David, yes. In fact what is quite remarkable is that a year ago, the United Nations Security Council was able for the first time to pass a resolution very clearly stating that food security is critical to the security of any nation. You wouldn't have had that years ago.
In fact, the Russians and the Chinese on the Security Council, which don't seem to get along about anything, sort of like Republicans and Democrats, came together on this particular matter.
When you see trends and you're watching people's movement, you sort of see where it's going. You're in politics. You monitor people. You're listening. Two and a half years ago when I began expressing my grave concerns about what was taking place in the early stages in the Sahel region, a lot of people said that couldn't be happening. Now everybody's truly woken up to realize the reality on the ground. Without food security, you really will have no other security at all. It is a fundamental building block for any society.
The beneficiaries don't care whether it's a humanitarian dollar or a development dollar; they're just trying to survive. What we try to do is take even a humanitarian dollar in a non-short-term context, because the old paradigm was that in short-term humanitarian disasters—a cyclone, an earthquake, volcano, whatever it might be—you were in and you were out.
Today it's protracted conflict like in the Sahel, like Syria, like many other places and such. We try to take the humanitarian dollar and leverage that dollar to build community, give them some hope. The women are the most amazing. I mean they are absolutely amazing. With some of the men in some of these places, if you give food or money to the men, sometimes you don't know what will happen to it, but if you give it to the women, they get it to the children.
What we are doing more now is that in our program we want an exit strategy in every country. How do we achieve our goals and objectives? We want to be able to go in and ask what we can do to help them as a family no longer need outside support: food for asset programs, school meals programs, homegrown school meals. Historically we would just bring in commodities. Today, out of our $8.4 billion, $2.1 billion is cash-based transfers, so we put liquidity into the marketplace, give it to mothers who then put that cash into the community, help stimulate the economy, buy from local small-holder farmers, homegrown school meals. Instead of bringing in the commodities from the outside, we will meet with the local school teachers, the local moms and the local small-holder farmers. We will buy from the local small-holder farmers and then the children eat home-cooked meals and we help them with the nutritious diets they need. Some of them have a cultural way of eating that is not quite so healthy. Like you would see in Guatemala, they have calories, but they have the wrong calories.
In a context like the Sahel region, what we are doing is rehabilitating land. I have seen mother after mother stand on a hill with so much pride. I remember one particular woman who said, “Mr. Beasley, before, we had no hope”, but we've designed these half moons and they dig. A half moon is what you would think half a moon is. It is about 30 feet in diameter in a trench about this deep, about this wide and in an area like the Sahel you might get this much water a year, both flash flood or drought. When the flash flood hits, the water gets caught in these little trenches and you ought to see the pictures in one year. Well it stabilizes the area. One mother said, “No longer do I need help from the World Food Programme. Now I own five acres of land and I'm going to buy five more acres of land and now I'm no longer just needing your help, but I'm feeding my family, I'm feeding my village and I'm now selling into the marketplace”.
That's what we want, even in the most troubled, difficult areas of the world. Last year, our beneficiaries rehabilitated about half a million acres of land. We want to scale that up and we literally built over 15,000 kilometres of roads, feeder roads to get products in and out, these types of things. Water canals, thousands upon thousands of holding ponds, water reservoirs, so that they don't have to depend upon us.... It is a wonderful thing to see that take place.
However, if we're not there in these building blocks.... This is one of the things that we ask the ministries around the world from the different governments because it was always a development silo and a humanitarian silo. We're asking the governments to be more flexible and fluid with these funds so we can achieve objectives and leverage that dollar to do more in each particular situation.