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World
Hunger Report:
842 Million Starve In The Midst Of Plenty
by Barry Mason, December 19, 2003
World hunger is increasing, with an estimated 842 million people
going to bed hungry every night. Most people suffering from
hunger live in Africa and Latin America, but 34 million are
in the former Soviet Union and 10 million live in the rich industrialised
countries.
This startling evidence of the growing division between rich
and poor on a world scale appears in a recent report published
by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Halving hunger was one of the UN Millennium Development Goals
announced in 1992. The number of people experiencing hunger
was supposed to be halved by 2015. Rather than decreasing as
the FAO anticipated, the number of hungry people has increased
by 4.5 million a year between 1995 and 1997 and from 1999 to
2001. Improved nutrition in some countries is being more than
offset by a decline in others.
Amongst the group of countries that suffered a reversal of falling
numbers of malnourished were some with large populations such
as Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. The report
states, “With reversals in many large countries and progress
slowing in others, the pattern of change in the developing countries
as a whole shifted from a declining to a rising trend. Between
1995-1997 and 1999-2001, the number of hungry people in the
developing countries increased by 18 million wiping out almost
half the decrease of 37 million achieved during the previous
five years. Unless significant gains are made in large countries
where progress has stalled, it will be difficult to reverse
this negative trend.”
The FAO report highlights the increase in the number of undernourished
in those countries it classifies as in transition. It is mainly
referring to the countries of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Figures for 1993-1995 of 25 million undernourished increased
to 34 million for 1999-2001—the bulk of the increase being in
the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former USSR), which
now has nearly 29 million or 10 percent of the population classified
as chronically hungry.
In these countries the report notes, “Economic transition has
been accompanied by far-reaching political and administrative
changes that have disrupted trade and exchange relations and
led to severe foreign exchange shortages. In addition, agricultural
production and marketing systems have broken down.”
HIV/AIDS plays a crucial role in the growth of hunger. The report
states, “The food crisis that threatened more than 14 million
people in Southern Africa in 2002-2003 brought into sharp focus
the interactions between HIV/AIDS and food security. It demonstrated
that hunger cannot be combated effectively in regions ravaged
by AIDS, unless interventions address the particular needs of
AIDS-affected households and incorporate measures to prevent
and to mitigate the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
Those countries where hunger has declined generally do not have
a high incidence of AIDS and have not been hit by natural disasters
such as drought. Their improvement is extremely precarious and
AIDS is spreading rapidly in many of them. Improved nutrition
in China and India could soon be reversed.
Reports from Southern Africa have warned of a new kind of emergency
in which short-term food shortages overlap with “an unprecedented
collapse of health, agricultural production and food security
that will endure for decades.”
The FAO predict that the AIDS epidemic will stretch well into
the century. In mainly claiming the lives of young adults, HIV
is severely reducing the number of agricultural workers. The
population left is dominated by the very young and the very
old.
The report states that by 2020 HIV will have killed 20 percent
of the agricultural workforce in Southern African and that currently
60-70 percent of farms are affected by loss of agricultural
workers. With the death of young adults the transmission of
agricultural knowledge and skills to the next generation is
being prevented.
Famine worsens the AIDS epidemic because those affected by famine
are more liable to move off the land to urban centres, where
the risk of HIV infection is higher and women and children may
end up selling sex for money and food—thus becoming more vulnerable
to HIV infection. Hunger also makes those already infected with
HIV more susceptible to opportunistic infections. Once they
have developed full-blown AIDS their capacity to absorb nutrition
from food is reduced. Even with drug therapy HIV/AIDS sufferers
need to have access to a better diet to help fight the effects
of the disease.
In a November 28 press release the World Food Programme Executive
Director explained, “Without food aid, the poorest people with
HIV will always have to choose between access to medical treatment
and their next meal—even where drugs may be free. We are talking
about whether to spend money on a bus fare to the nearest clinic
or buy basic foodstuffs. No one should have to make that choice.”
