The Ultimate Foodie

By GREG BURKE/ROME

After three bad hair days back in 1992, Catherine Bertini finally gave in. She leaned over the tub in her Rwanda hotel room--the one with shot-out windows and no running water--and allowed her husband to pour a bucket of dirty water over her head. Rough treatment for the CEO of a multinational with a $1.88 billion operating budget. But this multinational happens to be the U.N. World Food Program, and in her nine years as the agency's executive director, Bertini has grown used to hardships. "WFP reaches people who are at risk of starvation," she says. "They earn less than $1 a day, and wouldn't survive without our help."

As CEO of the largest U.N. agency and the leading agency working against hunger, Bertini is responsible for both raising resources from donor countries and "making sure food gets to the right people at the right time and is accounted for." She is the first American and the first woman to head the WFP, now responsible for feeding nearly 90 million people each year, mostly in disaster zones like Ethiopia, Somalia and India.

Bertini is a novelty in many other respects. A lifelong self-styled "Republican feminist," she was initially backed by the Administration of George Bush the Elder for the U.N. job, but she also won the endorsement of the Clinton Administration after her first five-year term. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, urged Clinton to keep her in Rome after her first term. "She's shown extraordinary ability with no sign of partisan activity, and as a result, she's been enormously effective," Leahy says. When she took over, Bertini had never been to Africa and did not speak French (she still doesn't), but she did have solid experience in food assistance. She worked in the Department of Agriculture from 1989 to '92 as Assistant Secretary for Food and Consumer Services. Before that she worked on welfare reform for Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Growing up in Cortland, N.Y., Bertini originally wanted to be a music teacher but then got interested in government service. She majored in political science at the State University of New York in Albany and later did a fellowship at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She jumped at the WFP post "because jobs like this come once in a lifetime." Since 1988 she's been married to Thomas Haskell, a photographer who enjoys globe trotting with her (although he once got separated from a WFP motorcade in Mogadishu and was held at gunpoint by two men).

Bernd Kaess, a German who was Bertini's chief of staff for 3 1/2 years, credits her with making the WFP known and appreciated by donor countries. Under her tenure the operating budget dipped from $1.6 billion to $1.2 billion, but is now nearly $1.9 billion, an all-time high. "She found the money," Kaess says, "and she put WFP on the map." Kaess also credits Bertini with decentralizing the WFP. Says he: "If we were in El Salvador 24 hours after the earthquake, that was because of decentralization." More than 80% of the WFP's 6,000 employees work in the field, and the agency boasts that administrative costs are only about 9% of the budget--comparable with those of private charities. She has seen 25 countries--most recently Vietnam, Tunisia, Mexico and Botswana--"graduate" from the food recipient column into relative self-sufficiency.

One of her other initiatives at the WFP was to set a goal that 80% of relief food aid should go to women, since most refugees and internally displaced people are women and children. Most food aid has traditionally gone to men, but the agency now delivers more than 60% to women. More controversial was a Bertini goal giving 50% of food aid for school meals and other education projects to girls. Countries in which female school attendance is low have shown resistance to that goal, but Bertini expects to meet it by 2003. She claims it has increased school attendance by females in countries such as Niger, Pakistan and Morocco.

Bertini's office in Rome features a couple of dozen wood and copper statues she's picked up while in the field. She calls it the "Women at Work" collection. One of the satisfactions of the job, she says, is "seeing what a difference it makes to have women empowered. And in our case, they're empowered when we give them food." Yet there are times she feels helpless. She recalls a trip to Rajasthan, in rural India. "There's no war, no people with guns, no drought, no flood, just desperate poverty," she said. "They had no hope, no education, no job opportunities. They didn't know where to go or what to do." The Rajasthani women, she says, are simply a sample of more than 800 million people who are hungry only because they're poor, not on account of wars or natural disasters.

Though she's tight-lipped about her future, Bertini faces a two-term limit at the WFP and plans to be back in the U.S. by April 2002. But her overseas job has been a good run. "In how many places," she asks, "do you get the chance to improve the lives of millions of people?"