Will World Hunger Ever be Eliminated?

World hunger refers to the multitudes of people presently facing the risk of an insufficient (quantity) or inadequate (quality) food supply, something known as food insecurity. This problem has led to detriments from the insidious, such as stunted growth and a greater risk of contracting disease , to the obvious, namely starvation and death.

So, how widespread is world hunger and how great is the problem anyway? The World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations (UN) reports that daily, over 800 million people go hungry while the Hunger Site says that every 3.2 seconds, someone in the world dies of hunger.

Most of the world's hungry (over 40%) are concentrated in China and India, with the rest found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America . And even developed nations such as the USA and Britain have millions of hungry people within their borders.

So can this daunting problem be eliminated from the world in the near future? A conclusion can be made if we examine both the causes of food insecurity as well as the steps being presently taken. If the former can be eliminated and/or the latter works, it would then logically follow that world hunger would soon vanish.

So, what causes world hunger? Immediately, famine-causing disasters such as droughts or floods, such as those which occurred recently in Mozambique, spring to mind. The cause is obvious: when farmland and infrastructure such as roads are destroyed or rendered useless, an immediate regional shortage of food develops, causing food insecurity and hunger.

Will disasters ever go away? Obviously not. And as the effects of human activity such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels causes rivers to silt up and the atmosphere to warm up, the frequency and severity of weather fluctuations looks set to increase dramatically. Witnesses to this trend include the severe 1995 floods along the Yangtze River in China and the harsh El Nino/El Nina inspired droughts in Africa and South America.

On the other hand, humans have indeed (of late) been trying both to reduce the problems causing the disasters (through efforts to protect the environment) as well as improving their ability to detect and predict impending disasters and reduce their impact on humans. Indeed, the advent of weather satellites has meant that the impending famine caused by the present drought in the Horn of Africa (poised to affect 15 million people in 8 countries including Ethiopia, already synonymous with starvation), was actually predicted over a year ago by scientists. As a result, the UN long ago began taking measures to prevent it, ensuring that the victims would not be so hard hit.

However, disasters are not the main cause of the widespread, insidious hunger which affects one in seven people on this earth. In fact, it is not a lack of food which makes people hungry. It is rather the inability to afford an adequate diet that causes food insecurity. For instance, out of the 40 poorest and hungriest nations on earth, a stunning 36 actually export food to richer countries such as the USAi!

So is poverty likely to go away? Unfortunately for the billion people who still live in poverty todayvi, the prognosis is uncertain. The main causes of poverty are poor economic policies leading to economic disaster such as those in Indonesia and Russia a few years back, as well as the fact that poverty is a viscous cycle. It is a well-known fact that poor children have less access to education and thus good-paying jobs, and also grow up to become less economically-productive adults due to malnutrition and greater susceptibility to disease. These poor adults then give rise to the next generation of poor children and the cycle repeats itself. Both of these causes are rather abstract, complex ones that do not necessarily lend themselves to being eradicated.

The good news is that poverty is in decline - the last half-century saw a greater decrease than the previous five combined. As a result, the percentage of malnourished has fallen by a third since 1960 . Also, a 1997 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report has estimated the cost of eradicating poverty at a mere one per cent of global income , about $80 billion.

Significantly, governments actually have a moral duty to help, something most recently reiterated by world leaders at the 1998 World Food Summit in Rome. This moral duty to rid the world of hunger is enshrined in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNHR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of 1966 which declare that every human being has the right to sufficient food .

Rich nations help mainly by providing aid both for emergency relief as well as for programmes designed to solve the problem of poverty, such as subsidised education. Also, governments develop programmes such as the Food Stamp and School Lunch programmes in the U.S. that provide free food for people with food insecurity . However, the sad truth is that organisations such as the WFP and C.A.R.E. are desperately short of funds.

While rich donor nations have repeatedly promised to give the UN target of 0.7% of their GNP in aid to poor countries, a promise most recently reaffirmed at the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen, only the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Sweden have ever met this target . In fact, the amount of aid given annually has been steadily decreasing, with most countries planning to make even further cuts in aid budgeting. Clearly, the outlook for reaching UN goals of halving the numbers of hungry people by 2015 are dismalii.

Donor nations also have to fight what UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan calls "donor fatigue", where donors feel that they have done enough. Getting governments to provide aid for disasters which have not yet happened has also proven to be difficult. Despite warning the global community of the impending famine in the Horn of Africa over a year ago, the region has seen little of the already insufficient promised aid, with the result that hundreds of children have already starved to deathiv.

Additionally, providing aid is by no means a panacea, because aid can cause economic dependence in recipient nations, for instance in Rwanda which received aid amounting to 125% of its GDPx. Also, the nations which receive the most aid (China, Indonesia, Israel)x are often chosen for political reasons such as affiliation or business opportunities, while many other nations (Haiti, Eritrea) go relatively unaided.

Other possible solutions include a revival of urban farming, with residents growing food on rooftops and public lands. Such schemes already account for the half the amount of vegetables eaten in cities like Havana, Cuba. Yet another possibility to solving world hunger would be genetic engineering, which promises to increases crop yields per unit area of farmland and also enable crops to grow in conditions unsuitable for normal crop varieties. High tech-farming methods such as hydroponics and aeroponics also point to possible solutions to producing food in an ever more crowded and urban landscape.

Evidently, the two main causes of world hunger - disaster and poverty are unlikely to fade away on their own because the former is simply a fact of living on earth while the latter is a deep-rooted, self-propagating cycle. At the same time, while the main solutions to these problems, namely early-warning systems and foreign aid might help to reduce the problem of world hunger to some extent, the manifold economic and political complications that surround the giving of aid makes this unlikely to be a quick fix. Perhaps someday world hunger will be successfully eliminated since this is by no means impossible, but sadly this does not seem likely to happen within the next few decades.

References:
Jones, Gallagher & McFalls 1988 Social Problems - Issues, Opinions and Solutions. McGraw-Hill.
UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report: The State of Food Insecurity in the World 1999
World Hunger Year website, quoting figures from the USDA, 1999
CNN report, New famine looms in Horn of Africa, 6 April 2000
UN World Food Programme website New Internationalist Magazine Rich and Poor - The Facts, issue 310/March 1999 Nikki an der Gaag
Poverty: Challenging the Myths, New Internationalist issue 310/March 1999 World Hunger Education Service Special Report: The right to adequate food is a basic human right
Hunger Notes Online, June 1998
World Hunger Year website Hunger, Poverty & Homelessness in the U.S.
New Internationalist Magazine Aid - The Facts, issue 285/November 1996

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