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food/hungerThe dictionary defines food as 'what one takes into the body to maintain life and growth'. It goes without saying then that everyone has to eat to live. According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) there is enough food in the world today for every man, woman and child to lead healthy and productive lives. Even though the world's population has grown 6-fold in the past 200 hundred years, food production has grown even faster thanks mainly to hybrid seeds and better fertilisers. In the rich countries of the North, where individually we spend on average $14 (£8.75) per day on food, the supply and variety has never been better. Visit any supermarket and you will find shelves stacked with affordable produce from countries all over the world. Going out for a meal, too, in our towns and cities also affords us a choice of restaurants which serve drinks and dishes from every continent. As a result, on average, people in the North exceed the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recommended daily minimum intake of 2,350 calories by some distance. Yet, on
the other side of the globe in the South, life could not be more different.
Here most people are subsistence farmers often eking out a perilous existence
using methods of farming that have barely changed through the centuries.
Bad harvests are a continual hazard in this part of the world where some
54 nations do not produce enough food to feed their people. And the problem
for these countries is that although there may be plentiful supplies of
food in the world for everyone's need, these supplies, for the most part,
lie in the wrong grain store in the wrong country on the wrong continent.
But there is also the problem of affordability. In contrast,
in the North, a combination of over-abundance, changed eating habits and
less-active lifestyles has led to a situation where a large proportion
of the population is overweight or obese*. For example, in 2012, in the
UK, it is estimated that 62% of the population is overweight (39%) or
obese (23%). This 'extravagant' lifestyle in turn leads to an estimated
30,000 premature deaths annually at a cost to the National Health Service
(NHS) of $750m (£500m). And this 'epidemic' also has the knock-on
effect of 18m days being lost every year in the work place through sickness
leading to a loss of output totalling $2.8bn (£1.75bn). And to cap
it all the UK spends $120m (£75m) every year on slimming. [Here we should perhaps mention one more stark statistic. 15% of all food bought in the UK ends up in the rubbish bin at a cost of $760 (£480) a year for every household. That is shameful and says much about the throwaway lifestyles we now seem to lead. The main reason for this is our mis-interpreting of supermarket labelling. Display until is only for supermarket information; best before means what it says that the food is best consumed by the date indicated but can still be used after that; use by is the date that should be heeded and the food thrown away after this expiry date] At the Millennium Summit in 2000, the United Nations (UN) drew up a list of Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by the year 2015. The very first target set was to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. Sadly, even with the great progress made by China in recent years this very first millennium goal is now almost certain to be missed - by a mile! So what needs to happen for UN rhetoric to become a reality and for all countries to be able to feed their own people? To start with, surplus food supplies from the North urgently need to be sent to countries where they are desperately needed. Politics should not be played with hunger and starving people need immediate help. But this should not be seen as a permanent solution as shipping food will not improve the prospects of the world's desperately poor, three quarters of whom live in rural areas in developing countries. At the same time governments in developing countries need to allocate more than 4% of their national budgets to agriculture. In Africa food output continues to fall yet Africa's farmers, who are mainly women, could grow approximately three times more food if they had access to essential inputs: fertilisers, irrigation, improved seeds.
Farmers also suffer from not owning their own land which makes it impossible for them to put up security in order to borrow money to help bring about improvements. One of the first tasks, then, for governments and state authorities in the South should be to work to vest every farmer in the title to his own land. In this way the home/farm could be used as security to borrow money for better seeds, fertilisers, tools and machinery which would lead to a big increase in crop production. Furthermore farmers could also be encouraged to amalgamate their small plots into co-operatives. This should further boost production and the resulting harvest and any profits could be shared according to the size of land contributed and the hours of work put in. Having certificates of ownership in a co-operative would also allow other farmers to join in and allow those wanting out the means to do so. Coming together like this would also help those families where the bread winner was no longer there or incapable of work. It would also allow children to get back to school instead of having to work in the fields in order to help their families maintain food production. The main cause of food shortages in poor countries is usually blamed by governments on drought but all too often this can be used as an excuse. Nobody disputes that hunger is aggravated by bad weather but bad government is a much greater enemy of the people. For example, in many parts of Africa water is readily available in countries lacking in food but too many governments either through neglect, other priorities, incompetence or lack of finance are not using the water resources available. Take Ethiopia, for example. Until recently, water from the Ethiopian Highlands and the huge expanse of Lake Tana was hardly tapped at all by a government more concerned about arguing over a worthless town in a useless piece of desert on its border with Eritrea than encouraging farmers to move to more fertile parts of the country where irrigation channels, bore-holes and wells could be constructed to provide water for all their needs. Good communications are also essential for moving food supplies within a country. And here again Ethiopia suffers from government inaction. Telecommunications throughout the country are poor and so even in good years surplus food can lie rotting in one part of the country whilst people starve in another. But even when the message does gets through there are few roads in Ethiopia and most of them are potholed. So moving grain around the country can be perilous and costly as can be seen from the experience