9 minute read
Real impact
Together, Marleen Balvert, Hein Fleuren, and Frans Cruijssen form the management team of the Zero Hunger Lab. All three are involved in the lab in their own way. What binds them together is that each wants to use smart mathematical processes to eliminate structural hunger.
Text: Jim Jansen Photos: Bob Bronshoff
Iam someone who likes to make this world a better place,” says Hein Fleuren, director of the Zero Hunger Lab (ZHL), when asked how he thought up the lab ten years ago. ZHL operates independently within Tilburg University on solutions to the world hunger problem. “Privately, I am much concerned with how we can live more sustainably,” he continues. “I am looking at how I can shape the energy transition in my own environment and how I can make sure I produce less waste.”
How did it start out?
Fleuren: “I had already been to the World Food Programme, the WFP, in Rome on a student trip for econometrics students from the Tilburg School of Economics and Management. I was deeply impressed by their operations and the scale on which they worked, but especially by the photographs on the wall. They showed what they had done and the people they had helped. We have built mathematical models of the highly complex logistics of courier delivery services company TNT Express. In doing so, we came up with much better ways of working, which led to savings of hundreds of millions and a reduction of a quarter of a billion kilos in carbon dioxide emissions. Then Peter Bakker, former top executive of TNT and PostNL, asked whether this might also be something for the WFP. I immediately jumped at the opportunity. The advantage of having someone like Peter is that you come in ‘at the top’. That’s when the ball started rolling.” Frans Cruijssen, member of the ZHL management team: “After my employment at TNT Express, I stayed in touch with my then colleague Perry Heijne. Occasional phone calls or a run. He told me about the ZHL he was preparing with Hein (see page 4 – ed.). I immediately thought it was a great initiative. I later started thinking about it more deeply, when I was considering quitting the consulting company that I was co-owner of at the time. I felt like doing more of my own calculations and writing, something I didn’t get to do much of in my managerial role. The ZHL gave me a chance to get started right away. What’s more, I was able to work with my supervisor Hein Fleuren again.” Marleen Balvert, management team member: “I was already familiar with OPTIMUS, the research done by Hein and external PhD student Koen Peters with the WFP, from my time as a PhD student in Tilburg. It is a fantastic example of how to apply optimization; a story like that does the rounds through the department. In January 2019 – I was no longer working in Tilburg – I ran into Hein at a conference, where he told me about the
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Hein Fleuren (1960) is professor of applications of business analytics and director of the Zero Hunger Lab, which works to reduce world hunger using data science.
Zero Hunger Lab. In the meantime, he had the funding in place to really get started and the plan sounded great. Never before had I heard of a group that wanted to work so intensively and on such a scale on research for such a wonderful cause.”
What motivates you to work day and night on a serious topic like hunger?
Fleuren: “Hunger is one of the biggest basic challenges in this world and I can actually contribute to the solution from my field. When it comes to fighting hunger, you have
Frans Cruijssen (1979) studied econometrics in Tilburg and received his PhD from the same university in 2006. After a fourteen-year stint in business, he returned to Tilburg in 2020 to join the Zero Hunger Lab.
to deal with things like transport, setting up sustainable chains, reducing losses, and producing locally. And you can model all these very well mathematically. I put my field of expertise into action in a relevant way to really improve the world.” Cruijssen: “Our purely quantitative way of working is quite unique in the humanitarian world. This allows us to make a meaningful contribution to the quality of decisions within NGOs with a small team of researchers. We have a unique position within the university. With our team, we are gradually establishing the theme of hunger elimination as a central theme within the university. We do great research and make sure it is applied directly in practice.” Balvert: “The direct collaboration with NGOs is unique. We can make a real impact because we use a wide range of techniques and integrate different disciplines into one project, all of which fit under that one umbrella: bytes for bites.”
You deal with hunger all day long in an academic way. Have you ever felt hunger yourself?
Cruijssen: “Not really. Wealth, in this case represented by the availability of healthy and sufficient food, is so unfairly distributed around the world. I grew up in a hospitality business where I could always grab a Mars bar or something else from the storage room. Total abundance. I’ve had to exercise vigorously to compensate for that.” Fleuren:“Yes, I actually know the feeling a little bit. For my own health, I do intermittent fasting. I eat during an eight-hour window; the other sixteen hours, I have nothing except water or tea. Of course, it’s a watered-down version of what people with real hunger feel, because that feeling goes on day in, day out.”
How does this work affect your private lives? Have you adjusted your lifestyle and consumption patterns?