Some experts are beginning to talk about the interaction between
HIV and hunger as “new variant famine”—some have referred to
the conjunction as the “perfect storm.” In Zambia the deadly
combination is known as the “ugly sisters.” Following a tour
of Zambia last year the UN secretary general’s AIDS envoy, Stephen
Lewis, said, “It is an absolutely unanswerable measure of AIDS
on the one hand and hunger on another hand ... and it leads
to a kind of downward spiral on a country, which becomes irreversible
if a country does not fight back.”
This sentiment was echoed recently by Save the Children’s Southern
Africa regional director, Greg Ramm, who warned, “We are in
a downward spiral. The region as a whole is much more vulnerable
to minor shocks than it ever has been before.”
Drought has a major impact on food production. The report explains
that it accounts for 60 percent of food emergencies. Africa
is the driest continent after Australasia, but other countries
are affected by erratic rainfall. India receives 70 percent
of its rainfall within the short three-month monsoon period.
The report stresses the importance of the provision of irrigation,
explaining that whilst globally only 17 percent of cropland
is irrigated this irrigated cropland provides 40 percent of
the world’s food supply.
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR) held a conference in November in Nairobi under the title
Challenge Programme on Water and Food. The conference included
scientists, policy-makers and NGOs who met to discuss the issue
of food and water.
A statement issued at a press conference to launch the meeting
stated, “The region [sub-Saharan Africa] will face a 23 percent
shortfall in crop yields due to insufficient water supply and
cereal imports will have to more than triple to 35 million tons
in the next 23 years to keep pace with demand. Under these conditions
many poorer African countries will be unable to finance the
required imports of food leading to rising levels of hunger
and malnutrition and greater dependence on international financial
support for food aid.”
The statement quotes the Chairman of the Challenge Programme
on Water and Food Consortium, Professor Frank Rijsberman:
“If present trends continue the livelihoods of one third of
the world’s population will be affected by water scarcity by
2025. We could be facing annual losses equivalent to the entire
grain crops of India and the US combined. The crisis has to
be addressed comprehensively at all levels, from the way farmers
use water to international policy decisions that affect reforms
and investments in water management and infrastructure.”
Global warming and associated climate change is also having
an effect. At the recent climate talks in Milan on the Kyoto
protocol, UN organisations reported that effects of climate
change were leading to an extra 150,000 extra deaths a year.
Globally growing seasons are being shortened, adding to malnutrition.
Faced with this mounting crisis the FAO has little to offer.
It can only document an unfolding human catastrophe. FAO Director-General
Jacques Diouf writes in the foreword to the report, “If the
latest data tend to confirm our understanding of factors that
contribute to food security, they also confront us with another
difficult question: if we already know the basic parameters
of what needs to be done, why have we allowed hundreds of millions
of people to go hungry in a world that produces more than enough
food for every woman, man and child? Bluntly stated, the problem
is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will.”
The expertise to address the problem of world hunger exists,
but the political will does not exist on the part of the ruling
class in the most powerful industrialised countries. Dr. Tewolde
Egziabher of the Ethiopian Environmental Protection Authority
recently pointed to one of the ways in which the West has prevented
Ethiopia becoming self-sufficient in food. Western governments
and international financial institutions have insisted that
the private sector must control the Ethiopian food supply. They
have prevented the government building granaries and food depots
that could store grain from one year to the next. As a result,
over the last three years Ethiopia has experienced record harvests
but now faces famine again.
Ethiopia’s experience reveals the extent to which the growth
in world hunger is a manmade phenomenon. Prior to the reintroduction
of capitalism hunger was unknown in the Soviet Union during
peace time, despite a monumentally bureaucratic system of production
and distribution. Now 34 million people are chronically hungry
in countries where the agricultural land is as potentially productive
as any to be found in the United States or Canada.
The FAO offer no analysis of why 10 million go hungry in the
most industrialised countries. But their existence is an indictment
of the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the advanced
capitalist states. The figure shows that hunger is not limited
to particular continents, but is even affecting growing numbers
of workers in the Western countries.
See also:
UN Report Says One Billion Suffer Extreme Poverty
by David Rowan, July 28, 2003
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/unpo-j28.shtml
Source:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/hung-d19.shtml
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