Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow on the miracle of Mary's Meals

And then I raise the simplistic analysis that the perma-critics always raise whenever the issue of overseas aid arises: that in a cost-of-living crisis, shouldn’t charity begin at home? 

He pauses for a few moments as though searching for a benign response. “It’s a mistake to think in these terms,” he says. There’s more than enough food in the world for all of us. It’s an outrage that any child in this world is hungry, It’s an outrage whether they’re in South Sudan or whether they’re in Glasgow. All of us need to renew our sense of outrage about that.

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“So far as Mary’s Meals is concerned it’s about focus. We are specialists in providing food in the world’s very poorest communities where thousands of children are dying of malnutrition and where millions are out of school because they’ve no food.

“And, in any case, who else but organisations from the affluent west are going to do it? We’re the ones with the resources and there are more people here who have the money to help us.”

The story of how Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow founded Mary’s Meals is widely-known, but it’s always worth the re-telling. How, in 1992, he commandeered an old shed on the family farm at Dalmally in Argyll to process aid donations in response to an appeal to provide for refugees in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

And how, ten years later, an encounter with the family of a dying woman during the appalling famine in Malawi, changed the course of his life. The mother was stricken with HIV/AIDS and in agony because the drugs that might have eased her pain are ineffective when the victim is also suffering from malnutrition. 

And then, how the words of her son had bestowed a moment of clarity. “I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day,” he had said. In Mr MacFarlane-Barrow’s best-selling book, The Shed That Fed a Million Children, he described the boy’s words as “the spark that ignited the already smouldering notion that became Mary’s Meals”.

They would also inspire the organisation’s core vision statement: “That every child receives one daily meal in their place of education, and that all those who have more than they need share with those who lack even the most basic things.”

Since then, Mary’s Meals has grown to become one of the world’s most recognised aid agencies, its feeding programme now providing nutrition to more than two million children and ensuring that they can attend school.

I’m meeting this softly-spoken Scot at the charity’s Glasgow offices near Kinning Park. He’s just received a letter from King Felipe of Spain congratulating him for attaining the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord, one of the most prestigious civic honours in the Hispanic world. He’s slightly stunned by the award as Mary’s Meals only run a small operation in Spain, but a friend has just called to tell him that he’s featuring on all the main Spanish news outlets.

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It’s the latest in a string of honours from around the world from governments and organisations startled at how such a simple idea has yielded such astonishing results. Yet, he feels that Mary’s Meals merely scratches the surface.

“If I’m being honest, I have this permanent frustration that we’re not growing fast enough. There are still 60 million children out of school because of hunger. We’ve made a great start but that’s all it is. And clearly, our aim is to become redundant in these places.

“For instance, parts of the economy in Malawi have grown since we started operating there in 2002 and the government has acknowledged that Mary’s Meals is a big part of that story and that’s allowed us to dwell on other places in the region in greater need.”

We discuss the population myth, another anodyne analysis advanced mainly by affluent middle-class types who would have us believe there are just too many people in the world. What they mean, of course, is that there are too many poor people.

This sophistry, inevitably, became a theme of last year’s Cop26 gathering in Glasgow. It’s often shared by global capitalists who would be aghast at the prospect of a thriving African economy eating into western profits. And you need people who are healthy and well-educated to build a thriving economy. Best to keep the numbers down in developing countries and make it difficult for them to educate themselves out of poverty.

“When I last looked, population density is much higher in Europe than it is in Africa,” Mr MacFarlane-Barrow said. “But we don’t see that as a problem. But there again, I don’t see population density in Europe as an issue either. There’s more than enough to go around.

“Certainly, climate change is a massive issue and we all have a responsibility to take it seriously. This is especially so for those of us in the west who have benefited from industrialisation and the rewards that have come with it and have grown wealthy on it.

“But I think we need to be careful that we don’t forget our primary duty to people and their lives and their livelihoods and that we don’t make choices that ignore the fact that millions – one in nine of the world’s population – are hungry.

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“I think as a human family we need to show more urgency about solving the issue today rather than second-guessing what might happen in 50 or 100 years.”

Nor does he shy away from the fact that the essential values of Mary’s Meals are rooted in Catholic social teaching. “But we’re an organisation open to all and have staff and volunteers drawn from all faiths and none,” he says.

“It’s important that Catholic social teaching underpins everything we do here, especially the obligation to care for the world’s most vulnerable people. We’ve never hidden the fact that the values which shape us are influenced by these principles, but the vast majority of people of goodwill would have no issue with this. That idea of universality and inviting everyone in is an intrinsic part of Catholic social teaching, but we’re not about proselytizing.”

We discuss Covid for a while. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, was a lone voice crying in the wilderness about the sandal of vaccine inequality and Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow saluted him for it, yet it also highlighted a truth that gnawed at him throughout the pandemic.

“Covid hasn’t actually been a major topic of conversation in some of these countries,” he says. “People were already dealing with so many other challenges. Many have little or no access to any kind of healthcare, so we’ll probably never know about the real rates of Covid in some of these places.

But what also struck me during Covid is how the world became laser-focused on this problem. We collaborated and devoted a huge amount of resource to solving it. And of course it hasn’t been done equitably, as Gordon Brown pointed out.

“Then you compare this to our attitudes to addressing world hunger. We were all desperately waiting for the vaccine, but I was thinking ‘we know the cure for hunger already, yet there’s no urgency in the global family to do something about that’.

“If we applied the same urgency and priority we could make hunger and the causes of people dying from it a thing of the past. Since the stated they were making zero hunger by 2030 their second sustainable development goal, we’ve been going rapidly in the opposite direction.”

He’s often asked if ‘Mary’ is his wife or mother and I tell him that I’ve been asked this too and how people seem startled that Mary’s Meals was named in honour of the mother of Jesus. She was, after all, a Jewish mother and refugee fleeing persecution who also found shelter in a shed.