Tag: food security

Remembering Shlomo Reutlinger, Global Hunger Expert

Sept 6, 2026     “Build roads” to combat hunger was (Fritz) Shlomo Reutlinger’s simple, final advice, when he was speaking to a roomful of food experts in Virginia as he retired from a long career at the World Bank to move to Israel, where he then lived until his passing in 2019 at the age of 93.

He was born in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1925. His father, Louis Reutlinger, a veteran of World War I, sold construction materials.  Shortly before young Shlomo was to celebrate his bar mitzvah, the Kristallnacht pogrom broke out.  His teacher warned Shlomo to avoid school in time for him to escape, though many of his family’s friends were sent to concentration camps (Buchenwald, Dachau).

Fleeing Nazi killers, Shlomo escaped Germany as a child, fleeing to Belgium in 1939.  His younger brother Erich  (shown together in the photo at right)  went with him to Belgium, where they were separated.  Erich died in the Holocaust.

After reaching America, Shlomo Reutlinger eventually reunited in 1956 with his sister and parents, who had been interned in France before immigrating to the United States.

He went on to earn a degree in economics, studying at Cornell University and North Carolina State University.  He then worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC.

Dr. Reutlinger anchored food security analyses at the World Bank for decades. The World Bank is a very large organization, but for many years, Reutlinger and Alen Berg were the two individuals who pushed the World Bank to pay attention to nutrition and health outcomes among the poor.

Colleague Dale Miller Hill remembers:  ” I … was inspired by his emphasis on Hunger not being just a function of food supply, but also income, including from food production, and nutrition.”

He was known for his ability to analyze complex economic data and translate it into actionable policies that benefited developing nations.  During periods of economic instability, he was instrumental in crafting recovery plans that balanced short-term relief with long-term sustainable growth. His expertise was particularly valuable in regions facing severe economic downturns, where his insights helped shape policies that provided both immediate support and a path to economic resilience.

Throughout his influence in the World Bank, he was kind to his friends.  Hailu Mekonnen reflects:  “Shlomo was not only a food security guru but also a wonderful human being…a human being who “walked the talk” in the true sense of the concept…involving its ethical meaning.”

His early influential work, the 1976 World Bank staff occasional paper Malnutrition and Poverty:  Magnitude and Policy Options (co-authored with Marcelo Selowsky), provided new methodologies for estimating malnutrition across income groups and offered practical policy options centered on reaching the poor.  They estimated the hunger problem as universal, with 56 percent of the developing world’s population (roughly 840 million people) with diets deficient by more than 250 calories a day.  They defined the “target group” narrowly as the calorie-deficient poor identified through income-distribution analysis.  They recommended, on cost-effectiveness grounds, that narrowly targeted instruments (food stamps, self-targeting commodities, income transfers) were superior to universal urban consumer-price subsidies, which cost roughly $5 to deliver just $1 of additional food to the truly needy.

Reutlinger and Selowsky concluded that malnutrition was unlikely to disappear through normal income growth and food-production expansion alone. Under unequal income distribution, the absolute number of undernourished people could continue to rise with population growth—even if average income and food availability improved.

His subsequent classic World Bank report, Poverty and Hunger, co-authored with Jack van Holst Pellekaan (with assistance from Craig Lissner, Claudia Pendred, and Colleen Roberts) was a breakthrough at many levels, and the first mapping of where hunger occurred most densely in the world. It offered a clear useful distinction between two types of food insecurity, that has endured:

  1. Chronic food insecurity: Persistent inability to acquire enough food for an active, healthy life due to low incomes. In 1980, an estimated 340–730 million people (roughly one-sixth to one-third of the population in 87 developing countries, excluding China) had energy-deficient diets, depending on whether the threshold was set at 80% or 90% of FAO/WHO requirements.  Absolute numbers of the hungry were shown to be increasing even as proportions slowly declined.
  2. Transitory food insecurity:  Temporary shortfalls caused by fluctuations in production, prices, incomes, or import capacity (e.g., droughts, export-earnings volatility, or price spikes). Famines, the report stresses (drawing implicitly on Amartya Sen’s entitlement framework), often occur even when food is physically available locally—because the poor lose purchasing power or employment.

