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How the World Is Getting Hungrier Each Year - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum How the World Is Getting Hungrier Each Year
By Paul Vallely
Independent
November 26, 2003
The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003
'War on hunger' is being lost as drought and natural disasters continue to exact a terrible toll in some of the world's poorest nations
I have never forgotten my first experience of ordinary life in an African village. I had been in Ethiopia, covering the terrible famine of 1985, with its haunted lines of starving, blank-eyed faces, sitting waiting for death. But I had not been to an ordinary village.
Not long after, I travelled to Sudan where drought had also shrivelled the land. Halfway to the famine area our four-wheel- drive stopped to refuel. There by the roadside in the parched scrub was a dusty straw-thatched hut. Outside a family was huddled around a meagre fire made from a handful of sticks. The children had swollen bellies and thin limbs. The mother was cooking a single piece of flat bread which was the entire meal for the whole family. "Why didn't you tell me we were in the famine area already," I said to my guide. He laughed. "That's not famine," he chided. "That's just ordinary life in Africa. Being hungry is normal."
The world is getting hungrier, according to a report issued by the United Nations food agency yesterday. After a decade of improvements for the planet's poor, things have taken a serious turn for the worst. Hunger, which fell steadily throughout the first half of the 1990s, is on the rise again.
Across the world an estimated 842 million people are today undernourished - and that figure is again climbing, with an additional 5 million hungry people every year. The figures, says the report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) "signal a setback in the war on hunger". The prospect of cutting by half the number of people who go hungry - the target set by the world's governments in 1996 - looks "increasingly remote". The shocking thing about this is that, in the world of the politics of aid, at any rate, nobody is shocked.
The report tries to put on a brave face. "First some good news," it begins, reporting that the number of chronically hungry people has declined by 80 million in 19 countries, including Brazil, Chad, Guinea, Namibia and Sri Lanka.
So why is the picture so grim everywhere else? The number of those going hungry in India has risen by 19 million since 1995-97, and yet China has reduced its figure by 58 million since 1990-92. "We must ask ourselves why this has happened," says the FAO director-general, Jacques Diouf, in his introduction.
Those who have bucked the trend share five characteristics, he concludes - faster economic growth, rapid expansion in the agricultural sector, slower population growth, lower rates of HIV infection and far fewer natural emergencies.
"The role of capital is decisive," said Hartwig de Haen, assistant director of the FAO's economic and social department in Washington. "Investment in agriculture is a precondition for growth in incomes of the poor and the food supply," he said. Yet such investment has been declining. Rich countries must put more cash into the agriculture sectors of poor countries. It must, he said, "go back to the level where it was in the early Nineties".
If only it were so simple. The truth is that the 19 nations who have bucked the trend have not been the authors of their own good fortune. They have been lucky not to have experienced the high levels of droughts and natural disasters that have increasingly afflicted the Third World over the past decade. Nor have domestic politics had much influence over rates of population growth, which tend to be determined fairly directly by levels of poverty - the worse things are, the more children you need to look after you in your old age.
Nor have many poor nations been able to manage their Aids epidemics in the way the rich world has with its new drug regimes. It is easy for us in the First World to forget the scale of the ravages of Aids - which has killed some 25 million people in the poor world. In this decade it will claim more lives than all the world's wars and disasters of the past half- century. Aids takes a terrible economic toll; it kills off farmers in their prime and leaves behind young orphans and aged parents - mouths with no one to feed them.
Neither is it a coincidence that those countries most dependent on agriculture are those with the most hunger. Increasing the amounts of flowers and strawberries grown for export near Third World airports may help the balance of payments, but it does little for pastoral and subsistence agriculture in remoter rural areas. The economics of globalisation are that the very poorest get poorer still. There are some places to which wealth just never trickles down.
There is gloomy evidence of this in the report. "At least half the higher prices received for exports went not to farmers but traders," it notes, "and there was no increase in production in response to the higher prices". Worst still, it adds, "prices are expected to rise more steeply for food products that developing countries import than for the commodities they export. "Overall," it predicts, "the lion's share of benefits from trade liberalisation is expected to go to developed countries."
This will surprise no one. The report repeats the familiar statistic that the West spends 30 times more on domestic farming subsidies than it does on aid. It catalogues how the US spends $3.9bn (£2.3bn) a year subsidising its 25,000 cotton farmers - more than the entire GDP for Burkina Faso where 2 million people depend on cotton for their livelihood. Europe is now the world's second- largest sugar exporter even though EU sugar costs twice as much to produce as does that of Third World peasants.
Yet the harsh truth is - as the failure of the World Trade Organisation round in Cancun brutally showed - the industrialised world has abandoned any pretence that trade negotiations are anything to do with development.
Set against the scale of such large problems and political intransigence, the triumphs the report charts are small by comparison. In Brazil, President Lula da Silva has launched a Zero Hunger project, with electronic cash cards for needy families and subsidised food in schools, workplaces and "people's restaurants", all linked to work and literacy incentives. In Vietnam great steps forward have been taken through nutrition education with poor families being schooled in a "coloured bowl" to encourage the right mix of rice, vegetables, meat and fish. But in much of Africa and Latin America the wherewithal is not there for such schemes. It is there that the vast majority of those 842 million people go to bed hungry at night - though interestingly 34 million of them are in the former Soviet Union countries, and 10 million even in the rich industrialised world.
Halving hunger was not the only Millennium Development Goal agreed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1992. There were also to be swingeing attacks on child mortality, illiteracy and education discrimination against girls. There were targets on aid levels, environmental sustainability and creating greater access to world markets for the products of the poorest countries. On most of these the rich world's promises are slipping too.
"Bluntly stated," the report concludes, "the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will". Bluntly stated, the problem is that none of us really cares.
An undernourished planet
THREE IMPROVING COUNTRIES
Brazil
Luiz Lula da Silva, the President, pledged to eradicate hunger by the end of his four-year term. The number of undernourished Brazilians has fallen from 12 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2000, thanks to food aid, more jobs and higher income from food production.Bangladesh
Cyclone-plagued, flood-drenched, over-populated and penniless, Bangladesh was the international byword for disaster. But now, with higher remittances frommanual workers in the Gulf and a booming garments industry, growth of more than 5 per cent is forecast next year.Vietnam
In the past 20 years Vietnam has achieved what the UN calls "remarkable" success. In 1979 a third of the population was undernourished; now it is about one fifth. One of the biggest factors has been a national programme encouraging families to grow vegetables and fruit, combined with education on balanced meals.THREE DECLINING COUNTRIES
Guatemala
A combination of a weak economy perpetuated by years of political instability, a series of natural disasters, including hurricanes and droughts, and the belief among donors that poverty in Central America is not as bad as in Africa or Asia has left Guatemalans growing hungrier.India
India reduced the number of malnourished people by 20 million from 1990-92 and 1995-97, but the number subsequently rose by 19 million. Population growth and unemployment often offset well-intentioned government programmes. Half of all children in India under four are malnourished.North Korea
Struggling to recover from a famine in the mid-1990s caused by natural disasters and mismanagement. In 1990-92 18 per cent of the population was malnourished. By 2001 it was 34 per cent. About 6.5 million people will depend on aid to survive next year.
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