of one enterprising grain merchant who tried to take a truck load of grain from the south to the north of the country. The journey of 900k (560 miles) meant 17 days on the road to reach his destination. In that time he was stopped 10 times by local officials whom he had to bribe in order to be allowed to move on. And at the end of his ordeal he found that the roads had been so rough that many of his grain sacks had burst open. However, his problems didn't end there. Selling in Ethiopia is also made hazardous by the fact that there is no legal system to enforce contracts and very few traders have bank accounts. As a result vendors only sell for cash and buyers must inspect and weigh every bag of grain to ensure that they haven't been cheated. So as he couldn't find a trustworthy trader prepared to pay in cash he finished up literally giving what was left of his load away. Needless to say that grain merchant is unlikely to undertake such a journey again. To be fair though, slowly the government of Ethiopia has reluctantly come to accept that agriculture production in the country was a mess and needed to be improved. And to this end the prime minister decided in 2008 to devote more of its annual budget to farming whilst commissioning the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to review farming with a view to making suggestions for improvements. The Foundation reported back in 2011 and found that despite recent increased investment, there was a lack of co-ordination among government agencies and a lack of skilled staff to properly implement initiatives. The result was the setting up of the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) led by, Khalid Bomba from the Ethiopian diaspora and, a former investment banker with J P Morgan, to take over the tasks which formerly lay with the sleepy Ministry of Agriculture. The ATA has set a target of at least 8% growth from 2011 to 2015 and a doubling of production of key crops. Hopefully, with agricultural spending now reaching 17% of the country's annual budget along with a focussed and determined staff at ATA, Ethiopia's days of mass hunger may at last be coming to an end. Conflicts and wars also cause hunger as rampaging armies roam through the countryside destroying everything in their path. Displaced and injured people then are left to find food and refuge wherever they can. There is no greater example of this at present than in Darfur in Sudan where refugees are having to seek aid and shelter from international charities or in neighbouring Chad, itself one of the world's poorest countries. And it is here at times like these that the international aid agencies do a wonderful job of feeding the refugees and helping them to pick up the pieces whilst the Sudanese government blames everyone but itself for the tragedy. Of the 40 poorest countries in the world, 24 are either in the midst of armed conflict or have recently emerged from it. And in Africa, 20% of the population live in countries affected by war or its aftermath. Further exacerbating the food situation in Africa now are foreign governments and large international corporations, mainly from India, The Orient and The Gulf, seeking prime agricultural land to grow food for their own people back home. And African governments, it seems, are ready to oblige. Already, according to a World Bank report, the government of Sudan has sold 4 million hectares, DRC 2.8m, Mozambique 2.7m, Mali 2.0m, Zambia 2.0m, Liberia 1.6m and Ethiopia 1.2m with many of the deals going through at rock-bottom prices. This is proving controversial as it reduces the already small supplies of food in many countries whilst the land that is often taken over sees no compensation given to those who formerly worked on it or grazed their cattle. This land grab causes further aggravation by many of these investors using it to produce biofuels. (It could
be argued that the selling of land to foreigners has already helped to
dispose of two governments in Africa. In March, 2009, in Madagascar, Andre
Rajoelina overthrew the government of Marc Ravalomanana after he promised
to lease half the fertile land in the country to Daewoo, the South Korean
conglomerate; and in September 2011 Michael Sata won the Zambian presidency
from Rupiah Banda by promising to open up the secretive copper mining
deals negotiated between the previous government and China.) *A healthy weight range is based on a measurement known as the Body Mass Index (BMI). To calculate your BMI you divide your weight in kilograms by your height in metres squared. The ideal weight is a reading between 20 and 25 but you are underweight if it is below 20. Between 25 and 30 people are considered overweight and above 30 they are classified as obese. |
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just1world@just1world.org |
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It is not surprising to learn, therefore, that the Food and Agriculture
Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) calculated that in 2011, 925
million people were going hungry every day - including 1 in 3 of people
living in sub-Saharan Africa. There is more though for nutritionists reckon
that the same amount again suffer from a hidden hunger - a lack of sufficient
micronutrients which are vitamins and minerals that support physical and
mental health. As a result 24,000 people die every day from malnutrition
and hunger-related diseases - many of them children under 5. That means
that the lack of food/malnutrition kills more children in the world today
than any infectious diseases, war or natural disasters yet it remains
a 'silent emergency' arousing little public concern until the next famine
is thrust onto our TV screens. 
At
present almost 80% of Africa's population is engaged in farming - mostly
subsistence. But despite this huge presence on the land, food security
continues to remain elusive due to worn out soils and tiny plot sizes.
As a result it is not surprising that many farmers are barely able to
produce enough food for their own families never mind having any left
over to sell. With more government support these farmers could gain access
to better fertilisers and be able to seek advice and help in buying seeds
with higher yields which are more disease resistant. 
All
of this means that food aid will continue to be important if mass starvation
is to be prevented, not just in Africa, but around the world. In 2011
WFP provided food assistance to 86 million people in 70 nations working
with more than 2,800 non-governmental organisations which cost US$5.1bn.
At any one time WFP has 30 ships at sea, 70 aeroplanes in the sky and
5,000 trucks on the ground moving food and other assistance to where it
is needed most.
WFP is funded completely by voluntary donations. And in a complete transformation
in recent years almost all food aid is now relief aid with very little
now being used for development.