Feinstein World Hunger Program

The Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program was inaugurated on February 26, 1985, at a convocation on world hunger held in Sayles Hall, at which James Grant, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), was the keynote speaker. The five-year program, named for the Cranston, Rhode Island, businessman who donated $1.6 million dollars, explores the social and political problems associated with hunger through courses, seminars, and annual awards to individuals or organizations which have made outstanding contributions in combatting world hunger. Professor Robert Kates was called to become the director of the program. In October 1986, as part of World Hunger Week, the first national Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program Awards were presented to Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne, founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadan rural development movement in Sri Lanka, and Achola Pala Okeyo from Kenya, representing the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology. The first annual Hunger Briefing and Research Exchange held at Brown in 1988 featured Kates’s The Hunger Report, which concluded that current programs could be expected to effect the end of a significant portion of world hunger. At the conference actress Liv Ullmann gave the keynote address at the second annual presentation of the Alan Shawn Feinstein Awards for the Prevention and Reduction of World Hunger, which were received by the communal farmers of Zimbabwe, represented by Robinson Lysias Gapare, president of the National Farmers Association of Zimbabwe; Leobardo Jiménez Sánchez, director general of the Colegio de Postgraduados of Chapingo, Mexico; and the U.S. House Select Committee on Hunger, represented by Congressman Mickey Leland. The 1990 awards were presented to the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, the Women’s Organization (WARMI) of Independencia, Peru, and Harvard professor Amartya Sen. In 1991 the awards honored the people of Iringa, Tanzania for a nutritional program for children, Nevin S. Scrimshaw for organizing a World Hunger Program at United Nations University, and Patricia Young for the observation of World Food Day. The program and its library are housed at 130 Hope Street.