an annual salary of $142,376.00 annually as director of the United Nations World Food Program combined with an estimated net worth of $1-5 million.
This begs a few questions begging honest skepticism: how much does David Beasley personally contribute to the World Food Program for purposes of eliminating world hunger? In other words, does Mr. Beasley put his money where his mouth is at direct personal expense? When engaging one of the wealthiest people on the planet for $6 billion, you should not only practice what you preach, but live it simultaneously as a practical yet engaging way of life. How much confidence does Mr. Beasley have in the same organization he claims can lead the charge & ultimately end world hunger considering past controversies & scandals? This revisits a period when the agency was steeped in corruption & bureaucratic dysfunction long before Beasley’s tenure as executive director of the World Food Program.
According to a Newsweek article published in 2010: “The UN Food Program’s Rampant Corruption,” 50% of food delivered by the agency was stolen in Somalia. Some influential businessmen winning transportation contracts with the agency transformed into rival cartels only to resell the same foodstuffs back to their own starving countrymen for profit. What assurances can the World Food Program provide under Beasley’s leadership to guarantee resources such as vital foodstuffs are received by the people that need it most? Do faceless top-down bureaucracies turned organizations caught up in international geo-political gerrymandering like the World Food Program have all the answers? Or do they exist simply to justify their existence in a new century against a radically changing world within a United Nations framework which time again failed to live up to its expectations to the oppressed & starved of the world?
When the task is international crisis management, there is no linear solution to a dynamic problem defined by endemic proportionality. Rather than peddling a glorified charity drive to the world’s wealthiest man for what has potential to be the single largest individual donation made in history for a great humanitarian cause, why not engage people like Elon Musk with the power of ideas by means of propositional innovations? What new renewable technologies can the World Food Program develop to eradicate world hunger in direct partnership with tech-startups with $6 billion for purposes of reinventing the meaning of citizen science? Food drops under campaigns of aggressive resource allocation will not solve world hunger.
Time again such efforts have been reduced to a for-profit black-market industry out of food drops in some of the most disparate parts of the world at the expense of the poorest & hungriest people on Earth. Make no mistake. It was not always doom & gloom for the United Nations. On May 8th, 1980, during the 33rd World Health Assembly, smallpox was declared globally eradicated. At an estimated cost of $300 million for the eradication of smallpox, the United States has saved an estimated $1 billion since. Why can’t Beasley tweet that to Musk under the suggestive auspicious that giving is a way to receive more? Why not petition Musk as a major United Nations official for a radical idea like building an international solar energy colony in the Sahara Desert the size of New Mexico? The question would then be: how can $6 billion of Musk’s net worth be used to deliver on Nikola Tesla’s vision of free electricity for mankind?
Perhaps $6 billion is better served by splitting the money between the World Food Program & a new United Nations agency fueled by citizen science to develop renewable technologies for purposes of advancing human development audited by corruption watchdog organizations like Transparency International? If successful, faith in the United Nations can be restored once again.