April 6, 2024 - PBS News Weekend full episode

JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, why more Americans are dipping into their retirement accounts early to make ends meet.

Then, with hundreds of millions of people going hungry worldwide, more than 1 billion metric tons of food is being wasted every year.

WOMAN: The root cause of hunger is not that we don't have enough food.

We have enough food in the world to feed everyone on it.

And so hunger is really a challenge of income and poverty and distribution and.

JOHN YANG: The state of air quality here and around the world.

How millions are living with potentially deadly air pollution.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

Israel says a military operation in Gaza has recovered the body of a man taken hostage in the Hamas attack on October 7.

Six months ago this weekend, militants had abducted 47 year old Elad Katzirfrom kibbutz Nir Oz.

His mother, Hana, was also kidnapped.

She was released in November during a truce.

His father was killed in the attack.

At least 36 hostages are confirmed to have died in captivity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains under public pressure to get a deal to free the remaining hostages.

Negotiations are set to resume in coming days in Cairo.

Hamas is demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

In Ukraine, Russian drones and missiles have killed eight people and wounded 12 others in Kharkiv, the second largest city.

Ukrainian officials said the strikes damaged residential buildings, businesses and a kindergarten.

Russia has stepped up attacks on Kharkiv as Ukrainian air defenses are strained without U.S. aid.

Mexico has suspended diplomatic ties with Ecuador.

It comes after Ecuadorian police force their way into the Mexican embassy in Quito Friday night to arrest Ecuador's former vice president, Jorge Glas.

Glas has been living in the embassy since December, when he was convicted for corruption.

Earlier Friday, Mexico granted Glas political asylum.

Mexican President Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador said the raid violated Mexico's sovereignty and international law.

And the death toll from the earthquake in Taiwan earlier this week has risen to 13.

Six others are missing.

Search and rescue efforts continue in Taroko National park, where hundreds were stranded when the 7.4 magnitude quake cut off roads.

Aftershocks have halted the demolition of a ten story building in Hualien that's been at leaning at a precarious angle.

It was Taiwan's worst quake in a quarter century, but upgraded buildings have been credited for the relatively low number of deaths.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend, why every day, more than a billion meals are wasted around the world.

And what's behind worsening global air quality and its potential health risks?

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: For a growing number of Americans, retirement accounts are doing double duty savings for the future when they're no longer working and as a source for emergency funds for the here and now when they feel a cash crunch.

In many ways, it's a reflection of the dueling forces in the US economy.

A strong stock market is growing retirement accounts, while stubborn inflation is keeping prices high for everything from groceries to gasoline.

We asked viewers who've tapped into their retirement accounts to tell us why they did it.

HANNAH EMPIE: My name is Hannah Empey.

I am currently unemployed, and I live in Pennsylvania.

The second that the meeting was over with HR and my former boss, I went to withdraw my entire 403(b) account.

I was able to make that withdrawal and had the money in three days.

And it was a lifesaver for me because it would take three months for my unemployment to get approved.

JIM SITRICK: I'm Jim Sitrick.

I've lived in Maine, where I am now for about almost three years.

Eight months ago, I began suffering from some medical difficulties, some situations that led me to start missing more work than I would like and ended up with me being hospitalized for several weeks as a consequence of having no income and needing to continue with our health insurance that I needed to then pay for out of pocket.

I had to dip into the savings I had in my thrift savings plan.

AMY STRIVERS: I'm Amy Stivers.

I live in Colorado.

In 36 months, I had to, let's see, a nice word they like to use is pivot.

I had to pivot my plans and go from retiring early modestly, just trying to be well for the rest of my life to I have to spend everything for the new housing price.

The price of these homes, a 20 percent deposit, six figures cash you got to come up with.

So that was a lot of savings I had in my 401K.

Then I cashed it out in order to get into the house.

HANNAH EMPIE: You know, times are hard right now, so I don't feel any shame in what I had to do to make ends meet.

JIM SITRICK: I really did consider what alternatives there would be to taking money out of my thrift savings plan.

And the only one that I was not either embarrassed about or unwilling to do was take out money that I had saved myself.

AMY STRIVERS: The nest deck is for later, but it's like, oh no, we're using it now in our mid-50's instead of in her 70s HANNAH EMPIE: I was raised by my grandparents, and I've seen what retirement looks like when there isn't a fallback plan, when it's just Social Security.

JIM SITRICK: I most likely will not be able to retire, period.

That I will continue to work until I am no longer physically capable of doing so.

