Editorial
The hungry billion
ONE with nine zeroes on the right looks quite tidy as a figure, but it gives an uneasy feeling when FAO says that the number of hungry people in the world has reached a historic high of more than one billion. FAO organised a three-day summit of the heads of states and governments in Rome from November 16 to 18 with a view to achieving its goal of eradicating global hunger by 2025.
Only 60 leaders, most of them from developing countries, attended the summit. The lone G-8 leader to attend the summit was the Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, who hosted the summit. The FAO had expected that the rich countries would participate in the summit as around $44 billion are required to end global hunger and there has been little progress on the $20 billion in agriculture aid promised in July by G-8 countries.
However, it augurs well that the summit on food security has adopted a 41-point declaration promising to take urgent action to eradicate hunger. The idea of setting a timeline for eradication of hunger was presented to summit by FAO and supported by Latin American, Middle Eastern and African nations. But it was rejected by the US, the European Union, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
The declaration of the summit reaffirmed its commitment to the UN Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of hungry people by 2015. The director general of FAO regretted their failure in setting a timeline for total eradication of global hunger.
Shortly before the delegates from 192 countries approved the declaration, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on the rich countries to tackle global hunger, saying that the world has more than enough food, yet today more than one billion people are hungry. Pope Benedict, who spoke on the occasion, was also critical of the opulence and waste in the rich countries and blamed the greed of speculators in the food markets for soaring food prices and aggravation of hunger.
FAO estimated that about 960 million people in the world were chronically hungry in 2008. The head of the UN's World Food Programme said recently that high food prices had pushed another 105 million people into hunger in the first half of 2009, raising the number of chronically hungry people to over one billion.
Before the food crisis started in 2007, there were less than 850 million chronically hungry people in the world, a level that has been roughly constant since early 1990s, owing to the global fight against poverty. The food crisis has reversed the past quarter-century's slow but constant decline in the proportion of undernourished people in the developing world, the percentage of whom has risen to almost 18 percent.
Asia and the Pacific are the home to 642 million hungry people, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa with 265 million. Latin America and the Caribbean countries have 53 million hungry people while the Near East and North Africa have 42 million. A UN report said hunger in South Asia had reached its highest level in 40 years because of food price rises and global financial crisis.
The problem of hunger is related to income. When a poor family has a regular source of income, even high food prices do not make it chronically hungry. When poverty is compounded by unemployment, the number of hungry people rises. Global food prices came down from their peak two years back, still people in some poor countries are eating less.
Global hunger is also interconnected with climate change. Food security cannot be achieved without tackling climate change. Melting Himalayan glaciers and other climate change impacts pose a direct threat to food security of more than 1.6 billion people in South Asia. Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Afghanistan are particularly vulnerable to falling crop yields caused by glacier retreat, floods, draoghts, erratic rainfall and other climate change impacts.
The Chronic Poverty Report 2008-09, launched by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre presented a grim picture of extreme poverty in Bangladesh. According to the report, around three crore people in the country living in extreme poverty go hungry.
It worries us that one-sixth of humanity goes hungry today, while the world has enough food to feed all the 6.5 billion people on the planet. Such a situation clearly reveals that hunger is not a phenomenon resulting from food shortage only but also from denial of rights to food and lack of fair and equitable food governance system
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who played a commendable role in the summit, very rightly stressed the need for a fair and equitable food governance system both at national and international levels to fight the global hunger. The world leaders should pay heed to her statements in the summit.
The world leaders have pledged to reinforce their efforts for halving the incidence of hunger by 2015. They should also commit to invest in agriculture, particularly in the developing countries, as the rise in world's population to nine billion by 2050 will force doubling of the current food production.
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