 Internationally, the report calls for accelerated growth-oriented adjustment lending, poverty-focused programs, better coordination of food and financial aid, multiyear food-aid commitments, and support for risk management (e.g., IMF compensatory facilities).

Food aid is portrayed by Reutlinger as most useful when integrated with development rather than used purely for relief.  It framed how World Bank lending can best reduce hunger.  Key instruments include:

  •   ¤  Raising incomes of the poor through employment generation and human-capital investments.
  •   ¤  Targeted transfers (food rations, public works, or cash) that minimize leakage to the non-poor.
  •   ¤  Selective consumer price subsidies (especially on processed staples consumed by the poor) rather than blanket general subsidies that strain budgets and benefit richer groups disproportionately.
  •   ¤  Trade policies that lower prices for net food buyers (urban poor, landless rural households) while compensating producers where needed.

Writing with food anthropologist Judit Katona-Apte (WFP, OCHA), in “The Nutritional Impact of Food Aid: Criteria for the Selection of Cost-Effective Foods”, they coined the term “alpha-value” to reference the nutritional benefit(s) of food aid, providing the framework for studies that showed where food aid was cost efficient, and where it was not efficient, compared to other interventions.  Reutlinger and Katona-Apte observe about how the poor make consumption choices  “On average, the food expenditure elasticity is 0.85, and the energy intake elasticity is about 0.50. The discrepancy between the food expenditure elasticity and the energy intake elasticity is the elasticity of the cost per unit of energy.  As income rises, people purchase more expensive foods per unit of energy.”

The report was refreshingly candid about administrative realities, leakage problems, and the political economy of subsidies. It incorporates household-level income variability data (e.g., from India and Nigeria) and recognizes that aggregate national food balances often mask severe intra-country and intra-household insecurity.

The poor’s status as net food buyers, net sellers, or subsistence producers should determine whether lower prices, higher farm prices, imports, agricultural production support, or transfers will improve food security.

Across his roughly two-decade World Bank career, Reutlinger’s thinking moved from a stark, quantitatively dramatic diagnosis of malnutrition toward an increasingly integrated, market-and-context-sensitive prescription for intervention.

Early on, he addressed malnutrition primarily as a magnitude-of-deficit calculation to be closed by targeted subsidies or trade stabilization alone.  He addressed specific groups such as landless laborers, small farmers, pastoralists, and especially children under five and pregnant or lactating women.

His “A Simulation Model for Evaluating Worldwide Buffer Stocks of Wheat”  recommends insurance-oriented storage rules for global food reserves.  He also argued that for most countries, particularly developing countries, trade liberalization and avoidance of protectionism would stabilize food supply and domestic prices more effective than buffer stocks of plausible size.  Buffer stocks became less useful at the margin as a country became more open to trade, while storage, financing, depreciation, and handling costs remained substantial.

Reutlinger’s work made a sustained case that nutrition was an economic-development issue, not merely a health-sector concern. His analysis linked hunger to productivity, education, labor capacity, and human-capital accumulation, creating intellectual support for bringing nutrition considerations into agricultural and rural-development operations.

Yet, he also observed that famines and acute food insecurity often stem from lost livelihoods and purchasing power, not simply a physical absence of food. His solution was to monitor shocks to employment, wages, terms of trade, harvests, and prices, provide fast cash, food, or employment relief to affected groups.

Reutlinger was also a strong proponent of education and capacity building. He believed that empowering local economists and policymakers was crucial for sustainable development. Throughout his career, he mentored numerous young economists, encouraging them to think critically and creatively about economic challenges. His legacy includes a generation of economists who carry forward his vision of development that is both inclusive and equitable.

His colleague at the World Bank, Hailu Mekonnen remembers:    “Over lunch,  Shlomo and I used to talk about books. The two that come to mind are Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” and Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” on developing inner and outer peace and the second is on the ethically-driven good life.  Shlomo pursued both.   In the early 1990s, he told me that he and his wife saw, at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., a production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and recommended that my wife and I see it.   [reflecting] our commitment…his and mine to promote the equality of women.”

Beyond his professional achievements, Reutlinger was remembered for his kindness and humility. Colleagues and friends alike recall his willingness to listen and his ability to inspire those around him. He had a unique talent for making complex economic concepts accessible and engaging, whether he was speaking to fellow economists or the general public.