JOHN YANG: The investment for Vanguard Group says last year there were early withdrawals from a record 3.6 percent of the 5 million retirement accounts and administers.

That's up from 2.8 percent in 2022 and above the pre pandemic average of about 2 percent.

Roben Farzad is host of the public radio podcast Full Disclosure.

Roben, what's going on here?

Is this unusual, this amount of early withdrawals?

ROBEN FARZAD, Host, "Full Disclosure": Isn't it so unusual in that we have such low unemployment, again touched near something a 50 year low.

You have housing prices at a record high.

You have a stock market like you mentioned, near a record high.

And yet capital I inflation really walloped us coming out of the pandemic.

And you've seen your purchasing power and your cost of living, all of this calamitous stuff happen while the nightly news is telling you that the economy is great.

So you want to tap what's working, but you're not necessarily thinking about your reality when you're 75 or increasingly 80 years old.

JOHN YANG: But when people look at their 401k statements with the stock market rising, are they thinking, well, geez, I can take some money out.

It won't hurt.

ROBEN FARZAD: It won't hurt.

But then again, you think about how $1,000 compounds over a lifetime, if you're one of these people who are fortunate and impressionate enough to do it in your 20s, you're talking potentially millions and millions of dollars at retirement.

It's very hard to instruct a 20-year-old or even a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old that look, you can't just depend on Social Security, you can't just depend on Medicare.

That's a very hard discipline to teach people who are instructed to deal with the here and now.

Nobody lives in the long term.

It's easy for economists and people to be in theoretical in the long term.

But it also breaks my heart to see a 20 or 30 something have to rate at NASDAQ.

JOHN YANG: What other consequences are there of tapping into a retirement fund this way in terms of taxes and other things?

ROBEN FARZAD: Yeah, you do have at the discretion of Uncle Sam, you could apply for a hardship withdrawal where you don't have the penalty.

You still have to pay taxes on the appreciation.

But again, $1,000 put in a retirement account.

If you're looking at it like, wow, I have $10,000 that's found money that I didn't even realize I had that could tide me over for several months.

Well, $10,000 could well at long term market rates be hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars.

So how many people are having that dialogue with their God willing retired selves?

And that's what keeps me up at night.

JOHN YANG: So we heard in that tape, we heard people saying that they took money out because they had lost jobs, they had medical emergencies.

For people who are in those positions, find themselves in those situations, what should they be thinking about as they consider how to raise the cash they need?

ROBEN FARZAD: Are you willing to downshift your life?

Are you willing to maybe hold off on buying?

The American dream has been deferred.

You know, 50 some odd year old woman you interviewed saying that we wanted that house, we definitely wanted that house.

They're out there using appreciated stock market assets to buy really appreciated housing assets.

Who's to say that housing market's not going to fall in a few years and they'll have buyer's remorse or they'll need that equity value if there's an injury or an illness into their sixties or seventies.

But I think for many, and this sounds cliche, that is part of the American dream.

And if that's broken, they're thinking, if not now, then when?

JOHN YANG: What are the alternatives to tapping into a retirement account?

And where should tapping into the retirement account rank in those alternatives?

ROBEN FARZAD: I would put it as a last case thing.

No one wants to bring up avocado toast or your car or the number of Ubers you take.

But again, this is structured 401Ks and 403Bs.

So it's an absolute last resort.

It's also why we haven't seen the privatization of Social Security.

If everybody was just free to raid a private Social Security account, can you imagine how many people would be in arrears later in life?

So that's very hard, again to say, cut back, right size your standard of living, take on temp jobs, gig.

It's like me saying, stay in school, drink your milk.

It sounds very paternalistic.

But the numbers again, bear out that you want to hold on, that you want to have this prescience, this ability to look into the future and take care of yourself, where we know that the social safety net has failed so many people in retirement, in their elderly years.

JOHN YANG: You heard some of those people in the tape talk about they lost their job, they had a medical problem that kept them off the job.

They weren't buying fancy homes, they needed cash.

What would you say to them?

ROBEN FARZAD: What is your cash runway?

I mean, were you in a structure that you were saving enough cash for an emergency?

We know the numbers with Americans who don't even have 1000 in the checking account or the savings account for a medical emergency.

So you are day to day.

You are paycheck to paycheck.

There are alternatives for you to maybe ahead of this to consider, if you can right size your cost of living, your expenses of living, how much money you're saving.

I mean you're actually making something on your savings right now, where in the past it would have just been inflated away.

But so many Americans look at saving money as a luxury for other people, when in reality saving and investing, they have to be fundamental pillars of personal finance.

