 BY RAMESH JAURA
IDN-InDepthNews Service
BERLIN (IDN) - Hunger is far from ‘sexy’ -- and yet it is the central theme of two new reports published two days ahead of the World Food Day Oct. 16 when conforming to the “same procedure as every year” the well-fed of planet earth juggle statistics as if these were crystal balls predicting ways toward a hunger-free world.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been seeking ways out of a hungry world -- comprising 1002 million this year -- at what has been described as a High Level Expert Forum Oct. 12-13. The Forum is part of its ‘How to Feed the World in 2050’ exercise done about four weeks in advance of the World Summit on Food Security Nov. 16-18 in Rome.
FAO has in fact published its “annual hunger report” -- an expression that conveys the impression that hunger is after all as normal as a road accident in a civilized and globalized world. The report states what sounds like a ‘sensational revelation’ that economic crisis is devastating for the world’s hungry. “The combination of food and economic crises has pushed the number of hungry people worldwide to historic levels -- more than one billion people are undernourished,” according to FAO estimates.
The report then springs another surprise when it points out that nearly all the world’s undernourished live in developing countries. In Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 642 million people are suffering from chronic hunger; in Sub-Saharan Africa 265 million; in Latin America and the Caribbean 53 million; in the Near East and North Africa 42 million -- and in developed countries 15 million, according to FAO's “annual hunger report” published in conjunction with the World Food Programme (WFP).
The report goes on to say that even before the recent crises, the number of undernourished people in the world had been increasing slowly but steadily for the past decade. “Good progress had been made in the 1980s and early 1990s in reducing chronic hunger, largely due to increased investment in agriculture following the global food crisis of the early 1970s,” maintains the report.
But between 1995-1997 and 2004-2006, when the world’s rich and well-fed sharply curtailed official development assistance (ODA) devoted to agriculture, the number of hungry people increased in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. Gains in hunger reduction were later reversed in this region as well, as a result of the food and economic crises, notes the report.
“The rise in the number of hungry people during both periods of low prices and economic prosperity and the very sharp rises in periods of price spikes and economic downturns shows the weakness of the global food security governance system,” FAO notes in yet another revelation.
A second report also published Oct. 14, but far more in-depth than FAO’s, points out that twenty-nine countries around the world have alarming or extremely alarming levels of hunger, and thirteen countries have actually seen increases in their hunger levels since 1990.
The 2009 Global Hunger Index report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) finds out that the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) scored the worst, followed by Burundi, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Chad, and Ethiopia.
GENDER INEQUALITIES
New this year in IFPRI report is that it also points out that high rates of hunger are strongly linked to gender inequalities, especially in terms of literacy and access to education. It also highlights which countries are most vulnerable to the global economic downturn.
“Low-income countries are being hurt by the food and financial crises,” explains Klaus von Grebmer, lead author of the report and communications director at IFPRI. “The crises have significantly reduced purchasing power and income-earning opportunities for poor people, who spend up to 70 percent of their income on food, while food prices in many countries are still higher than several years ago.”
The Global Hunger Index has been released in advance of World Food Day for the fourth year by IFPRI, Germany’s Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide. The Index ranks countries on three leading indicators -- prevalence of child malnutrition, rates of child mortality, and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient -- and combines them into one score.
“Data used in the Index come from 2007 and earlier years (the most recent available), and thus rankings only partially account for the impact of the food crisis, and do not reflect the effects of the financial crisis,” says the report. However, the report does compare Index rankings with International Monetary Fund (IMF) indicators of vulnerability to the crises.
Countries that suffer from alarming levels of hunger are also very vulnerable to the global recession -- Burundi and DRC being prime examples. The areas of vulnerability are trade, foreign direct investment, international aid, and remittances.
Overall, the 2009 Index candidly illustrates that despite regional differences, progress in reducing hunger remains slow. Since 1990, the global score has declined by less than 25 percent. Most of this progress has been made in Southeast Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, which have lowered their Index scores by more than 40 percent over the past two decades.
Global Hunger Index scores, however, remain “distressingly high” throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa, which has made the least progress in combating hunger, with only a 13 percent decline in its score since 1990.
Of the ten countries that have seen the largest increase in their Index scores, nine are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and DRC’s score has increased by an appalling 53 percent. Africa is also home to the highest proportion of undernourished people (76 and 68 percent of the population, respectively, in the DRC and Eritrea) and the world’s highest child mortality rate, which stands at 26 percent in Sierra Leone.
Despite some progress over the past 20 years, the situation is also alarming in South Asia, which actually scored worse than Sub-Saharan Africa on the 2009 Global Hunger Index, largely because of widespread child malnutrition. In Bangladesh and India, more than 40 percent of children are underweight. Sri Lanka, which has been committed to universal education and reproductive health care, has been successful at reducing hunger, and stands out as an important exception in the region.
“Women’s educational level and status or power relative to men’s in households and communities significantly affect children’s nutrition,” says Agnes Quisumbing, report co-author and IFPRI senior research fellow. “In South Asia, women’s low social status and limited access to schooling have dire consequences for the nutrition, health, and wellbeing of both mothers and their children.”
To better assess the links between hunger and gender inequality, IFPRI compared the 2009 Global Hunger Index rankings to the World Economic Forum’s 2008 Global Gender Gap Index, which measures the wellbeing of women relative to men.
Countries with the most severe hunger problems also had high levels of gender inequality. The situation is especially serious in Chad, which ranks fifth worst on the Global Hunger Index, second in terms of gender inequality, and has a shockingly low female literacy rate of 13 percent, compared to 41 percent for men.
This negative trend, however, can be reversed. IFPRI research shows that equalizing men’s and women’s status would reduce the number of malnourished children by 13.4 million in South Asia and by 1.7 million in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Knowing that hunger and gender inequality go hand-in-hand, an important step to ending world hunger is empowering women and eradicating gender disparities in education, health, economic participation, and political opportunities,” says Joachim von Braun, IFPRI director general.
“After decades of slow progress in the fight against hunger,” he adds, “child malnourishment is now on the rise due to recent economic developments. It is imperative that commitments made at the G20 and other global policy meetings are swiftly transformed into real action in cooperation with developing countries.” (IDN-InDepthNews/14.10.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews Service
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