World Hunger

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017 finds that 815 million people were undernourished worldwide in 2016.

The increase - 38 million more people than the previous year - is largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.

Update (October 21):  Vijay Prashad comments on Food Security report.

War certainly produces hunger, but hunger in turn produces war. The pressure on the world’s agriculture from climate-change is now an acknowledged fact. But this is not enough. The descent of agro-business firms, with the advantage of intellectual property rights behind them, has struck against small farmers with a vengeance. There are any number of reports that show that the crisis of hunger can only be solved by the encouragement of small farms, whose farmers are themselves victims of the hunger crisis (three quarters of the world’s hungry live in rural areas). Even Bill Gates has suggested that the solution to the hunger crisis—and therefore to some of the instability that has led to so many wars —is the small farmer. But how can the small farmers emerge as the saviors when they are under immense pressure from capitalist agriculture that has produced ‘efficiencies’ along the global commodity chain that advantage what they do over what the small farmer does? These capitalist agricultural firms process food beyond nutrition and are thereby responsible for the obesity crisis in the West, the mirror image of the hunger crisis in the Global South. Will there be a spotlight shone on their activities?

Update (September 8, 2018):  Prashad ties increasing inequality to hunger.

It is true that war and climate change are major factors that leave people without access to food. Starvation follows aerial bombardment and rising tides. But, it is even more important to focus on the much wider problem of inequality and poverty that make hunger a normal part of life—the constant sound in the heads of the impoverished.

Data on poverty should make any sensitive person pause. The United Nations and the World Bank keep track of poverty figures. There is always some disagreement about the methodology followed by the analysts. But, there is near consensus that half of the world’s peoples—in excess of three billion people—live on less than $2.50 a day, the benchmark for poverty. Of these people, at least 1.3 billion live on less than $1.25 a day, the standard of extreme poverty. Hunger in this part of the planet is a normal part of life. As food costs rise, notes the World Bank, hunger increases. The rise of food prices in 2010 itself pushed 44 million people into poverty. UNICEF calculates that each day 22,000 children die due to poverty—most of them from malnutrition and starvation.

Update (December 17, 2020):  Debbie Weingarten reports on alternatives to the industrial food system.

If COVID-19 was a test, the food system failed. The urgency is only growing, as increased poverty, ecological disasters and global public health crises threaten food security in lockstep with the climate crisis. Continuing the status quo is likely to endanger global food supplies, reduce crop yields, make food less nutritious and drive up prices.