The Hindu : Global food insecurity

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Oct 19, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Global food insecurity

MUCH HAS BEEN said during 2002 about a new global effort to accelerate sustainable development. At the Financing for Development conference and at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, two high level United Nations conferences that were held earlier this year, agendas were adopted and declarations were issued on a new partnership between rich and poor countries that would take the world to the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health, education and gender equality. But now we have a U.N. agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, issuing a warning that the world will not meet the first and most basic of goals — of halving by the 2015 the population suffering from chronic hunger.

The FAO warns, in its grimly titled report, State of Food Insecurity, that there are now 799 million people in the developing countries suffering from under-nourishment. The latest estimates show a 20 million decline between 1990-92 and 1998-2000 in the number afflicted by malnutrition, but this is far too slow a fall in the scale of chronic hunger in the world. The imperceptible progress that has been made in the war against global hunger since the early 1990s means that from now onwards, every year as many as 24 million people have to be lifted out of hunger (compared to the recent record of just 2.5 million a year) in order to achieve the 2015 target of just 400 million people coping with under-nourishment. Clearly, notwithstanding all the brave words spoken by the leaders of the world, the global fight against hunger is in urgent need of a much stronger thrust. If a reduction in the spread of under-nourishment is proving so hard to bring about, elimination of hunger must be a goal that keeps getting pushed further and further into the future. It is also worrying that what little progress has been made has been concentrated in a few countries — mainly China and six other nations in Asia and Africa. In the vast majority of developing countries, there is a slackening in the efforts to reduce malnutrition. Sadly, India is one country where even as there has been a small decline in the proportion of people experiencing under-nourishment (from 25 to 24 per cent between 1990-92 and 1998-2000), the absolute number has grown by as much as 18 million. This is consistent with the Indian development experience during the 1990s, when in spite of a fairly rapid growth in average per capita incomes, widening regional disparities have meant that the absolute number of people suffering from chronic hunger has increased.

It is not that the Governments of the developing countries do not know what needs to be done to make a major dent in this the most basic of problems afflicting the human condition. The agenda for action has been known for decades. What stands in the way is a combination of factors that includes Governments without political will, an unfavourable global environment and wrong priorities that get reflected in a paucity of resources. For Governments that care to listen, the FAO has listed once more all the elements of an age-old package. Since chronic hunger remains predominantly a rural phenomenon, land reform is as relevant today as it was decades ago. The FAO report shows once again, if evidence was needed, that no country has succeeded very much in lowering malnutrition without first implementing land reform. The other elements of the package include higher investment in rural infrastructure, restoration of degraded farmland, improved agricultural research and extension services and diversification of rural income. The FAO lists its familiar five-point programme which would cost the world $24 billion a year for achieving a dramatic reduction in the scale of under-nourishment. This may seem like an impossibly large amount in an era when few developed countries put their money alongside their lofty proclamations. But a monetary cost cannot be attached to reducing global hunger, the reduction — if not elimination — of which must be the first and foremost task of the international community.

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