Importance of Travel to Build Global Leaders
The World Food Prize Borlaug-Ruan internship provides high school students the opportunity to travel and intern in a foreign country for eight weeks. The interns work with a supervisor on a project benefiting food insecurity, the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of nutritious food. Throughout the experience, students immerse themselves in the culture of their host country, exposing differences and similarities between their own culture and a foreign one. Few high schoolers are able to experience and learn the important life lessons that come with living in a foreign country. These skills will serve them well in adapting to a world more globalized than ever, where access to information and communication are almost borderless. World food insecurity is a global problem which will require interaction with multiple countries, international institutions, state and local governments to find and implement solutions that won’t just benefit citizens in their own country but individuals around the world.
Unfortunately the recent rise in nationalism, populism and xenophobia in countries around the world, not only endangers the progress that has already been made in combating food insecurity, but also closes the door to possible life saving and game changing breakthroughs. To reverse this trend, we need leaders to break down the walls of fear and the unknown that chain us from progress, we need youth to travel abroad. Travel forces us to see how someone else experiences the world. Author Harper Lee once wrote “You can’t really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.” A global leader’s understanding of tolerance and cooperation will allow positive change in the lives of people around the world.
Globalization is the process of interaction and integration between people, industries and governments. Globalization has been spurred by technological advancements that have allowed the exchange and export of ideas and culture. This has led to rich multiculturalism where traditions are adopted and transformed into one’s own culture. Acceptance of multiculturalism is a sensitive issue, especially in countries that have a largely homogenized population. Older individuals might see multiculturalism as a threat to their own culture and way of life. These individuals are more likely to support leaders who show authoritarian tendencies that use populist ideals that promise to restore their country to a former vague idealized state. The resurgence of nationalism has emboldened authoritarian leaders to persecute the most vulnerable minorities for their use as a scapegoat and political gain. These leaders thrive on using divisive and isolationist policies that have global ramifications.
Nationalistic countries are less likely to work with the global community to solve problems that require international cooperation, at a time when important problems such as climate change and food insecurity threaten to upend the global food system. Formal international institutions such as the United Nations, have been critical to the development of the international community since WWII, are now viewed as controlling overreaching bureaucracies that should just be tossed away into the dustbin of history. While these institutions do have inefficiencies that need to be addressed, their value far surpasses potential drawbacks. To strengthen and modernize these institutions, our youth need to become global leaders, where they are able to navigate through a world with ever increasing complexity in culture and ideas. We need to encourage the youth to travel and gain international experience. More programs similar to the World Food Prize Borlaug-Ruan internship should be developed to give students from all backgrounds, the opportunity to travel abroad. Through their international experiences they will learn that humans share much more in common than the differences that separate them.
We must build and elect new global leaders to solve the greatest challenge human civilization has ever faced, how to eliminate food insecurity by sustainably feeding the expected 9.7 billion people expected to be on Earth by 2050. Norman Borlaug once said “You cannot build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” Earth is our lifeboat in the ocean of space, there is not a second planet we can move to, we must act now or risk our own demise.
