DEVELOPMENT: More People Go Hungry in World

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 14 1999 (IPS) - The United Nations is complaining that, nearly three years since the World Food Summit pledged to reduce world hunger by half, the number of people in the world facing starvation has increased by about eight million.

“Globally, there is enough food to feed the world,” says Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), “But to our shame, we live in a world where food rots and people starve.”

In the 1998 annual report of the World Food Programme (WFP) – a sister organisation of the Rome-based FAO – Diouf points out that, despite significant reductions in hunger and malnutrition in some developing regions, there has been no marked change in the number of chronically undernourished people overall.

The 1996 World Food Summit in Rome pledged to halve the number of undernourished people from 826 million to about 413 million by the year 2015.

But far from achieving any reductions, the number of people living in hunger is on the rise: from 826 million in 1996 to more than 830 million in 1999.

These are people living in the developing world who “continue to suffer from a lack of sufficient food to eat on a daily basis,” Diouf points out.

Early this year, Ambassador Francesco Paolo Fulci of Italy, president of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), singled out the World Food Summit as an”illuminating example” of a UN talk-fest long on pledges but short on action.

Fulci said the tragedy of most UN conferences is that they fail to meet their targets or implement their highly ambitious action plans.

Almost three years have passed since the World Food Summit announced the “noble principle” of reducing starvation, he noted. “But, what has happened meanwhile is that the total number of chronically undernourished people in developing countries has not decreased, but increased,” he added.

“What we need is more concrete action and less talking.”

Diouf argues that hunger is a violation of human dignity, and that the risk of starvation prevents the poor from mastering new skills, adopting beneficial new technology, and otherwise taking advantage of development opportunities.

“Unless we break the cycle of hunger, the next generation will be caught in the same trap,” he adds.

WFP Executive Director Catherine Bertini says that the year 1998 was marked by an unprecedented combination of events that pushed up world hunger levels.

As a result, the number of people fed by WFP in 1998 rose to nearly 75 million – the highest number in any single year – and women and girls accounted for more than half of the beneficiaries.

The rise in hunger levels was attributed to several factors: climatic catastrophes like Hurricane Mitch in Central America and the Caribbean; widespread floods in Asia; economic collapse in Indonesia; a resumption of bitter civil wars in Angola, Guinea- Bissau, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; and steady, long-term conflicts such as in Somalia and southern Sudan.

According to the WFP report, most beneficiaries of relief food (about 40 million) were victims of natural disasters – droughts, floods and crop failures. Also for the first time for some years, the larger number of recipients of WFP food relief aid were in Asia.

Bertini says the financial crisis Indonesia resulted in “massive shortages of food and created a new population of hungry poor from the ranks of middle-class citizens.”

At the same time, natural disasters, which traditionally have been causes of food insecurity, produced increasingly serious effects in 1998.

Hurricane Mitch was the biggest natural disaster to strike Central America and the Caribbean in 200 years, while both Bangladesh and China suffered devastating floods – in the case of Bangladesh, the worst for more than 100 years.

“Many experts believe that these disasters are merely the first indications of the devastation likely to be wrought by continuing climate change and environmental degradation,” warns Bertini.

Forecasts for 1999 indicate that there will likely continue to be an increase in the number of countries suffering emergencies, and the number of people needing humanitarian assistance. “We face an increased threat of famine, malnutrition and endemic hunger,” warns Bertini.

In a foreword to the WFP report, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says that in the age of the sound bite, it is often easier to get resources for humanitarian emergencies than for development.

“Yet effective development interventions increase people’s resilience to shocks, and so reduce the need for future emergency assistance.” he argues.

“Those of us who live in countries with sufficient food often take this for granted. But for the one-sixth of the world population who are chronically undernourished, economic and social development can come only after their food needs have been met.”