925 million of world’s population still hungry

In spite of efforts that have been made so far by governments the world over, to half the global population of those who starve daily because they do not have access to food, current estimates say 925 million still go hungry.

This figure however, represents an improvement over last year’s estimate of 1.02 billion published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, which is 15 percent of the estimated world population of 6.8 billion.

According to the FAO, last year alone, the number of people deprived of food rose from 915 million to 1.02 billion, despite interventions being made globally to meet the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving hunger by the year 2015.

Of that number Asia and the Pacific had the largest chunk with 642 million hungry, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa with 265 million, then Latin America and the Caribbean, 53 million, Near East and North Africa 42 and developed countries 15 million.

Current figures suggest last year’s number has been greatly improved upon in 2010, having reduced by an impressive 95 million to put the latest figure at 925 million.

Meanwhile, a decade ago when the international community committed itself to halving the percentage of people who go hungry by year 2015 as the first of eight interventions agreed in what was and has since been known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the population of the world’s hungry stood at 830 million, according to officials of the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations agency responsible for distributing food aid.

This figure later increased to 854 million in 2006 before increasing phenomenally by close of 2009 to 1.02 billion.

Commenting on the current state of hunger in the world ahead of the MDG Review Summit, which takes place from today – Monday, September 20, 2010 to Wednesday in a statement titled “We Can Halve Hunger, If We Change the Way We Do Business”, Shenggen Fan, Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), urged world leaders to re-examine their policies and their commitment to enable them realise that goal.

Setting the tone for the Review Summit officially called the High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly in New York to be hosted by the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, Shenggen Fan said “the goal of halving hunger by 2015, enshrined in the first MDG, remains extremely challenging. The situation demands more innovative, better focused, and cost-effective action.”

Enumerating five of such actions, he said to reduce hunger: “We need to increase combined investment in agriculture and social protection,” adding “Interventions combining agriculture and social protection have high payoffs, since they can protect the poorest in the short term and increase their productive capacity in the long run.”

According to him, evidence from Ethiopia shows that households with access to a safety net programme and a complementary agricultural intervention are more likely to be food secure, borrow for productive purposes, and use improved agricultural technologies than households that have access to just one component.

The IFPRI Director General suggested that the private sector and emerging economies must be encouraged to play a greater role in reducing hunger in developing countries and that firms must be given the right incentives to move beyond a short-term focus on corporate philanthropy and to develop inclusive business initiatives that help fight hunger and integrate smallholders into the global value chain.

“Many of the world’s poorest people are smallholder farmers, and moving them out of poverty will involve increasing their productivity and linking them to high-value markets. Emerging economies need to be fully integrated into the global food security agenda, since they are ever more prominent in trade and investment, and in providing development assistance,” he stated.

For his third action, Shenggen Fan recommended that developing countries must lead the fight against hunger with their own strategies. “Some issues—such as climate change, trade, and disease control—need to be addressed at the international level, and individual countries must set their strategies in a global context,” he stressed.

Opining that the most effective, efficient, and sustainable policies are those most attuned to local reality, the IFPRI Director General cited China, India, Vietnam, and others that have enjoyed agrarian and economic success as a result of country-led policies, such as partial liberalisation, that were considered unorthodox because of their content, sequencing, or both.

He said innovation must be encouraged because pilot projects and experiments have the potential to improve policymaking, by giving decision makers information about what works before policies are implemented across the board.

“Experimentation can improve the success rate of reforms as successful pilot projects are scaled up and unsuccessful ones are eliminated. Policymakers need to allow experiments to be monitored impartially, and they must rapidly transform the lessons learned into large-scale reforms,” Shenggen Fan urged.

Bemoaning that decision makers at the global, regional, and national levels have made commitments to enhance food security which they have often not followed through, he emphasised that “Governments and other institutions do need to keep their promises,” adding, “Mechanisms to effectively ensure accountability and measure progress are urgently needed.”

The IFPRI boss concluded that the global food governance system itself needs to be reformed to work better, saying “For example, the extremely volatile wheat prices seen in recent weeks remind us of the need for global institutional arrangements to prevent export bans, other forms of ad hoc protectionism, and excessive speculation.”

He expressed optimism that although only five years remain until the deadline of 2015, the objective of halving world hunger can be achieved, “but only if we pursue it with increased vigour and innovation.”

Conversely though, according to Jacques Diouf, the Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), who spoke at a news conference, which was broadcast on the Web, “the latest hunger data indicate that the very first goal, reducing the number of hungry people in the world to half of what it was in 1990, will be virtually impossible to meet.”

According to the latest report, it is estimated that the number of undernourished people in the Asia-Pacific region would decline 12 percent from the 2009 figure to 578 million, because of economic growth there.

The seven which countries account for two-thirds of the world’s hungry people are China, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Pakistan, the report says, indicating that India and China alone account for 40 percent of the world’s hungry.

But sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of undernourished or hungry people, which makes up 30 percent of its population, it said.

In a report written by Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times, Mr. Diouf said “The current dramatic situation is a result of the neglect of agriculture in development policies over the past three decades.”

More than 70 percent of the extremely poor live in rural parts of developing countries, he said, adding that those areas need investment in seeds and fertilizer and better access to markets to reduce hunger.

Also speaking on the state of the world’s hungry at a news conference in Rome, Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, said still, the hunger number remains “shockingly high,” especially since success stories in African, Asian and Latin American countries that once suffered chronic malnourishment suggest that a permanent reversal should be possible.

By Edmund Smith-Asante