At his retirement party, Reutlinger quoted Rabbi Hillel, who said “if I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  If not now, when?”  Upon retirement he returned to Israel where he lived immediately after WW II, with his wife, Blossom. Their two children made aliyah with their families as well.

Reutlinger passed away in in Israel.  He was survived by his children, Raanon Reutlinger and Elana Reutlinger, his sister Ruth, grandchildren, and extended family.

-Contributed by WHES Board member Steven Hansch

 

Why the Destruction of USAID Increases Hunger and Harms America

March 21, 2025

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency created by Congress in 1961 to lead America’s development and humanitarian assistance, has been decimated by President Trump’s January 21 Executive Order freezing U.S. foreign assistance.

Why should Americans care? For several reasons. First, USAID, until it was decimated, was the world’s largest provider of food aid, nutritional, health, and humanitarian assistance, saving millions of lives of women and children around the world. While many Americans believe that foreign aid takes a large share of federal spending, in fact this assistance accounts for less than 1% of government spending.

Cancellation of this aid has direct and immediate impact on vulnerable people in low- and middle-income countries. Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, who was placed on administrative leave on March 2 for documenting the failure of the Trump administration to follow through on its pledge to allow waivers for lifesaving foreign aid, has written that the consequences of halting $7.7 billion in funding for lifesaving global health programs will lead to the following each year:

  • 5–17.9 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths;
  • a 28-32% increase in tuberculosis globally;
  • an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases;
  • more than 28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases;
  • 17 million pregnant women without access to life-saving services when faced with delivery complications;
  • 11 million newborns not receiving critical postnatal care;
  • 1 million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition.

“USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation,” wrote Enrich on Feb. 28. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale.”

Second, the decimation of USAID hurts American businesses, faith-based organizations, and farmers. USAID had a well-established strategy to prioritize contracts for American small businesses like Rhode Island-based Edesia which manufacturers a lifesaving paste for severely malnourished babies. Cancellation of Edesia’s contract not only harmed this business of 150 employees but also the farmers across 25 states, the U.S. ocean liners Edesia paid to ship hundreds of metric tons of its Plumpy’Nut therapeutic paste, and finally, to the international organizations that distributed it to children staving off death.

Third, this assistance, proudly branded by USAID as “From the American People”, created good will towards the United States and its citizens. It also contributed to America’s and global health security by fighting infectious diseases and strengthening local capacity to detect and fight scourges like Ebola, Mpox, and Avian flu which continue to be threats to the United States. Wholesale cancellation of support for infectious disease and research on how to prevent and mitigate pandemics makes Americans less safe and more vulnerable.

Presidential Advisor Elon Musk bragged on X on February 3 that “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Under the direction of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, USAID’s headquarters in Washington, DC was closed, over 4,000 USAID staff terminated, and another 4,765 direct hires placed on administrative leave.

By early February, USAID contractors and implementing partners, including those providing humanitarian assistance and emergency food relief like Catholic Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief, began receiving stop-work orders. Some of these contractors and implementing partners then received communication that the stop-work orders were lifted, but then in many cases were contacted again to say the stop-work orders were still in effect.

Effectively gutting the USAID workforce means that actions to issue waivers for lifesaving programs, as the Trump Administration claimed it was doing, or to support the continuance of “approved” programs, are not happening. USAID’s payment system is not accessible. As a result, most contractors and implementing partners have not been paid for work they did before the freeze, and many have been forced to lay off and furlough staff or even cease operations.

While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, now the acting administrator of USAID, has repeatedly said he has issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs, including food and medical aid, no staff at implementing partners or USAID means promises of such waivers are cruel hoaxes. In early March, Rubio announced that 5,200 USAID programs had been terminated and that about 1000 USAID programs would be continued but administered by the State Department.

In addition to stopping the delivery of food and humanitarian assistance, the Trump Administration also ended the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) which monitored drought, crop production, food prices, and other indicators in order to forecast food insecurity in more than 30 countries. FEWS NET was created following the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, which killed an estimated 400,000 to 1 million people – and caught the world off guard. President Ronald Reagan then challenged USAID to create a system to provide early warning and inform international relief efforts in an evidence-based way. Managed by contractor Chemonics International, FEWS NET employed researchers in the United States and around the world to provide eight-month projections of where food crises will likely emerge. Now, its work to prevent hunger in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and many other countries has been stopped. Amid the aid freeze, FEWS NET has no funding to pay staff in Washington or those working on the ground. The wealth of data that underpinned global analysis of food security – used by researchers around the world and paid for by the American people – has been pulled offline.

