CHILDREN-PERU: Entrepreneur Wants to Feed the Children

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Zoraida Portillo

LIMA, May 6 1998 (IPS) - There is a popular saying that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” but that doesnt apply to breakfast, says Peruvian entrepreneur Roberto Wagner.

He used to provide free, nutritional breakfasts to children living in extreme poverty in the slums of the Peruvian capital – and wants to do so again. Wagner has used up his own funds for this project, and now is seeking new funding from other business concerns.

Until 1996, Wagner was providing breakfast for 200,000 children in the capital under the age of eight – more aid than provided by official institutions.

The project began in August 1990, the very morning after president Alberto Fujimori imposed economic measures which provoked increases of more than 300 percent in consumer prices that left more than half the population in poverty.

“The situation was desperate; the majority of working people did not even have enough to bring home bread for their children. We had to do something,” recalled Wagner, who then was manging an ndustrial glue factory.

So he decided to invite the children of the factory’s workers to breakfast. The first day, some 200 frightened and hungry children arrived and were offered a glass of milk and bread and butter..

“One week later, we had 2,000 children and a logistical problem, because it became impossible to attend to them ourselves. Nor could we let them go without giving them anything to eat. For many of them, it was their only meal of the day,” Wagner said.

So he presented a proposal to the factory owners: turn the plant into a mammoth temporary dining room for the children in the surrounding neighborhoods, and to take advantage of the industrial equipment to prepare a more nutritious meal. “Nobody was interested in buying glue at that difficult time,” he recalled with a certain irony.

Once the equipment was disinfected, it took less than half-an- hour to prepare 50 tons of hot cereal, about 10,000 rations which for six months were distributed free of charge to about the same number of children. It was a truly a “giant cauldron” – which was the name given to the system.

The factory provided the cauldrons, the trucks and the labor. Other nearby factories located from Lima’s most important industrial zone, contributed soya, cereal, milk, eggs, sugar, vitamins and minerals.

The distribution was carried out with no problems until 1991, and Wagner was perhaps one of the only entrepreneurs in the area who escaped being threatened by the Shining Path guerrilla organization. At the time, its was intensifying its actions in Lima’s industrial zone and the surrounding neighborhoods.

The government refused to allow the donations to be deducted from taxes, and so support for the program dwindled and finally died. Wagner, undeterred, then built his own plant plot of land he owned in the outskirts of Lima, where he could prepare up to 200,000 rations of food a day.

In 1993, he got support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID): 15 trucks would leave in two shifts from the plant to 271 distribution points, located in 23 of Lima’s 42 districts. Peruvian authorities heaped all kinds of praise on the entrepreneur. “The idea was that when the USAID funding ran out, the Peruvian government would step in. But the government said that there were legal problems, so instead it invited us to submit bids for its school breakfast programs,” he said.

Wagner didn’t win and failed in other attempts before running out of money in 1996 and closing down his operation.

“Forty-nine percent of Peruvian children under 12 years old suffers some degree of malnutrition, a figure which is unacceptable for a country because it means that almost all the economically active population in the year 2014 will be malnourished,” said Wagner, who now is appealing to private firms to support his project.

“I am aware that, in contrast to my own work for this social cause, the main goal of private firms is profit. So I am asking for their collaboration through publicity, which, unlike donations, is tax deductible,” he explained. “Today’s malnourished children are tomorrow’s potential consumers. So there could be firms out there that are interested in cultivating a positive image beginning now”, he pointed out.”

The cost of one breakfast ration is just 10 US cents 10 cents of a dollar. Wagner has established a Board of Directors made up of well-known local entrepreneurs, including Jesuit priest and economist Juan Julio Witch who was a hostage during the three- month guerrilla seige of the Japanese embassy in Lima in 1997.

“The Giant Cauldron served the poorest sectors of the population and was a true work of social solidarity,” Witch declared. “Peru today is not living in peace. It cannot be until we have a society capable of providing a certain level of human dignity.

“Projects like this one which are not carried out by the government but rather by the society itself, by private entrepreneurs can help recover that level.”