Africa has opened the eyes of the rest of the world. Ongoing violence, climate change, desertification, and tension over natural resources are all worsening hunger and poverty across Chad—and also across Africa.
A landmark report released last July by five UN agencies— the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN children’s agency UNICEF—outlined the setbacks in fighting global hunger and warned that the world has fallen behind by more than 15 years in its relentless battle against food scarcities, with levels of undernourishment comparable to those in 2008-2009.
Environmentalists and socio-economists have pointed out that the future seems virtually bleak, particularly if current trends continue, when over 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half of them in Africa.
They have also observed that in such a situation, the UN is also unlikely to meet Goal 2 of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at ending hunger worldwide by 2030.
The UN has also pointed out a cruel paradox: that the world produces enough food to feed everyone, but nearly 20% of it is lost or wasted before it’s eaten. Poor storage facilities on farms can lead to crop loss due to pests and mold. In rich countries, food waste often happens in the kitchen when food is prepared but not eaten, or left to spoil in the fridge.
Providing a different perspective, Joseph Chamie, a consulting demographer and a former Director of the United Nations Population Division has also noted that in addition to the environment, climate change, technologies, social organization and conflict, population remains a major factor impacting the food crisis in many countries. Rapid population growth, he has pointed out, intensifies the overall demand for food. Consequently, world population growth means that food production needs to also increase to meet demand. Chamie, author of numerous publications on population issues has also observed that “rapid population growth can lead to increasing levels of food insecurity due to a scarcity of resources. While the world produces enough food to feed its current population of 8 billion, too often this food does not reach those in need or they cannot access it.”
In this context, we need to remember that over the past five decades, the world’s population has doubled from 4 billion to 8 billion today. As world population has increased, the number of people in the world facing food insecurity has also increased, with more than 800 million people going to bed hungry each night. Even in developed countries, he pointed out, too many people face food insecurity because they cannot afford to purchase food or have limited access to food resources.
By 2060 world population is projected to increase to 10 billion with most of that growth occurring in countries with the highest levels of food insecurity. With the highest proportion facing hunger, Africa’s current population of 1.5 billion is growing rapidly and is expected to reach 2 billion in a dozen years and 3 billion in forty years, he said. Chamie has also declared that- “unfortunately, a world free of hunger by 2030, Goal 2 of the SDGs, is unlikely to be achieved due to major global and national trends, including rapid population growth in many developing countries”.
Olivier De Schutter, Co-Chair of International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), and UN special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has in this regard underlined that “these hunger figures are a major wakeup call.” Global hunger remains catastrophically high, with 733 million people still going to bed hungry every day – 36% more than a decade ago. And 2.8 billion people unable to afford a healthy diet – meaning for one in three, wages are too low or social protection too weak to have adequate nutrition, he said.
De Schutter has also drawn attention by pointing out that “this is not just a blip, - the global industrial food system is disastrously vulnerable to increasing climate, conflict and economic shocks – with climate change increasingly pounding farmers. Building climate-resilient food systems is now a life-or-death matter. As is establishing social protection floors and ensuring workers are paid living wages. We desperately need a new recipe for addressing hunger – based on diverse agroecological food production and localized food markets instead of global industrial food chains, and social protection schemes that guarantee the right to food for the world’s poorest.”
Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, a progressive think tank headquartered in Oakland, California, has also confirmed this unfortunate evolving scenario. He has noted that despite the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine, the world has produced all-time records of food in recent years, but this has not prevented the rise in food prices and the persistence of an unbearable level of world hunger.
Such observations have led to some significant observations. Reducing waste is clearly important but should not let governments lose sight of two fundamental policy issues that require decisive action according to F. Mousseau. These are-
(a) the use of food commodities for non-food uses is massive and growing fast, with animal feed and agrofuels representing respectively 38 percent 18 percent of cereals used in the world. This, according to the analyst is happening at a high cost for humanity, with commodities unavailable for human consumption but also land grabbed from Indigenous and local communities, the devastation of forests, waters, and biodiversity and the pollution by chemical and fossil-fuel based intensive industrial agriculture.
(b) whereas food is available, it is often not affordable for poor households, even in wealthy countries where hunger is on the rise. Several international institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have showed that the 2022 rise in food prices, which threatened access to food for billions around the world, was due to a large extent to the significant increase in profit margins for agri-food corporations. One has to agree in this regard. We in Bangladesh have been suffering from such a scenario. All the large transnational actors in the sector have enjoyed record profits in the past few years after increasing their sale prices.
Consumers can relatively easily reduce their own food waste but this should not be a distraction from the real challenge, which is for them to mobilize as citizens and take back control of their food systems.
F. Mousseau has also underlined that “governments have mostly overlooked the above issues and many prominent ones, starting with the Biden administration, keep calling for more food production. This is a case of willful blindness, which goes against all the evidence that the problem is not the amount of food produced but what we do with it and who controls and benefits from the production and the trade of food commodities”.
Mousseau has also argued that time has come for a global treaty on the non-proliferation of industrial meat production and agrofuels to curb the seemingly endless expansion of agricultural production for non-food uses. In addition, it has also been suggested by this analyst that “the other urgency is to act more decisively on a global taxation mechanism of the large food and agro-chemical corporations that can limit their speculative behaviors and redistribute part of their revenues as global solidarity to address both world hunger and the climate crisis.”
This year the prestigious World Food Prize is being awarded to the Special Envoy for Food Security, Dr. Cary Fowler, and agricultural scientist Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin. These two individuals, according to the World Food Prize Foundation, are being awarded for “their extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of crop biodiversity and mobilizing this critical resource to defend against threats to global food security.”
Dr. Fowler is currently working to encourage farmers and governments to grow “opportunity crops” like cowpea, millet, sorghum, and other ancient and resilient foods. These crops have often been overlooked in favor of maize, rice, and other so-called staples, but they have, again, the opportunity to solve a multitude of problems. They build soil health and if storage and processing can improve in places like sub-Saharan Africa, they can be profitable.
In addition, according to FAO, if women had the same access to resources as men—education, access to credit and financial services, extension, and respect—they could lift as many as 100 million people out of hunger. Consequently, equal rights are good for the economy. In this context, according to Betty Chinyamunyamu of the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi, “gender integration makes good business sense.” In addition, women are often growing the foods that are actually nutritious—including not only opportunity crops, but also fruits and vegetables that contribute to agrobiodiversity. Consequently, “women’s empowerment will definitely have a positive impact on agricultural production, food security, diets and child nutrition,” according to FAO’s Status of Women in Agrifood Systems.
Muhammad Zamir, a former Ambassador, is an analyst specialized in foreign affairs, right to information and good governance, can be reached at <muhammadzamir0@gmail.com>
