Sen. George McGovern is keynote speaker at Princeton University conference

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Posted by a proud McGovern '72 volunteer


Former U.S. Sen. and presidential candidate George McGovern addresses a Princeton University audience on Thursday.

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1972 presidential candidate is keynote speaker at Princeton University conference.

The United States must assume an active role in eliminating global hunger and promoting nutrition programs, former U.S. Sen. and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern said Thursday at a Princeton University address. His keynote speech at Dodds Auditorium marked the beginning of a three-day conference, sponsored by the university, on the relationship among food, trade and the environment in the developing world.

Mr. McGovern said reducing world hunger is the most important step in curbing high growth rates in nations that cannot sustain even their current populations. Greater access to food leads to an increase in education rates, which can halve birth rates in developing countries, he said. More than 300 million school-aged children living in Asia and Africa — as well as parts of Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe — have nothing to eat for lunch each day, he said. "No one I know has found a stronger magnet to drawing kids into school in developing countries than the promise of a good meal," the former South Dakota senator said. "How do you teach kids on an empty stomach?"

Academic performance also increases dramatically among children who are well-fed, he noted. It's common for a girl in a developing country to get married at the age of 10 or 11 and then have six children in her lifetime — "the old business of children having children," Mr. McGovern said. "Kids who go to school marry later in life. They have a better understanding of what life is all about. They are not as easy to push about. They have a birth rate of 2.9 children," he said.

As the United Nations Global Ambassador on World Hunger, Mr. McGovern is working to create school lunch programs around the world similar to the ones he helped establish in the United States while serving on the Senate Agriculture Committee. "We revolutionized food assistance in the United States by providing free and reduced-price lunches," he said. To provide a school lunch for every hungry child in the world would cost about $18 billion a year, Mr. McGovern estimated. "I hope I live long enough to say we're feeding every schoolchild in the world with a good, nutritious lunch every day."

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