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 Open a daily paper or a magazine almost any day of the week and you will find news or a feature on melting ice caps, rising sea levels, retreating glaciers or the possible extinction of polar bears. Open the same papers for a week and you probably won’t find anything on hunger, unless it is around the time of a world food summit. Hunger just doesn’t make news in the same way as climate change and global warming.
Why is it that the fate of the retreating ice cap appears more gripping than the plight of 1.02 billion people who end each day on an empty stomach? Is it because rising sea levels seem more catastrophic to the developed world? Is it because hunger (to be distinguished from famine) is just not dramatic enough? Perhaps. But many of the present anxieties of developed countries – and the stories that do get media coverage – stem directly or indirectly from hunger. Lack of food starts off the spiral of malnutrition that leads to poverty, ill health, disease and epidemics, the population movements that lead to mass immigration, the insecurity that generates violence, regional conflict and war. Remove the cause and the consequences become less acute.  As the world’s leaders gather in Rome on 16-18 November for the third world summit on food security since Jacques Diouf became the director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1994, many may consider that this is just another example of world summitry; that heads of state and government will examine the problem and then give promises that will never be kept. That is possible, but without this summit and Diouf’s previous efforts to focus attention on world hunger, the subject would be even further down the global agenda.
The scene that faces politicians as they gather for the 2009 world food summit is certainly dramatic. According to the latest FAO figures there are now 1.02 billion hungry people worldwide –100 million more than last year – mainly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The goal set at the first world food summit, called by Diouf in 1996, was to halve the number of hungry in the world to 420 million by 2015, in other words five years from now. What has happened to cause such a devastating failure? The increase in the number of hungry in the first decade of the 21st century, following declines in the 1980s and early 1990s, can be attributed to the effects of economic instability; to the increase and speculation in the price of food commodities; to migration from rural areas to cities in search of work; to the decline in investment in agriculture but at the same time to increasing competition for land. And as food prices go up – paradoxically at the same time as farm profits go down – and jobs become scarcer, families cut back on education and healthcare to buy food. At best this has led to a decline in public health and to an increase in migration, not just from rural to urban areas but across international frontiers. At worst it has meant a rise in both domestic violence and political conflict. A preparatory FAO document for the summit points out that 2007-2008 saw food riots threatening political stability in 22 countries.
What makes this situation all the more upsetting is that experts agree that the planet has enough resources to feed us all, and that the ways to reduce hunger (unlike those to keep global warming under control) are relatively straightforward. The latest aim – to be put forward at the coming food summit – is to eradicate hunger by 2050. This may sound overblown but the methods to achieve it (see below) are simple enough – provided, of course, that the political will is there. Is it? If it isn’t, then the scenario is bleak. If the numbers of hungry continue to increase by 40 million a year – as they have done on average for the last three years – in 2050 there will be over 2.5 billion hungry people in the world. If the increase continues at the rate of 100 million a year the numbers would swell to over 5 billion. If, as estimated, world population reaches 9.2 billion in the same year, then in the first scenario over a quarter of the planet would be hungry when 30-year-olds in the developed world reach their 70s; in the second it would be over half. Either way it is an alarming prospect, but what can be done to make it daily news and not just the stuff of world food summits? Ways to eradicate world hunger
1. improve governance by getting rid of bureaucratic waste and corruption
2. ensure that developing countries have access to international markets by lowering trade barriers
3. ensure that farmers in both the developed and the developing world have an income comparable to those working in other sectors of the economy
4. invest more public and private money in agriculture and infrastructure
5. ensure early reaction to food crises 6. adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change 7. security of legal rights to land and water resources Hunger statistics From 1971 to 1997 the number of hungry people dropped from 878 million (or 23 per cent of the world’s population) to 825 million (14 per cent of the population), mainly thanks to the green revolution in agriculture. From 2000-2002 it rose to 853 million and then to 873 million in 2006. In the last three years it has reached 1.02 billion (15 per cent of the population), with over 100 million “new” hungry in the last year. They are mainly in Asia and the Pacific (642 million), sub Saharan Africa (265 million), Latin America and the Caribbean (53 million), the Near East and North Africa (42 million). See www.foa.org/hunger/en for more data.
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