Food, Food Everywhere, Nor a Crumb to Eat
By Masood H Kizilbash
Islamabad, Pakistan
Out of all challenges that humanity faces today, food poverty or extreme poverty-defined as a minimum level of income or expenditure level below which life is threatened -takes precedence. This is well-highlighted by a report “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World”, released by Food and Agriculture Organization in 2017. It states that “after steadily declining for over a decade, global hunger appears to be on the rise, affecting 11 percent of global population. This is despite the fact that “there is more than enough food production in the world to feed everyone.”
According to the yardstick of FAO, the average minimum daily requirement is about 1800 kilocalories per day per person. All those falling below this yardstick are considered suffering from under-nourishment. Based on this terminology, as many as 815 million people out of the global population of 7.6 billion, fell in the category of under-nourished in mid-2017. The report predicts a gloomy picture of future trends by stating that “after steadily declining over a decade, global hunger appears to be on the rise.”
The prediction of a rising trend in global hunger by FAO stares with contemptuous eyes at the Goals 1 & 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the member-states of UNOfor next 15 years (2015-2030) in the summit held in New York on 25th September, 2015, following termination of the life of Millennium Development Goals, set for the period 2000-2015. The Goal 1 of the SDG’s proclaims as ending poverty in all its forms and everywhere while Goal 2 as ending hunger, achieving food security and improved nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture. Both the Goals are identical with the Goal 1 in the MDG’s which envisaged eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by halving the proportion of the people whose income was less than one dollar a day and halving the proportion of people who suffered from hunger.
The UN released the Millennium Development Report in 2015, detailing the progress achieved in the implementation of the goals and targets. According to the report, extreme poverty declined significantly during the last two decades. In 1990 nearly half of the population in the developing world lived on $1.25 a day. That proportion dropped to 14 percent. With it, the number of people living in extreme poverty on the global basis came down from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015. On the face of it, it was indeed a laudable achievement. However, it was conditioned by four most important factors. Firstly, the baseline selected for evaluation of the MDG’s was 1990 instead of year of 2000 when the MDG’s were actually launched. Secondly, the global reduction in extreme poverty in China from 61 percent of the population in 1990 to only 4 percent in 2015 had a profound effect on the overall world figure because of a large size of China’s population in the global population. Thirdly, a rate of reduction in extreme poverty, as measured by the people living on $1.25 a day, was uneven for various regions with some recording a steep fall while some regions experienced only a marginal decline. Fourthly, the international poverty line as determined by the World Bank was not truly representative as it ignored inequality in the calculation of international poverty line as is recognized in the UNDP’s Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index.
While analyzing the causes of a rise in global hunger, FAO report 2017 mainly ascribes it to civil strife and terrorism. It states that“the food security situation visibly worsened in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South Eastern and Western Asia. This was most notable in situations of conflict, in particular where food security impacts of conflict were compounded by droughts of floods, linked in part to El Nifio phenomenon and climate-related shocks.” The other factors included in the report for nutritional outcomes are women’s educational level, resources allocated to national policies and programs for maternal infant and young children nutrition, access to clean water, basic sanitation and quality health services, lifestyle, food environment and systems and culture.
The analysis of rising hunger and poverty during the first eighteen months of the 15-year timeframe of the SDG’s is a warning to the international community. However, it misses out some very important points. The first and foremost is that of lack of income or purchasing power or iniquitous sharing of gross national income in our societies- a trend triggered during the last three decades under the impact of globalization and its policies. It has promoted concentration of national income in almost all countries of the world in a few hands with preponderant majority of population experiencing a downslide in their incomes even if the national income was growing. This underscores the urgency of recalculating inequality-adjusted international poverty line.
Secondly, an Agreement on Agriculture under the aegis of the World Trade Organization aimed at making the policies more market oriented and freeing trade domestically and internationally with the provision of withdrawing all subsidies on inputs and outputs had had a negative effect on agriculture in the Third World countries in the face of flagrant violation of the provision by the developed world through generous subsidies administered to their farmers. The provision needs to be re-visited. Thirdly, the goal of elimination of hunger from the globe in the SDG’s will require many shifts in the policies of the governments and the attitude of the people living in the Global North. If it happens, the goals of the SDG’s including elimination of extreme poverty and hunger will be attained.
(The writer is former Joint Chief Economist of the Planning Commission.
e-mail: masood_kizilbash@hotmail.com)
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