Despite gains, millions go hungry

Trends in undernutrition in developing countries, 1969-2010

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), FAOSTAT Statistical Database (FAO, Rome, 1997).

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) organized a World Food Summit in 1996 with the goal of reducing the number of undernourished people to half their current level by no later than 2015. Even though governments made no financial commitments, the summit planners did assemble a mass of data on food and its availability, little of it encouraging. According to FAO projections, the chronically undernourished portion of the Earth’s population is expected to decrease over the next decade or so by more than 10 percent from current levels. (See Despite Gains, Millions Go Hungry.) Yet that will still leave some 680 million people with insufficient food in 2010. Sub-Saharan Africa will be particularly hard-hit, with more than 260 million people -- about one third of the population -- lacking adequate food [10].

The most widely recognized cause of malnutrition is poverty -- the lack of money to buy food or the means, land, resources, and knowledge needed to grow it. Yet, there are other factors at work as well, both environmental and social. A shortage of potable water or water for agriculture -- a shortage felt by more than one quarter of the world’s people -- is likely to be reflected in poor child and adult health [11]. Local water scarcity can be more devastating than food shortages because it is more difficult and expensive to trade water among regions than it is to trade agricultural products [12].

Famines caused by continent-wide droughts were once considered inevitable occurrences in Earth’s cycle of calamities. Dry spells continue, but their effects have been reduced in recent years through good planning and early-warning systems established by international, national, and regional aid agencies, as well as allied nongovernmental aid agencies. Yet famine’s destructiveness has not been eliminated. The “natural” famines of the past have been replaced with famines created as a result of localized wars and the consequent displacement of civilians. Often those who foment these wars use starvation intentionally as a weapon. Even countries that are not experiencing conflicts are affected if they are neighbors of areas in upheaval. Hungry refugees quickly become an entire region’s problem. Refugees suffer particularly serious effects because they usually have no rights to land or other resources and are often concentrated in areas that have marginal soils and scarce water resources.

The prognosis for ending world hunger is not encouraging. There is little prospect for stopping the kinds of wars and local upheavals that often cause starvation and malnutrition. Just as troubling, nations in the developed world show less and less interest in sending aid of any sort (other than military) to the less developed world. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development document a continuing decline in public aid from well-off nations to developing countries, with a 4 percent drop in aid from 1995 to 1996 [13]. Though the United Nations adopted a covenant as far back as 1966 declaring a universal "right to adequate food," this proclamation has a somewhat hollow ring as the world approaches the end of the century with hunger still much in evidence [14].

Despite the discouraging news, the battle against malnutrition continues. Indeed, some countries have succeeded in reducing malnutrition. In the 10-year period ending in 1991, Thailand reduced nutritional deficiency in preschool children by two thirds. It did so by establishing a national goal to increase the amount of protein and calories in children’s diets; an educational program stressing breast-feeding, hygiene, and home production of nutritious foods; a national surveillance effort that weighed and examined every preschool child at 3-month intervals; and school lunch programs [15].

Thailand’s efforts were also aided by significant economic growth during this period, which raised average incomes and increased access to food. Over the longer term, such economic development is one of the most potent tools against continuing malnutrition.

References and notes

10. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Agriculture and Food Security: Looking Forward--Continued Gain, Continued Pain. Available online at: http://www.fao.org/wfs/fs/e/agricult/AgLoo-e.htm (September 25, 1997).

11. United Nations (U.N.) Department of Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development, Critical Trends: Global Change and Sustainable Development (U.N., New York, 1997), p. 49.

12. World Meteorological Organization (WMO), A Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World (WMO, Geneva, 1997), p. 28.

13. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, "Aid and Other Resource Flows in 1996," June 18, 1997 (press release). Available online at: http://www.oecdwash.org/PRESS/PRESRELS/news9757.htm (September 8, 1997).

14. The United Nations first spoke of a human right to food in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1966, the body adopted an International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizing "the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food" (Per Pinstrup-Andersen, David Nygaard, and Annu Ratta, "The Right to Food: Widely Acknowledged and Poorly Protected," International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) 2020 Brief 22 (IFPRI, Washington, D.C., 1995). The United States did not sign the covenant because policymakers feared it might encourage lawsuits by malnourished citizens; U.S. General Accounting Office, Food Security: Preparations for the 1996 World Food Summit, GAO/-NSIAD-97-44 (GAO, Washington, D.C., 1996), pp. 6-7.

15. Op. cit. 3, p. 30.