Kenro Oshidari recalls the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines in 2013, leaving a humanitarian crisis in its wake. As Asia Regional Director for the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) at the time, Oshidari says that it was the most challenging operation he led in his 25 years at the organization.
“We were faced with the task to deliver food to about 2.7 million people within the first two weeks of the disaster,” Oshidari tells the Taipei Times via e-mail.
The operation required 300 WFP staffers from throughout the globe to collaborate with the Philippine government, NGOs and foreign militaries — par for the course to an aid worker who oversaw a staff of 3,000 while on the ground in Sudan between 2006 and 2009. Since 2015, Oshidari has been using his experience to mentor young professionals who are willing to devote their lives to helping the less fortunate, which he says, begins with knowing what’s going on outside of your own country.
Photo courtesy of Kenro Oshidari
“Show interest in ‘what is going on in the world,’” says Oshidari, who has worked in conflict zones such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and North Korea. “People need to understand that, unfortunately, the world is quite an ‘unfair’ place depending on where you happen to be born.”
Oshidari will give a talk — Not Enough Food? What You Need to Know about Global Hunger — in Taipei on Saturday as part of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation’s Taipei Salon series of lectures. He will draw on his extensive experience to cover a broad range of topics, including the globe’s 800 million food insecure people, the importance of investing in child nutrition, natural disasters and conflicts, as well as thinking globally.
A HELPING HAND
Though Taiwan is not a member of the UN and therefore has no formal aid agreements with the WFP, Oshidari praises the “incredible generosity of the Taiwanese people” when helping out after Japan’s devastating 2011 tsunami.
But more can be done.
“Taiwan seems to be rather modest when considering international standards of developed countries,” Oshidari says, while noting the complicated position Taiwan finds itself in internationally.
Oshidari says that the principle of humanitarian aid is “neutrality, impartiality and independence without political considerations.”
And with the recent announcement that the Donald Trump administration will dramatically cut funding to the UN, the shortfall will have to be made up elsewhere as the WFP struggles with potential famines in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria.
“This is obviously a big concern for the entire humanitarian community, including the NGOs, that work in partnership with the UN. Obviously it would affect not only these four countries but the well being of many more millions of people,” he says.
Compassion, Oshidari says, is a good place to begin when thinking about global hunger.
“You can donate money to charitable organizations, volunteer some time to help or pursue a career in international humanitarian work like myself. But the most important starting point is to realize that there are hundreds of millions of people without food, shelter, education [and] medical help, and to feel some level of compassion,” Oshidari says.
On Facebook a friend posted a dashcam video of a vehicle driving through the ash-colored wasteland of what was once Taroko Gorge. A crane appears in the video, and suddenly it becomes clear: the video is in color, not black and white. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake’s destruction on April 3 around and above Taroko and its reverberations across an area heavily dependent on tourism have largely vanished from the international press discussions as the news cycle moves on, but local residents still live with its consequences every day. For example, with the damage to the road corridors between Yilan and
May 13 to May 19 While Taiwanese were eligible to take the Qing Dynasty imperial exams starting from 1686, it took more than a century for a locally-registered scholar to pass the highest levels and become a jinshi (進士). In 1823, Hsinchu City resident Cheng Yung-hsi (鄭用錫) traveled to Beijing and accomplished the feat, returning home in great glory. There were technically three Taiwan residents who did it before Cheng, but two were born in China and remained registered in their birthplaces, while historians generally discount the third as he changed his residency back to Fujian Province right after the exams.
With William Lai’s (賴清德) presidential inauguration coming up on May 20, both sides of the Taiwan Strait have been signaling each other, possibly about re-opening lines of communication. For that to happen, there are two ways this could happen, one very difficult to achieve and the other dangerous. During his presidential campaign and since Lai has repeatedly expressed his hope to re-establish communication based on equality and mutual respect, and even said he hoped to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) over beef noodles and bubble tea. More dramatically, as explored in the May 2 edition of this column,
Tiffany Chang (張芳瑜) is a force to be reckoned with. Crowned Miss Taiwanese American in 2022, she made history last year as the first Taiwanese winner of Miss Asia USA. She’s also a STEM student at Stanford and an aspiring philanthropist — the kind of impressive accolades that has earned her the moniker “light of Taiwan.” At the end of March, Chang returned to Taipei, to “see the people that support me because ultimately that’s what made me win.” She says her Taiwanese supporters shower her with praise: “you inspire us, and you make us feel proud of our Taiwanese heritage,”