JOHN YANG: Roben Farzad, host of the public radio podcast Full Disclosure.

Thank you very much.

ROBEN FARZAD: My pleasure, John.

JOHN YANG: About a third of the world's population, that's more than 2 billion people, face food insecurity.

Yet a report from the United Nation highlights another problem.

Food waste.

The UN said people throw away enough food to give each person facing hunger around the world more than one meal a day.

Ali Rogin has more.

ALI ROGIN: Over 1 billion metric tons.

That's how much food the United Nations Environment Program says went to waste in 2022.

That's nearly a fifth of all food produced across the globe.

It's an estimated economic loss of over a trillion dollars, and it amounts to 174 pounds of food person per year.

On top of that, when waste sits in a landfill, it creates methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.

Food waste generates eight to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

If that were a country, it would rank third in the world, behind only China and the US.

Dana Gunders is the executive director of ReFED, a national nonprofit that's dedicated to ending food loss and waste.

Dana, thank you so much for joining us.

What do we know about the parts of the world where all this food is being wasted?

DANA GUNDERS, Executive Director, ReFED: Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that there's really not one part of the world to point to as the main culprit.

It truly is a global problem.

And the data in this report confirms that food waste is not -- it's not just a rich country problem.

And that's new because historically, there's been a narrative that in lower income countries, most of the food is lost on its way to market because they don't have a way to keep it cold and it spoils.

And in higher income countries, it's more lost in our homes or in stores and restaurants.

But that characterization is being flipped on its head.

ALI ROGIN: So you just mentioned a lot of the assumptions about where this food waste comes from.

This particular report only started coming out in 2021.

So is the issue here that the assumptions were once true and no longer are?

Or is it that we just didn't have the information to tell us where this waste was coming from?

DANA GUNDERS: It's really more the latter.

You know, we have not been measuring food waste for very long, and it's still really difficult to do.

You know, we don't have scales on every garbage can or cameras or anything like that.

So just the process of collecting the data is challenging.

And really, in this report, one of the main feats they talk about is they've doubled the amount of data they've gotten on the topic.

ALI ROGIN: Let's talk about who's wasting it.

Where's this coming from?

Households, individuals, restaurants?

DANA GUNDERS: Well, certainly it's happening across the board, but households are actually the largest segment of food going to waste.

And that's true in this report from the UN.

It's also true right here in the US.

That's everything from, you know, the science experiment in the back of your fridge to maybe making too much food and scraping your plate into the garbage can.

In the US, we're about average.

We're actually a little under average when it comes to our household waste.

But when you look at the food service, which is restaurants and university cafeterias, anything eaten out of home there, we have about twice as much waste happening as in other countries.

I think the other thing we've seen is that in relative terms, the cost of food has gone down since, you know, several decades ago.

You know, we might go to the store and five or $0.10 could sway us to pick one product over another, but then we get home and that math kind of goes out the window.

And when we throw away $3 worth of cheese or something, and it's just not quite enough for us to be paying attention to for some people.

And that's true for businesses as well.

When we look at restaurants, for instance, oftentimes the labor is a much bigger cost than the food.

And so it makes sense for them to do things like, say, serve really big portions so that they can charge more to cover their costs.

ALI ROGIN: How linked are the issues of food waste and food insecurity?

In other words, if were to cut down on food waste, would it get to addressing issues related to curbing hunger worldwide?

DANA GUNDERS: You know, the root cause of hunger is not that we don't have enough food.

We have enough food in the world to feed everyone on it.

And so hunger is really a challenge of income and poverty and distribution.

So at its core, solving food waste will not solve hunger, but what it can do is it can provide more food into the emergency food system.

If were to cut our food waste in half, that could add about 4 billion meals into the emergency food system here in the US.

ALI ROGIN: There are some bright spots in this report.

One of the things that was mentioned is that Japan actually has reduced its food waste by 30 percent since 2000, 31 percent actually.

What's being done right on this issue?

And what can other countries learn?

DANA GUNDERS: Yeah, absolutely.

There are bright spots.

I think Japan, you know, they've been working on this for a very long time.

And what we've seen is that it does take time, but also a holistic approach.

Policy has played a very important role there.

They passed a law back in 2001 that, among other things, required businesses to start measuring their food waste so they could really see how much they have and do something about it.

There's a great word in Japanese called matanai, and it really expresses a sense of regret around wasting something and kind of values those resources.

And so I think culturally, they've had a mindset of conservation and efficiency built in, and it's certainly something that we could learn from here.

