The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations recently issued
the first installment of a new annual report investigating hunger and malnutrition
throughout the world. The introduction to The State of Food Insecurity In The
World 1999 says, “This and subsequent editions of The State of Food Insecurity
in the World will serve as regular progress reports on global and national efforts
to reach the goal set by the World Food Summit in 1996 — to reduce the number
of undernourished people in the world by half by the year 2015.”

So how is the world doing at reducing hunger and malnutrition? Pretty good,
according to the FAO, but not good enough to meet the goals set in 1996 (though
as will become clear the goal of a 50% reduction was probably unrealistic given
the political situation in the most chronically hungry parts of the world).

According to the FAO, in 1995/97 approximately 790 million people in the developing
world did not have enough to eat. This represent almost a 5% decline in hunger
since 1990/92 when approximately 830 to 840 million people in the developing
world didn’t get enough to eat and an enormous improvement since 1979/81 when
the FAO estimated 920 million people in the developing world were hungry. Since
1979/81 the percentage of people in the developing world suffering from hunger
has fallen to 30 percent of the population to slightly less than 18 percent
— a 40 percent decline in only two decades.

The 40 million decline since 1990/92 is a bit deceptive, however, because it
hides two contrasting trends — a steep decline in hunger in a handful of countries,
especially in Asia contrasted with an increase in hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa.
From 1980-1996, for example, 4 countries in the Asia Pacific lost ground in
conquering hunger while 8 countries significantly improved their ability to
feed their population. In Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, 22 countries saw
significant increases in hunger while only 10 saw significant improvement in
hunger.

The effects of hunger are clear to see in the developing world. According to
the FAO, two out of five children there are stunted while one in three is underweight,
and a stunning one in ten is wasted (a low weight-to-height ratio indicative
of a recent period of starvation or severe disease).

While the report was welcome, the FAO included a section which this reader
found disturbing — an analysis of hunger in the developed world. Certainly
hunger exists in the developed world, but the FAO cited questionable statistics
to give the impression that there is widespread hunger in rich countries such
as the United States.

Over a headline screaming, “Survey finds severe hunger in 800,000 US households,”
the FAO. This conclusion is completely unwarranted by the evidence. The reality
is that a survey of several thousand U.S. families found that about 1 percent
reported a child had went an entire day without eating any food in a 3-month
period because of a lack of money to buy food. Certainly this is a serious problem,
but it doesn’t even come close to the sort of problems experienced in the developing
world. Although a child not eating for a day is something always to be avoided,
there is no evidence of the sort of stunting or wasting reported in other countries
— in fact the major food-related health problem among poor children is obesity
rather than being too thin. Such sensationalist figures, unfortunately, may
cause people and agencies to focus on hunger in developed countries rather than
in developing countries even though the two are both qualitatively and qualitatively
different.

The The State of Food Insecurity In The World, 1999 by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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