World Hunger On The Rise Again

World Hunger On The Rise Again

We are concerned about the impact that rising prices have on vulnerable people. 

Photo: AP

A street vendor sells food on the streets of the capital San'a, Yemen. Even in Yemen's breadbasket, people are having trouble feeding themselves in what food experts say is a hidden but growing hunger problem across this impoverished country, the poorest in the Middle East, (File)

As demand for food continues to increase in the long run, we need to increase productivity and improve markets.

Three years after the 2007-2008 global food crisis, food prices are rising again. Increasing demand for food in developing countries and weather-related production losses are the primary reasons for the increase in food prices. Fortunately, good harvests of staples in Africa and Latin America have kept local prices there low, and record world rice production has kept rice prices stable.

We are concerned about the impact that rising prices have on vulnerable people. We are watching food prices closely and working with the international community to respond appropriately to achieve long-term sustainable solutions to food insecurity.

"We know very well that hunger is a drain on economic development," said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last October, as she accepted the World Food Programme's George McGovern Leadership Award for her commitment to ending global hunger. "Fighting hunger is a priority for us and it demands our highest levels of patience and commitment."

In response to the global food price spike in 2007-2008, President Obama pledged $3.5 billion to help poor countries fight hunger by investing in agricultural development. His Feed the Future Initiative utilizes innovation, research, and development to improve agricultural productivity, link farmers to local and regional markets, enhance nutrition, and build safety nets.

The international community also learned key lessons from the 2007-2008 food crisis on the importance of having the right policies in place. We are working bilaterally and within multilateral institutions, such as the UN food agencies, the G-20, and APEC, to encourage nations to pursue policies that facilitate agricultural growth and reliable trade flows.

We learned that it is vital to maintain transparent, functioning markets, and to avoid export barriers, panic buying and unnecessarily large increases in food stocks, as these actions tend to drive prices higher. Governments understandably need to ensure affordable food supplies. They can best do this through targeted safety nets for their most vulnerable and by reducing import tariffs and taxes.

As demand for food continues to increase in the long run, we need to increase productivity and improve markets. This requires conditions that foster investment in agriculture, particularly in the developing world, so innovative technologies can raise agricultural productivity.

Countries that make smart investments in agriculture will spur agricultural growth, ensuring that they are better able to combat hunger, feed their people, and contribute to stable global food supplies.

World Hunger On The Rise Again

World Hunger Map

Article from the LA Times- World hunger, the crisis inside the economic crisis

As food prices skyrocket, the jobs and wages of the poorest are being devastated. But will the developed world act when it's focused on averting a financial meltdown?

March 12, 2009|Sonni Efron | Sonni Efron, a former reporter and editorial writer at The Times, is a contributing editor to Opinion.

The economic crisis has now spread from Wall Street to Main Street to the places where there are no streets.
In slums and shacks around the world, hunger is gnawing again as job opportunities shrink but food prices do not. Global cereal prices are 71% higher than they were in 2005, according to the International Monetary Fund, but the wages of many workers are falling.
This is a disaster for the bottom billion, the one out of six humans living on less than $2 a day. But as always, the poor have a problem getting our attention -- especially when the rich have lost half their wealth.
Today's attention deficit is this: Starving children with bloated bellies make for horrific video footage, and the world opens its wallet. But chronic malnutrition, degradation and misery -- suffering that causes real pain but falls short of mass famine -- is being pushed off the front pages by the frightening global economic news.
Last year, skyrocketing food prices sparked violent protests in 30 countries and scared many more into making generous donations. The United States doubled its contribution to the U.N. World Food Program. Saudi Arabia handed over a check for $500 million. All told, the world kicked in an extra $2.3 billion. As a result, the U.N. program was able to add 30 million people to the rolls of those being fed, and disaster was averted.
But it was a short-term fix. The chronic, underlying causes of food insecurity haven't been addressed. So warnings that hunger is growing again should come as no surprise.
What is perplexing is that on the global market, prices of such food commodities as maize, wheat and rice have fallen by 35% to 50% in the last year (although they are still 50% higher than in 2005, according to the International Monetary Fund). Oil prices have collapsed too. Yet the price of food at the retail level around the world shows no signs of falling.
How can this be? The causes are myriad: pricing lags, hoarding, speculation, war, profiteering, food export controls, droughts in China and Argentina, and the age-old reluctance to lower prices, which economists call "stickiness."
As usual, in the poorest places the situation is stickiest.
In Afghanistan, a standard food basket cost 73% more in October than it did a year earlier. In February, the charity Mercy Corps found that Afghan families were skipping meals, eating boiled turnips instead of bread and pulling their boys out of school to shine shoes in the market. One family married off a young daughter even earlier than planned to collect the wedding gift from the groom's family -- $160.
In Tajikistan, more than a third of the nation's gross domestic product comes from remittances sent home from migrant workers in Russia, according to the World Bank. As the global economic crisis and the fall in oil prices ravage Russia, those workers are being fired. This also has become a problem in remittance-dependent Haiti, Jordan and Kyrgyzstan -- three countries where instability could create bad political problems for their neighbors.
In Zambia, whenever the world price of copper declines, unemployment rises. Copper mined there is exported for use in the production of computers, refrigerators, autos and machinery, and slumping industrial demand caused the price of copper to plummet 54% last year. That means more hunger in Zambia, where nearly half of all children under 5 have stunted growth.
World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick has called for the developed countries to set aside 0.7% of stimulus funds for vulnerable countries. This is sensible: It's always far cheaper to prevent hunger, increase production and position food stocks where famines may loom than it is to buy food on the open market during panics, when prices jump. But how much is the developed world willing to invest in foreign food security when its governments are running up record deficits to stimulate their own economies?
The World Food Program says it will need $6 billion this year, $1 billion more than in 2008. So far, it's only raised 10% of that. Of course, it will take vastly more -- and more than money -- to fix the long-term problems that create hunger: under-investment in agriculture and food infrastructure, particularly in Africa; urban development on farmland; and climate change, which will make all of the problems worse.
And then there's the unchecked population growth that eats up whatever gains many poor countries manage to make.
If the Group of 20 leading and developing nations meeting in London this weekend pushes the food problem to the back burner to focus only on financial stabilization, the annual begging for emergency food aid -- the most expensive, least sustainable form of foreign aid -- will never end. And neither will the suffering.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/12/opinion/oe-efron12