Aside from the immediate damage to health and health security that the decimation of USAID poses, the assault on USAID has also removed access to the world’s largest public repository of development assistance documentation, the USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse. A public good paid for by American taxpayers, the Clearinghouse and its thousands of resources are now unavailable. It is clear from the draconian cuts to USAID programs and staff that it is not a priority for the Trump Administration to make development knowledge and information available.

State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) Report 2020

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World is an annual report prepared by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO to inform on progress towards ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition and to provide in depth analysis on key challenges for achieving this goal in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Pandemic Exposes Long-Standing Problems in the Global Food System

June 7, 2020

In a very short time, the response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic has exposed many of the long-standing structural weaknesses and inequalities of the global food system.  After years of steady progress in reducing the total number of chronically underfed people, the tide has turned backward, due to civil wars, crop failure, climate change, and now most recently—COVID-19.  The United Nations World Food Programme estimates that more than a quarter of a billion people face starvation this year due to the multiple impacts of COVID-19.

COVID-19 is accelerating global hunger in two key ways:  government-imposed lock-downs adversely affect the poor and unemployed families who are running out of money to buy food, even where it is still available. Ironically, due to the weakened demand stemming from a lack of cash, the FAO-monitored food price index has fallen to a 17-month low.  Also, many of these vulnerable families depend on school feeding programs to ensure that their children have access to nutritious food at least once a day. The closure of schools is depriving 370 million children of this critical source of nourishment.

Global food trade has also been disrupted. In Africa, many borders have been closed, consequently transporters cannot move food, resulting in significant food spoilage.  These localized disruptions have resulted in hoarding and have pushed up prices of staples such as rice.  In Senegal, trade restrictions and curfews have adversely affected the food economy, especially the seafood sector upon which the poor depend for livelihoods and sustenance.  Exacerbating the situation, some major grain producing countries exporters are contemplating controls on food exports. Such trade restrictions make a bad situation worse.  Food deficit countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which are suffering from rises in unemployment coupled with drastic reductions in tax and export revenues, now must find ways to feed millions.  International cooperation is desperately needed to assist with food surpluses from other parts of the global community.

While we must mobilize quickly and effectively to deal with the immediate adverse consequences of the pandemic on global hunger, at the same time we also must look to the future and think about how we can address our chronic food problems to be more resilient to future shocks such as drought, flood or plague.  To achieve this, we must invest in agricultural research—better yields, more drought-resistant crops, early warning systems, and sustainable farming.  We must assist small farmers to earn a decent income.  One way to do that is by strengthening local food systems by improving transport, refrigeration and food processing.  Finally, we must improve access to information and finance, so farmers can better navigate future shocks and more reliably produce the food we need.

The global community is more affluent now than ever before.  Our farmers have never produced so much food.  However, food like wealth is unevenly distributed – with devastating and preventable consequences.  In a resource-abundant world, hunger should now be a relic of the past.  Yet it isn’t.

To build a more sustainable and equitable global food system that provides affordable, nutritious and safe food for all, we need strong collaboration between governments, the private sector, academic institutions and intergovernmental bodies.  Together we can help not only those left hungry today and tomorrow by COVID-19, but those who are chronically vulnerable to hunger due to deficits in the global food system.  Now is the time to act to make food insecurity a distant memory.

 

 

Dr. Thoric CederstromAbout the Author: Dr. Thoric Cederström is the Director for Research and Learning for Food Enterprise Solutions which is actively implementing a five-year USAID Feed the Future initiative called Business Drivers for Food Safety.  Previous experience includes: Senior Advisor for Partnerships in Nutrition, World Food Program; Senior Manager for Agriculture in Nutrition, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN); various positions with Save the Children, Counterpart International, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the University of Arizona.

 

 

 

How urban agriculture can improve food security in US cities

During the partial federal shutdown in December 2018 and January 2019, news reports showed furloughed government workers standing in line for donated meals. These images were reminders that for an estimated one out of eight Americans, food insecurity is a near-term risk.