Playing God - The Challenge of Deciding Who to Feed
Playing God on a Limited Budget: The Challenge of Deciding Who to Feed

The sandbar is more than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in length, a long, narrow piece of land rising above the water. Those who have lived here for 20 years say that they have already moved 12 times.Before the WFP arrived and began distributing food, everyone on the sandbar survived by working odd jobs on the mainland. Everyone here was hungry, sometimes more and sometimes less so. This has now changed. The WFP aid has fractured the social structure of this island community, which has now become a dual-class society.Working for 80 Cents a Day
Rani Begum is one of the beneficiaries of the change in the social structure. She lives alone, and she is young and healthy enough to work. She doesn't own any land, has no family members capable of working and has no regular income. She says that sometimes she cuts the reeds that grow along the edge of the sandbar and sells them on the riverbank as building material. She lives in a hut made of branches, with a leaky grass roof. There is a bed made of rough, thin slats, a board for her cooking utensils, and a hole in the ground outside the hut -- her oven.Begum doesn't own a chair, a table or a wardrobe. All she owns is the sari she is wearing. Nevertheless, she says that the arrival of the WFP has been a blessing for her.Begum is one of the 200 sandbar residents the WFP is paying to build a paved path. It is 1 kilometer long and leads from the huts to a plateau on the sandbar, which is about 2 meters (6.5 feet) higher than the rest of the island. The plateau serves as a refuge during floods.Two months have been allotted for the road construction project. The workers get their construction material from the river, using hoes, and carry it in shallow baskets balanced on their heads. Each worker, male or female, is required to move one cubic meter of earth (35 cubic feet) a day. They are paid a daily wage of 75 taka, or about 80 euro cents, plus 3 kilos of rice. Begum says that this is a good wage and a lot of rice. She says that she could earn 400 taka a month working as a maid on the mainland, plus meals and a place to sleep on the kitchen floor.
'Why Am I Not Allowed to Work?'
A neighbor is observing Begum as she tells her story. Her name is Marizon Nanda. The two women have known each other for a long time, but they recently stopped talking to each other. Nanda was not included in the project. She goes hungry, while Begum has enough to eat. Begum also refuses to share what she has with Nanda, saying: "How could Nanda ever repay me?"Nanda's hut is built like all of the other huts on the island, with no furniture except the bed. Like Begum, Nanda is able to work and alone, with no one to support her. She occasionally gets work as a maid on the mainland, for which she is paid 400 taka a month and one meal a day. When she can, she doesn't eat her meal but gives it to the man who operates the ferry to the sandbar. He gives the food to Nanda's youngest son, who waits for him at the dock. The boy is seven and lives in the hut with his mother. Sometimes Nanda misses the ferry, and sometimes she is too hungry to pass up the meal, and then the boy gets nothing.Nanda is just as needy as Begum, and she complains about being excluded from the program. She says: "I can work, and I want to work, so why am I not allowed to work?"
Ready for the Next Catastrophe
The answer to this question isn't simple. The first part of the answer can be found in an industrial area on the outskirts of Rome, where a four-story building is wedged between a gas station and a Europcar office: the headquarters of the WFP, the source of food for 100 million people, the poorest of the poor.Obtaining and distributing the food is a monstrous task. It begins with purchasing. Year after year, the WFP buys about 4 million tons of rice, wheat and corn on the world's markets, as cheaply as possible and as close to the recipients as possible, to avoid transport costs. The WFP charters ships, aircraft and trucks, some 5,000 of which the WFP dispatches to the world's hunger zones and crisis regions every day. The convoys have to be provided with security, and the drivers need to be paid on time. As far as possible, the drivers' integrity is checked, as is the condition of the vehicles. It is important for the WFP to avoid bad publicity stemming from news reports on accidents, deaths and unsafe rented trucks.In addition to helping the chronically needy in the poorhouses of the world, the organization also has to be prepared for the next catastrophe, no matter where it unfolds. To improve its preparedness for the unexpected, the WFP routinely collects data on conditions in the world, and on developments in crisis regions around the globe. Its databases are filled with reports from the major news agencies, reports on demonstrations, unrest and potential indicators of future suffering. When disaster strikes, the data can be combined to create interactive maps on a large screen in the WFP's situation center. The center is a showcase for the organization, with its plethora of technology painting the WFP as an effective, elite, modern humanitarian organization of the United Nations.Just as important as the situation center, albeit not nearly as impressive, is the Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping unit (VAM), which is headed by Joyce Luma, an energetic woman whose office is filled with countless studies, books and brochures. The first part of the answer that Marizon Nanda, on her sandbar halfway around the world, is seeking can be found in Luma's office.Luma is a bookkeeper of poverty. Her job is to compile hierarchies of suffering and to update them within prescribed time periods. Luma's computer is linked to the databases of other UN organizations and national agencies. She is interested in current crop forecasts, food prices on the world's exchanges, demographic developments in individual countries and their dependence on old and new migration patterns. She also needs information on the number of small business owners in central Ghana, the percentage of unskilled laborers in Nepal and the question of how limited access to forest areas affects the food situation of the hungry in Cambodia. Using this data, she prepares rankings, broken down by countries and regions. The sandbar that Marizon Nanda is forced to call her home appears on one of these lists.The Crucial 33 Questions
But it is not up to Luma to decide whether Nanda qualifies as one of the recipients of aid. This is the job of men like Mohammed Shahidul Islam, a Bangladeshi with an eager smile who accompanies Aylieff on his trip. Islam is the head of an aid organization in Bangladesh called PMUK, which acts as a humanitarian subcontractor to the WFP.PMUK's job is to identify the poorest of the poor in the regions Joyce Luma has already identified as the poorest regions. The organization conducts regional censuses, sending its employees from village to village and from hut to hut with a list of questions prepared by the WFP. One of the PMUK employees has also visited Nanda's hut on the sandbar.He asked her about the members of her family, including their names and ages. He asked Nanda about education and job training, and whether her children went to school or worked. He also asked about the adults in her household, whether they worked and, if so, how much they earned a day and how many months a year they were employed. He asked about animals she owned and could sell, about land that was being farmed and support coming from other aid programs. The three-page questionnaire includes 33 questions.Nanda provided all 33 answers, and she told the interviewer that she had an adult son in addition to her seven-year-old boy. She also said that the adult son is a drug addict and hasn't worked in years, and that he steals to pay for his habit.The interviewer noted everything she told him, with the exception of the son's addiction, because there was no room for it on the form. Nanda was not accepted into the program because, on paper, at least, she had an adult, employable son. She feels that this is unfair. And it is, but if the WFP has millions to feed and is unable to feed them all, the attempt to be fair, and the bureaucracy associated with it, has its limits. In Nanda's case, the limit was reached after 33 questions.
Choosing Whether to Help the Old or the Pregnant
A day's journey from the sandbar, on another branch of the Brahmaputra, another plateau is being shored up as a refuge for the rainy season. Here, too, the WFP has put several hundred men and women to work.It is payday, and the workers are squatting in rows on the ground. Each of them receives 36 kilos of rice and 1,500 taka for the past month's work. The rice is scooped out of sacks and weighed in the presence of the recipients.Kohinoor Begum is standing on the opposite riverbank. She is more than 60 years old, blind and just as needy as the people working on the plateau. But she has the bad luck of living on the wrong side of the river, in a district that is rated as being slightly more affluent in the WFP's records.Similar situations arise throughout the country. The children in schools in the Saghata district receive a handful of biscuits every day, filled with vitamins and minerals, which the children are required to eat in their teacher's presence. The children in the neighboring district get nothing. In Fulchari, a district in northwestern Bangladesh, mothers are given powdered milk to improve their babies' chances of survival. Old people who cannot work receive nothing. The reverse is true in another village, where the old people are given rice and the pregnant women are left empty-handed.
'Maybe Later'
This is the ugly, inhuman side of international aid. As long as there isn't enough money to go around, and as long as billions are being spent to rescue banks and countries, aid will mean democratizing need. And aid will be doled out in accordance with a system in which the poor are continually questioned and categorized, eventually yielding a group small enough to be accommodated by existing funds.On the last day of his trip, Aylieff is standing in another village. This time he is touring 100-square-meter (1,080 square feet) village gardens, established with WFP help and tended by the poorest in the village. The owners of the land are given half of the harvest. The farmers are growing pumpkins and basil. As Aylieff gets into his car, people gather around the driver's side window to ask for chemical fertilizer. Aylieff looks at them through the window and says: "Maybe later. Try working without it for now."