ALI ROGIN: Dana Gunders, executive director of the national nonprofit ReFED, thank you so much for your time.

DANA GUNDERS: Thank you so much for having me.

JOHN YANG: While the United States has made great progress in recent decades, improving air quality, air pollution is still a leading cause of cancer and a driver of many other serious health problems both here and around the world.

And as William Brangham reports, air pollution appears again to be on the rise.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's hard to overstate how serious air pollution is to human health.

It's responsible for nearly 7 million premature deaths every year worldwide.

In 2023, only seven countries met the World Health Organization's air quality guidelines for pollution, while more than 90 percent of countries and territories exceeded them.

Those are the findings of a new report by IQAir.

They're a Swiss research organization that also manufactures air purifiers.

The report, which gathered data from 134 countries, regions and territories, found that central and South Asia is home to the top ten most polluted cities in the world.

And here in North America, wildfires accelerated by climate change are driving even more air pollution.

Last year, that contributed to worsening air quality in cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, and Milwaukee.

Glory Dolphin Hammes is the North American CEO for IQAir, and she joins us now.

Thank you so much for being here.

I know that it's hard to generalize globally, but why are so few nations able to control their air pollution better?

GLORY DOLPHIN HAMMES, North America CEO, IQAir: It has to do with economic activity.

So the World Health Organization, their standards are essentially based on science and what actually affects human health.

And we have governments and their responsibility to provide a good economy for its constituents that actually directly conflicts with the health guidelines that are set forth.

So there is a balance between health and our economy.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: One of the things I was really struck by in your report is that the pollution that we're talking about is incredibly small particles in the air, and that contributes to making it even more unhealthy for humans.

Can you explain why that is?

GLORY DOLPHIN HAMMES: The impact of what's called fine and ultrafine particulate matter is tremendous on the human body.

These ultra fine particles are able to penetrate the human cell mitochondria that is essentially the brain of the human cell.

And what it's able to do is to damage or kill off the cell as a result of penetrating the mitochondria.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So your report points out that seven nations met the WHO's guidelines for air pollution.

What is it that they're doing right?

GLORY DOLPHIN HAMMES: I believe a big function of their meeting the WHO standards has to do with geography.

They're in areas that have tremendous amount of wind.

This wind creates dilution of air pollution that's generated in terms of human activity.

That's probably, I would say, the main driving factor in meeting the WHO standards, also along with the smaller size population from these particular areas as well.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Your report also notes how wildfires, which we know are exacerbated by climate change, can make air quality dramatically worse.

And that seems to be one of the hardest political pollution factors to control, given that these can erupt at any time when there's dry brush in the right conditions.

GLORY DOLPHIN HAMMES: That's true.

So when we look at the 2023 report, the big X factor for Northern America is essentially the Canadian wildfires right now.

Really, there has just been a perfect storm created in terms of wildfires that we haven't really truly been able to get these wildfires under control yet.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: A lot of people hearing this and hearing about the quality of the air around them are obviously going to be thinking, are there things that I can do for my family in my own home?

And I know you're a manufacturer of air purifying devices, but are there other things that people can do to protect themselves at a very local level?

GLORY DOLPHIN HAMMES: First and foremost, on the local level, we need to monitor air quality the same way that we monitor the weather.

That's a big change that people need to make air quality is very important because you can go days essentially without water.

You could probably go weeks without food.

But question is, how long can you really hold your breath?

And air quality is the most underestimated human need that we have.

You can do things like wear masks that actually protect the user.

And these are all important steps that people can take and they should take in order to reduce their overall exposure to air pollution.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, Gloria Dolphin Hemmes of IQAir, thank you so much for joining us.

GLORY DOLPHIN HAMMES: Thank you for having me.

JOHN YANG: And finally tonight, a small victory for some sea turtles and people who care about their survival.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): On Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, a very special delivery.

Wrapped in towels and old banana boxes, nearly three dozen sea turtles begin to stir.

WOMAN: Oh, you wake up.

Good morning.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): They've been found in frigid New England waters where very winter, the cold blooded creatures are washed up on shore, weak, lethargic, and disoriented, a condition known as cold stunned turtles.

The Georgia Sea Turtle center on Jekyll Island teamed with volunteers from northeast aquariums and conservation groups to move 33 Kemp's ridley sea turtles and one green sea turtle, both species on the endangered list, to the warmer southeastern waters where they can thrive.

Down to the sea they went, carried by volunteers who gently set them in the water, sending them out to their new home, carrying with them the hopes of recovery for these endangered creatures.

JOHN YANG: And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.