Part III: Hunger - The 'old' evils of poverty, hunger and inequality

The inability of people from poorer, ‘developing’ countries to meet their basic food needs is a perversity driven by the food demands and greed of wealthy nations. Children in poor countries are the worst affected by the imbalance. Food production is measured purely in terms of market value - this must change for the imbalance to be redressed. By Justin Frewen

In 2000, some 790 million people were deprived of basic food security. This number was spread between the different regions as follows; South Asia had 283.9 million malnourished people, East and Southeast Asia 241.6 million, sub-Saharan Africa 179.6 million; Latin America 53.4 million; Near East and North Africa, 32.9 million. In addition, over 20,000 people a day were dying from hunger-related causes.

Death caused by hunger is generally the result of chronic malnutrition rather than starvation. The case of the Irish famine was similar, with many deaths caused by accompanying infectious diseases - typhoid fever, typhus and dysentery. Similarly in the South today, people suffer from nutritional deficiencies which have weakened their bodies’ defences, fully exposing them to attendant illness.

Tragically, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on development aid and the launch of high-profile initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which I will look at in Part 5 of this mini-series, hunger’s grip upon the lives of hundreds of millions of people has tightened.

According to the World Bank’s 2009 Global Monitoring Report, the global financial and food crises have overturned the gains made in combating malnutrition. The number of chronically hungry people - those consuming under 1,800 calories a day - rocketed upwards from 850 million in 2007 to 960 million in 2008. By mid-October 2009, the figure had risen to 1.02 billion according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). To put this in perspective, this number exceeds the cumulative population of the EU, the US, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. At the same time, the daily death toll from hunger and related diseases has also mounted and now rapidly approaches a daily total of 25,000 persons or an average of one life lost every few seconds.

Children are particularly badly affected both in their physical and mental development as a consequence of malnutrition. UNICEF says almost 200 million children under the age of five in ‘developing’ countries suffer from stunted growth due to a lack of sufficient nutritional intake; 90% of these live in Asia and Africa. Whereas progress was made in Asia where the percentage of children afflicted by stunted growth fell from 44% in 1990 to 30% in 2008, the situation has only marginally improved in Africa where the percentage declined from 38% to 34% in the same period. It has been estimated that over 25% of children in the South are underweight and as many as ten children die each minute from malnourishment and related diseases. Under-nutrition renders children more vulnerable to illnesses, with over one third of children dying from pneumonia, diarrhoea and other illnesses. Had these children not been malnourished, they could have survived.

Ironically this situation exists in a ‘world of plenty’ where agriculture already produces enough food to provide everyone with over 2,700 calories per day, well over the average requirement of 2,200 to 2,400. Indeed, despite a 70% population increase over the past 30 years, agriculture globally is producing 17% more calories per person today than it was then. We would appear, therefore, to live in a world where hundreds of millions go to bed hungry simply because they are too poor to be able to purchase sufficient food for their requirements.

As the economist Ross Copeland has written:

[A]ccess to food and other resources is not a matter of availability, but rather of ability to pay. Put bluntly, those with the most money command the most resources, whilst those with little or no money go hungry. This inevitably leads to a situation whereby some sections of humanity arguably have too much and other sections little or nothing.

This is not to argue that efforts to improving the effectiveness and output of food production techniques should be discontinued but rather to draw attention to the fact that it is essential the deeper problem of endemic poverty and inability to access food are placed at the forefront of the struggle to combat hunger. 

Food is no longer produced to meet needs. It is now a commodity. It is manufactured and produced to be sold to those who have sufficient resources to pay for it at a price that is profitable for the company selling it. Marked demands have caused large tracts of good agricultural land being devoted to the cultivation of tea, coffee, tobacco, cotton and so forth - products of hardly any nutritional value. Similarly, over half the grain produced in the US is for livestock feed despite the fact that it would provide food for far more people than the livestock to which it is given. 

Poor people in the South who possess insufficient power in the marketplace, due to inadequate income, tend not to count in the food equation. Approximately 80% of all food commodities produced globally is guzzled by the richest 20%. Perhaps unsurprisingly the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates there are now 1 billion overweight adults with at least 300 million of them obese, a figure which is almost identical to the worldwide total of people who exist in a condition of food insecurity.

Furthermore, many farmers have been obliged to produce cash crops for export as well as for alternative energy. There is now more corn being grown than staple food items such as wheat or rice, as corn can be used for bio-fuel. According to the World Bank (WB) as much as 60% of the worldwide rise in corn production went to the US alone. Conversely, the reduction in wheat and rice production has led to shortages in these crops thus triggering higher market prices and their rationing. This concentration on producing crops and food for export instead of domestic consumption has exacerbated the Food Crisis, which began in 2007, as for many in the South the price of food procured from the international marketplace is prohibitive.
 
Aditya Chakrabortty, writing in The Guardian, referred to a confidential World Bank report, which calculated that bio-fuels had forced global food prices up by 75%, through diverting the production of grain for food to fuel, the encouragement of farmers to devote land for bio-fuel production and financial speculation in grains due to the increase in bio-fuels.

The volatility of food prices, particularly of those essential for the staple diets of the poor, has had a drastic impact upon the nutritional intake of hundreds of millions of people. Studies have shown that staple foods are responsible for between 40 and 80% of energy intake for the majority of population groups in the South, with poor households positioned in the upper range. Even a slight increase in the price of staple items can therefore have a significant impact upon their overall levels of food consumption. Families that might have been able to previously afford two or more meals a day may now have to cut back to just one as well as availing of less costly ingredients of inferior nutritional value. Women and children tend to be the worst affected. Children, as discussed above, often suffer from retarded physical and mental development whereas women frequently do without in order that their children can eat.

While governments in the South have tried to tackle the food crisis and stem the rising prices of staple items through the provision of subsidies as well as cash and food assistance, the resources at their disposal are limited. It is therefore imperative that the North play a role in overcoming this crisis, not only by making development assistance available but also by revisiting their policies in areas such as bio-fuels.

What is required is a complete rethinking of the manner in which agricultural production in the South, and indeed in the North, is viewed almost exclusively in terms of the market-value of the commodities it produces with virtually no consideration being given to the nutritional needs of people, particularly those living in poverty. The pressure placed on states in the South to adopt a policy of encouraging the production of cash crops for export should be abandoned. Instead, substantial resources need to be made available for agriculture and rural development that supports domestic food security needs and which also benefits the livelihoods of the local communities.