Fighting Child Hunger in Mexico

By Bernie Beaudreau | December 20, 2006

From December 10 through 19, my colleague Bob Forney and I visited the Mexican Association of Food Banks (AMBA) in Guadalajara for The Global FoodBanking Network. Our purpose was to discuss with AMBA their plans for food banking development, specifically food sourcing capacity building, and to identify fundable projects.

I spent most of my time with AMBA staff and visited the Guadalajara Food Bank and one of its community distribution points in the village of Santa Isabel. Bob worked with the staff of AMBA and the Bancos Diocesano De Alimentos (Guadalajara food bank) to develop a food sourcing plan for AMBA’s 53 member food banks serving all of Mexico.

According to the World Food Program’s most recent data, 7.5% of all children under the age of five in Mexico are moderately or severely malnourished, accounting for 836,000 children, and 17.7% have stunted growth. Feeding hungry children is the primary concern of AMBA, the Bancos Diocesano De Alimentos and the women of Santa Isabel.

On Wednesday, we first toured the Bancos Diocesano De Alimentos and witnessed the industrial activity of this large food sorting, repacking and distribution operation. The BDA has hundreds of volunteers and 80 staff busily getting a wide range of mostly perishable foods out every day. The food bank, which serves 90,000 people, is seeking funding support to expand food assistance to another 20,000 people going hungry. It provides the food for hundreds of weekly distribution sites, including the one in Santa Isabel. Santa Isabel also has a children’s noon meal program, called "Comedor Infantil" (meal for children). We first toured the warehouse and saw the operation and then followed a distribution truck out to the village of Santa Isabel.

Santa Rafael is a small community about ten miles outside Guadalajara. They have no paved roads, no running water and their main source of employment is brick making. Of the 300 families in Santa Rafael, 120 of them are registered and are allowed to receive their ration of food once every two weeks. "We don’t have enough food for everyone", lamented Maria Christina Garcia, the leader of the five member "Tonala" committee responsible for overseeing the distribution. Every Wednesday ten women volunteers from the village arrive late morning to organize the buckets of food and bags of bread for the families who will arrive at 1:00 PM. Women from the village take turns volunteering and are limited to once every three months. Often with children in tow, they work the six-hour distribution day and receive and extra ration of food. It is a highly-organized all women effort.

Each family receives two buckets of food filled with re-bagged cereal, fresh eggs, milk, vegetables, fruit and bread, mostly perishables. They seldom have non-perishable staples such as rice and beans which are not usually donated to the food bank and are expensive to purchase. Seventy percent of the Guadalajara FoodBank’s supply is perishable with mostly soft drinks and snacks the balance.

We spoke with Maria Esther, a member of the committee who has three girls and two boys. Her littlest one just 16 months old sat on the floor as she filled bags with family rations of breakfast cereal donated by Nestle. Maria’s husband is a woodworker in the village but his work pays too little to feed the family. Maria told us that her 13-year-old daughter has epileptic seizures and they couldn’t afford the medicine until the food distribution program began. "The food saved my daughter’s life by leaving us just enough money to pay for her medications. Now she is doing well in school." I asked her what her hopes are for her future: "I want a job. We need a factory here. I want my children to go to school and have a better life than me."

The Comedor Infantil (Kids Café) serves over 100 children mid-day meals. The volunteer cooks get some of their food from the food bank but have to buy the ingredients, often lentils or beans, to have balance meals. The children are fed 7 days a week at 1:00 PM. The meal program is supported by one of Mexico's soccer heroes, Rafael Marquez, who is now playing for the Barcelona team. "Rafa", as they call him, grew up in this small village and his name is proudly displaced in the comedor. One little boy caught my attention. As all the other children were busy eating with gusto, this little boy stood there looking lost, "perdido". It reminded me of the listlessness that comes over people, especially children, when they are very hungry and their bodies are beginning to waste. I saw this in Central America in the 1980s.

Brick making pays 300 pesos per 1,000 bricks. It is Santa Isabel’s cottage industry. In a typical 12-hour day one worker can produce 800 bricks, or earn 240 pesos which is about $22 or $1.85 per hour. When it rains, which occurs the heaviest during the months of June through September, they cannot make the bricks and go hungry. Jose Rios told me that they run out of water to drink and they often become dehydrated working in the hot sun all day. He spoke to us as he stomped the mud and saw dust, mixing it well before filling the forms to make the bricks, a back-breaking physically demanding job.

There is ample surface water due to a high water table but it is not safe to drink due to animal and human fecal contamination. Families must pay 10 pesos for 20 liters of delivered water every day for drinking and cooking. Some don’t have the pesos and they boil the surface water. They wash in the contaminated water and many have skin lesions and infections. Some of the water is unsafely consumed and intestinal ailments are prevalent in the community.

We visited Maria Rosaria Morales Rojas in her home. Maria is a single mother of three little boys, the oldest with severe asthma. Her 65 year-old father still makes and sells bricks to help the family. She often has to take the bus an hour into Guadalajara for emergency treatments for him. She needs a nebulizer (they have electricity in Santa Isabel) but cannot afford one. She gets food from the distribution every two weeks but still runs out of food. As we sat talking with her, her boys who were dressed for afternoon school waiting for lunchtime. Suddenly they jumped up and ran to the Comedor Infantil for their only full meal of the day. With full stomachs, they were ready for afternoon school work.

As we were leaving Santa Rafael the dirt road had a section deep with mud and a trailer truck entering the village to pick up bricks had gotten stuck. "We were promised paved roads by the government," Maria had told us.

I left the village of Santa Isabel feeling that so much can be done to help these families do better for themselves. I wondered if Procter and Gamble’s PUR water purification system could help here. P&G’s recent grant to the Global FoodBanking Network will fund "Alimento Para Los Ninos" (Food for Kids) out of the Guadalajara food bank and Santa Isabel will certainly benefit.

As the elder farmer in a small village in Ghana, West Africa said to me last August when I visited there, Maria Esther said, "Please don’t forget us." These words I carry with me. GFN’s grants from Cargill, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg Company and Weinberg Foundation will make it possible that we will not forget them.