ACF's Impact in 2011

The year 2011 saw its share of devastating natural disasters, bouts of deadly malnutrition, and drought-related food crises.

From the catastrophic quake in Japan to political upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East, massive floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh to the drought, malnutrition, and food shortages that have raged across the Horn of Africa, the need for humanitarian assistance simply hasn’t let up.
Action Against Hunger has been on the frontlines throughout 2011, providing life-saving assistance while restoring independence and self-sufficiency to millions of people in more than 40 countries.
Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve accomplished in 2011:

850,000 People Assisted Across the Horn of Africa

Over 13 million people across the Horn of Africa faced food shortages, livestock losses, and protracted drought in 2011. Action Against Hunger responded across the region—in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia—providing nutritional support and therapeutic treatment for malnourished children and emergency access to food, clean water and sanitation for the most vulnerable. To date, we’ve helped more than 850,000 people. Read about our response »

48,500 Lives Saved In D.R. Congo

Since 2003, Action Against Hunger has worked to strengthen local health systems in D.R. Congo to help combat deadly malnutrition. The year 2011 was no different as our teams trained thousands of health workers, equipped hundreds of hospitals and health centers, and administered lifesaving therapeutic treatment to a record 48,500 severely malnourished children—the most lives saved by ACF in a single country.

700,000 Provided with Access to Clean Water

Whether responding to natural disasters or deadly malnutrition, Action Against Hunger’s global water and sanitation experts ensure that vulnerable communities can access clean water, improved sanitation, and avoid life-threatening diseases like cholera and dysentery. In contexts as diverse as D.R. Congo, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, and Pakistan, our teams provided over 700,000 people with access to water and sanitation in 2011.

585,000 Ugandans Achieved Self-Sufficieny

In the five years since the Lord’s Resistance Army collapsed, ACF has supported “returnees” as they leave displacement camps (where they’d resided for over 20 years) and move back to their ancestral homes—a massive migration requiring significant agricultural and livelihood support. In 2011 alone, ACF helped nearly 600,000 Ugandans restart income-generating projects and bolster their agricultural activity.

350,000 Provided with Clean Water & Sanitation

After last year’s catastrophic floods, monsoon rains once again inundated southern Pakistan in 2011, affecting millions. Action Against Hunger prioritized the emergency provision of clean water and sanitation, installing water storage tanks, rehabilitating wells and fortifying water points, building latrines and distributing chlorine tablets. To date, these efforts have provided over 350,000 people with sustained access to clean water.

Help ACF make an even greater impact in 2012.

Hunger Statistics

• In the Asia, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty"
• Every year 15 million children die of hunger
• For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years
• Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!
• The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.
• One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture
• The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world. Hunger in Global Economy
• Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. UNICEF
• 3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day.
• In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.
• In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.
• The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.
• One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
• Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.
• In 1997 alone, the lives of at least 300,000 young children were saved by vitamin A supplementation programmes in developing countries.
• Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
• About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age
• To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
• The assets of the world's three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
• Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger
• It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm