Gov. David Beasley answers a student’s question at the Breaking Bread, Bridging Divides Fireside Chat at the US Bank Conference Theater in the Ohio Union. Credit: Josephine Pajemola | Lantern Reporter
David Beasley, a former South Carolina governor and the former leader of the United Nations World Food Programme, visited Ohio State on Tuesday, to speak on international food security and how he facilitated discussions between world leaders to bridge divides for a more peaceful world.
The Ohio Union served as a stop on his Breaking Bread Together national tour, where Beasley encourages the American people to start bridging divides with one’s neighbors in a politically polarizing climate, Beasley said.
At the event, he drew on his experiences as the executive director of the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, where he visited 75 countries and raised over $55 billion to combat hunger.
“We’re absolutely saving the lives of little girls, little boys,” Beasley said in the discussion, which was moderated by Amanda Girth, the director of Washington Programs at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. “And they’ve got names, and they have voices. They’re not just numbers.”
Beasley described his experience sitting at tables with groups such as the Taliban or the Houthis, as well as with world leaders such as former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I have seen bringing enemies together, and they sit down, and usually on the first few hours, I don’t want to talk about the issue,” Beasley said. “Talk about how many children you have, your background, your family and it’s remarkable what happens. Before long, you’re finding an agreement on something that might be small at first, but it creates an opportunity of trust. Then the next thing you know, you’re opening up the doorways to a lot of other things.”
The discussion focused on how these facilitated discussions between global actors directly intersects with food security across the world. Beasley said his work as the World Food Programme leader across two presidential administrations and a global pandemic means he saw vast amounts of suffering across the world, due to the lack of food security in various nations.
“I go to bed at night brokenhearted over the children we couldn’t save,” Beasley said. “You know what really pisses you off? When there are trillionaires and billionaires and 500 billion, trillion dollars worth of wealth out there, and every four seconds someone’s dying from hunger. I said, ‘shame on us.’”
One of the students in the audience, Allison Sachs, a third-year in international studies and Korean, said she is searching for policy-makers and thinkers to not only address the effects of food shortages internationally, but to identify the causes and develop solutions.
Beasley is aware of this need. Beasley joined the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic organization for humanitarian well-being, as a member of its board of trustees in June. Here, he is co-chairing an initiative to design and launch a more effective U.S. foreign assistance system called the Commission on the Future of Foreign Assistance, according to the Rockefeller Foundation website.
“We do need to redesign aid programs to be more strategic, more effective to create resilience and sustainability versus dependence. And those programs are out there,” Beasley said.
Sachs completed her international studies capstone on water insecurity in Syria, and described the event as more of a call to action.?
“Obviously, he’s done so much groundwork with so many various international countries,” Sachs said. “I think we’re all trying to answer the same questions and we don’t all have the answers.”
Nearing the end of the discussion, Girth proposed the question of how students at Ohio State can best step into the world after graduation.
“You’re in this together. You don’t create more light by more darkness,” Beasley said. “Reach out to the other side. Listen. Understand. You don’t have to agree. Go break bread with somebody.”
