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During the Wodorow Wilson School's 75th Anniversary kickoff weekend starting September 30, and near the date of the United Nations' World Food Day in October, Peter Bell and Julius Coles took the opportunity to meet at Robertson Hall on the Princeton campus to discuss how the international community can best prevent as well as respond to major humanitarian disasters such as famine.

Bell and Coles have long careers both in the U.S. federal government and in the nongovernmental sector, focusing on development issues and humanitarian relief efforts. Bell is currently president of CARE USA; Coles is president of Africare. They have been friends and colleagues for decades: in the mid-1960s Bell helped recruit Coles to Princeton and the School's M.P.A. program.

The Woodrow Wilson School's Office of External Affairs documented the following discussion.

Woodrow Wilson School (WWS) -- In the months ahead of the famine in Niger this past summer, the United Nations' World Food Programme and other international organizations warned that a major humanitarian crisis was imminent. Why was the international community, especially the West, so slow to respond? And what were your groups doing in Niger at that time?

Peter Bell -- CARE has been in Niger since 1974, and now has a staff of nearly 300. We went to Niger initially to respond to a famine situation. Over the years, we've worked in six of Niger's eight regions to develop savings and loans associations, improve agricultural production, and advance opportunities for women, particularly in rural areas. As early as October 2004, our staff first began warning about a looming food crisis. And yet, we did not effectively sound the alarm.

Now, why is that? One reason is that Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. There is a tremendous amount of chronic malnutrition, subject to some seasonal variation. Unfortunately, much of the international donor community is accustomed to a certain amount of malnutrition in Niger and therefore discounted the alarms. Secondly, the government of Niger itself was slow to acknowledge the crisis. They had elections in February. It was really only several months afterwards -- in June 2004 -- that they acknowledged the crisis. And then finally, it is just too much the case that the international community only responds when there are images of starving babies and children on television. Those images first shocked the world on BBC and then on CNN in July.

Julius Coles -- In our case, Africare was founded in Niger in 1970, so we've been working there for some 35 years. We've been working in various areas of the country, including the south. At the time of this crisis we were working in the Agadaz area, which is in the far north. The Agadaz area is an area of critical food shortage in general, because they have the hungry season that runs from roughly March to June. And typically in Africa you have a hungry season where there are not sufficient amounts of food to feed the population, and they have to import food.

In addition to the problem of not having enough water and drought, there was a locust infestation that also impacted the situation. We had all of these things occurring -- they weren't able to predict it, and that created a crisis that was more severe than it had to be. But the question of the U.N. was a very important one. The U.N. made the announcement, but I don't think anyone picked it up because people were still looking at the impact of the recent Asian tsunami, which was a major disaster with which the U.N. had to deal. So Africa was not on the radar screen, nor were the problems of Niger on the radar screen to the level of the crisis that had been experienced in Asia.

Peter Bell -- I very much agree with what you say about the tsunami, because that really absorbed the attention of the international community and took attention away from the crisis in Africa. But as the tsunami response began to take hold and the international outpouring of aid was fully evident, several of us from humanitarian NGOs went to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development to stress, again, the importance of responding to the looming food crisis in Africa. But our attention was first and foremost to the Horn of Africa and to southern Africa. We estimated at that time that 16 million people in those parts of Africa were at serious risk. By contrast, there were several million people who were at risk in Niger. This was extremely important in its own right; obviously, the life of each and every person is important. Yet, in the context of Africa overall, we thought our first duty was to focus on the Horn and southern Africa.

Julius Coles -- The president of Niger also came to the United States around February or March. And I met with him at that time and I asked that he reinforce the appeal that had been made by private voluntary agencies to ensure that the administration was taking into account this current food situation in Niger. He said that he would make that appeal, but I don't know if he made that appeal strongly enough because in the initial stages the U.S. government's response was somewhat slow, but once the media devoted attention to the crisis the United States really got in gear in terms of making sure that food commodities were provided.

Peter Bell -- Within the humanitarian community, we've made a great deal of progress over recent years in early warning systems -- that is, ways of identifying harbingers of disaster such as poor farmers selling off their cattle, farming implements, or household items. But typically, the primary custodians of these warning systems are governments. Rightly or wrongly, we usually look to governments for leadership in sounding the alarm within their own countries, particularly when you have a democratically-elected government like that of Niger. Yet all governments, including and maybe especially democratic governments, are subject to politics. And they are sometimes reluctant to call attention to a food crisis - let alone a famine within a country - because it brings shame. There's a tendency to engage in wishful thinking and disregard or discount the early warning signs. And I think that happened in Niger.

Julius Coles -- I agree. We see the subsequent actions that were taken by the president [of Niger], he criticized the press and said they had overreacted to the crisis and really put the country in an embarrassing situation. In some ways I could see what he was saying because the media began to reflect that famine had enveloped the whole country, but it was most severe in certain areas, there were other areas where it was less severe, but regardless some came away with the impression that all people in Niger were starving. He didn’t want this conveyed to the world. And so he began to take the position, “we’re not all starving [in Niger] and that this is not the crisis that the press is making it to be.”

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