The theme of the 1995 World Food Day Teleconference on October 16 will be "Fighting Hunger: Looking Back, Looking Ahead." It will encompass the effort by the international community to eliminate hunger over the past half century and an analysis of the food/hunger outlook for the 50 years to come — what went wrong or right in the past, and what might be done better in the future.
By estimates of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — which will mark its 50th anniversary this year — there are still more than 800 million people on Earth suffering from chronic hunger. That is 150 million less than there were in the mid 1970s (and a much smaller percentage of total world population), but still horrendous figure. Nearly one of every seven people in the world is close to starvation. More than a billion people suffer some form of dietary anemia.
In the face of such numbers, it seems difficult to be optimistic, especially at a time when international confidence and commitment to the United Nations appear to be fraying. But even as they warn about the seriousness of problems, most development experts and food analysts believe progress will continue and the number of hungry will continue to fall.
Over the past years, the international "infrastructure" for fighting hunger has been put in place — international agreements on food aid, trade and orderly marketing, the technical agencies and monitoring systems for early warning and quick response to emergencies and long-term trends, a global network of national and international research stations pouring out a steady flow of better seeds and farming techniques — have been created and seasoned. Progress in agricultural science has been stunning, including the development of high-yielding plant varieties and the promise of genetic manipulation now in the formative stage. At the same time, over-all economic progress in the developing world is beginning to gather momentum again after the "lost decade" of the 1980s.
What are the real dimensions of the hunger problem today, the reasons for concern but also for hope, and the strategies for the future?
About half the number of hungry live in Asia, a quarter in Africa, with the rest scattered among other regions. An estimated three-quarters of the hungry live in the rural areas of their countries, and probably a third of the total are children. How can they be helped — or given a better chance to help themselves? There is a general expert consensus on three central points:
Increasing Food Production
World population will double again in the next 50 years, and food production must grow even faster because of the impact of development and higher personal incomes. But productive capacity and potential are not evenly distributed. FAO puts 88 countries in a category of "low income-food deficit," and these are the countries where population is growing the fastest. In the 1994-95 crop year, food production per capita fell nearly 2 for the LI-FDC group as a whole. Moreover, some experts are warning that the next doubling of food production will be far more difficult than is realized because of steadily degrading soil and water conditions and other factors. Yet spending on agricultural research is falling sharply. Nonetheless, food production globally continues to increase faster than population and the real price of food to the consumer has fallen steadily for the past two decades. At the same time, population growth rates are slowly declining.
Poverty and Hunger and Development Planning
Nearly everywhere hunger is a consequence of poverty rather than food availability. Fighting hunger effectively requires a labor-intensive, employment-oriented development strategy to increase incomes among the poor and especially the rural poor. Agriculture remains the key to such a strategy because for most countries only farming and farm-related activities can provide the hundreds of millions of jobs the poor need to raise their standard of living and buy more food. Yet in a great many countries such a rural strategy goes against the interests of political and economic elite groups. But the fact remains that economic growth rates are climbing, particularly in the countries of south Asia where the worst of the hunger problem still resides.
Targeting Poverty Assistance
Structural adjustment economic policies of the 1980s forced governments to review basic subsidies paid out of public revenues, including food subsidies. Now countries are much more careful to "target" scarce funds to where they can do the most good. Two kinds of targeting can have a major impact on hunger — first by identifying those in real need and, second, by a strategy of support for child-bearing women and their children. Targeting can also mean using funds to empower the poor (for example through small loans) rather than broad-based welfare programs in countries without the means to fund them. A massive global strategy to target children first could have huge affects on hunger and, experts agree, the infrastructure for delivery already exists through each country's system of schools, health clinics and other service centers, as well as the growing size and technical capacity of nongovernmental organizations.
Three major world conferences have been held in the past 25 years to address food and hunger issues: The World Food Conference in 1974, the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Development in 1978 and the International Conference on Nutrition in 1992. Each ended with a lengthy "Declaration of Principles and Program of Action." Every one included references to the "right to food" and the "empowerment of the poor" and a host of government and international pledges. Unfortunately, the follow-through has never lived up to the promises. It is against this background that the teleconference panel will discuss hunger in the 21st century and the new "World Food Summit" called for November 1996.
In preparing "middle hour" panels and discussions, teleconference sites are encouraged to consider the impact of food policies and programs on the needy in their local communities and also to weight the relationship between our national food economy and the global challenge of hunger eradication.
U.S. NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR WORLD FOOD DAY