Fleuren: “Certainly. Privately, we try to make sure that we never throw away food. My wife is an expert at turning leftover food into a whole meal. I also grow all kinds of vegetables and fruits myself, as sustainably as possible. I don’t grow anything in a heated greenhouse or use pesticides. Not only do I enjoy it, but it gives me a feel for how much work it takes to grow to a really good tomato or bell pepper, for example.” Cruijssen: “I have become much more aware of both the privileged position we have in Western Europe and the waste we cause here. Our situation is difficult to compare with a family in, say, southern Somalia, but my projects with the Food Banks provide a clearer mirror. Poverty and hunger don’t only occur in developing countries. Even around the corner, people can have a hard time getting a complete meal. This gives us a responsibility to assign food the proper value. At home, we only throw something away sporadically.” Balvert: “I have become aware of the need for sustainable aid. Emergency aid is very good and sending goods and money is necessary
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Marleen Balvert (1989) is assistant professor of operations research & machine learning. She develops mathematical and statistical methods to address social issues, for example in genetics and at the Zero Hunger Lab.
to help people through a crisis situation. But sending money and goods to people in need alone won’t get us there. In fact, if you don’t do it in the right way, it can cause people to become dependent on aid. We need to put energy into providing aid to build sustainable solutions and let people take control of their own lives. This insight has, for example, helped me better understand the importance of microcredit (small loans to entrepreneurs, often women, in developing countries – ed.). In addition, the ZHL has impact in my own kitchen. We were already conscious of our food choices at home, and my work has only reinforced that awareness.”
Where will we be in 2030?
Cruijssen:“That’s quite a question. Our second Sustainable Development Goal is to eliminate hunger by 2030. I don’t think we’re going to achieve that. The world is too unstable, and we are facing too many challenges. If you look back at the Millennium Development Goals from 2000: not all of them were met by 2015 either. But they did lead to real action.” Balvert:“By 2030, hunger will not be eradicated. Eight years is a very short time to solve such a big problem. Covid has also shown us that there is a lot that we can’t anticipate. I do hope, however, that in eight years’ time we will have much better insights into how we can improve our food chain, both in the West and in countries with food shortages, to enable people to live healthier lives, to significantly reduce hunger, and to have a fairer distribution of wealth across the world. I am also confident that some great strides will have been made by then. We are already seeing a lot of progress and many wonderful initiatives that are making a difference.” Fleuren: “Above all, I hope we make the shift to really tackling hunger. And I hope that through science, humanity will become more awake to problems of health, water, hunger, and poverty. That’s what happened with the climate crisis. It is threatening us very directly and still you see that humanity isn’t sounding the alarm yet. But the other problems will also affect us; they will eventually trigger large flows of people. And be honest: what would you do in a situation like that?”
Finally, will we ever completely eliminate hunger?
Balvert: “There will always be natural or human factors that continue to cause hunger. For example, flooding, landslides or conflict and violence. I do hope, however, that through sustainable development we can provide a stable basis for the elimination of structural hunger. And that we can deal with the unexpected shocks faster and more successfully with emergency aid and reconstruction.” Cruijssen: “There will always be emergencies that can make people suddenly vulnerable. What we need to work on is the resilience of people, logistics chains, and food systems to deal with these changes without them turning into a disaster.” Fleuren: “I think that with a lot of effort, it will be possible to tackle hunger structurally and make it a thing of the past. I would also love it if we could ensure that the number of people suffering from structural hunger is reduced by hundreds of millions in the coming years and by hundreds of millions more in the years after that. One day, an organization like the WFP will be able to offer more incidental help and we can rightly say: ‘We’ve had to help out a little bit, but this year no one has gone hungry.’ I’m 61 now; I hope to live to see that year.”
Prestigious award
In 2021, the WFP won the international Franz Edelman Award, in part due to solutions from the Zero Hunger Lab. This is the world’s most prestigious award in the field of the application of analytics, which looks not only at innovation, but also at impact. In previous years, this award was won by Tilburg University several times. Hein Fleuren, director of the Zero Hunger Lab: “Hunger is, of course, an appealing topic where successful application of mathematics can have a great deal of impact. A lot of people respond to the name of our lab alone. We stick tightly to the rule that our research has to be scientific and must have impact. If you make sure that the impact is high and the research is scientifically sound, you can often come up with very innovative approaches and insights. In addition, hunger and a stable food supply are such big issues that you can help a lot of people – indirectly – very quickly.”
