IMANE KURDI As Ramadan begins, it seems to me a good time to talk about hunger. Not the “how long to go before Iftar" kind of hunger, of course, but the chronic, debilitating, killer hunger of undernourishment. The hunger faced by people who are poor, who are in zones ravaged by famine, who are in the middle of armed conflicts - or a lethal combination of the above. Fact number one: One in seven people is hungry. In the world today, more than a billion people do not have enough food to meet their daily requirements. They live mainly in developing countries (98 percent) and in rural areas, though hunger in urban areas is on the rise. Chronic hunger is most concentrated in seven countries that make up 65 percent of the world's population: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia, but we should not forget that hunger also exists on our doorstep, in neighboring communities and countries on our borders. Fact number two: Hunger is rising. At the 1996 World Food Summit, a goal was set to reduce by half the number of undernourished people on the planet by 2015. This meant reducing the number of hungry people from an average of 824 million over 1990-1992 to 412 million by 2015. In 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the figure had gone up to 925 million. Though much was done to reduce hunger in the 1990s, it has since started to edge up again. Climate change, the economic crisis, rising food prices and new armed conflicts are some of the reasons behind this increase, but they only give a partial explanation: the underlying causes of hunger remain the same. Fact number three: More than five million children die every year as a direct result of undernourishment. Every day thousands of children die from undernourishment and malnutrition. Not only do they not get enough calories to satisfy their bodies' basic needs, but they are also short of vital micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals we eat every day without noticing. The World Health Organization estimates that 100-140 million children are vitamin A deficient, leading to blindness in 250,000-500,000 of them, and that one half of these children die within a year of going blind. Zinc deficiency results in more than 800,000 child deaths per year. Meanwhile, UNICEF reports that 20 million children are born mentally impaired because their mothers did not get enough iodine in their diets while pregnant. The biggest form of malnutrition however is iron-deficiency, the prime cause of anaemia, affecting 30 percent of the world's population. Fact number four: There is enough food to feed everyone. It may seem obvious but it is worth emphasizing: people do not go hungry because there is not enough food but because they do not have access to food, often because they are too poor to buy it or to grow it, or because they are caught in the middle of a war zone or, in less than eight percent of cases, because there is a natural catastrophe or emergency. Fact number five: Agricultural productivity is declining. Last week the OECD and FAO published their latest Agricultural Outlook. The report notes that 25 percent of agricultural land is highly degraded, that water scarcity is a serious problem in many countries, that climatic changes are undoubtedly affecting agricultural production, and that agricultural output growth will slow to 1.7 percent annually over the next 10 years, down from over two percent in the previous decades. In other words, we face a real prospect of food insecurity as demand rises and supply shrinks, unless agricultural productivity is increased. Fact number six: One third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted or thrown away. Yes, I repeat, the FAO estimates that roughly one third of the food produced is lost or wasted! Fact number seven: Eradicating hunger is possible. One billion people a year is one billion too many. It is a shaming indictment on humanity that so many people today still die of hunger. They die not because there is not enough food but because they have been locked out of prosperity. Economic growth is the only way out of poverty, and consequently hunger. Feed the starving by all means, but what is needed is not the charity of free food but the fairness and decency of opening up international trade to developing countries, of giving them the means to invest in education and infrastructure, of helping them obtain the necessary technology and know-how to increase not only agricultural productivity but economic output. As OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria put it in the latest outlook report: “Governments should renounce trade-distorting practices and create an enabling environment for a thriving and sustainable agriculture underpinned by improved productivity." Tonight, as you sit before a sumptuous meal for suhoor and fill your stomach in readiness for tomorrow's fasting, have a thought for those for whom hunger is a constant reality and for the children who will not make it to adulthood because they had the misfortune of being born into poverty. It may be today's reality, but it need not be tomorrow's. Some of us might end up a little worse off as resources are redistributed globally, but is it fair to keep others (absolutely) poor in order for us to stay (relatively) rich? – Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
