Hunger and PovertyJustin Frewen

Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on development aid and the launch of high-profileinitiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals, the blight of hunger has not been defeated. If anything, its grip on hundreds of millions of people is as tight as ever.In 2000, some 790 million people in the southern hemisphere were deprived of basic food security.According to the World Bank's 2009 Global Monitoring Report, the number of chronically hungrypeoplethose consuming under 1,800 calories a dayrocketed upwards when the global economiccrisis hit. The number went from 850 million in 2007 to 960 million in 2008. By mid-October 2009,the figure had risen to over a billion, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. To put thisin perspective, this total exceeds the combined population of the European Union, the UnitedStates, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.It is important to remember that deaths caused by hunger are generally the result of chronicmalnutrition rather than starvation. Just as in the mid-19th century Irish famine, when many of thefatalities were due to accompanying infectious diseasestyphoid fever, typhus and dysenterypeople in the South suffering from nutritional deficiencies are far more prone to attendant illnesses.According to the World Banks 2009 Global Monitoring Report, the global financial and food criseshave overturned the gains made in combating malnutrition. The number of chronically hungrypeople, those consuming under 1,800 calories a day, rocketed upwards from 850 million in 2007 to960 million in 2008. By mid-October 2009, the figure had risen to 1.02 billion according to the Foodand Agriculture Organization (FAO). To put this in perspective, this total exceeds the total populationof the EU, the US, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The death toll from hunger and relateddiseases has also mounted and now approaches a daily total of 25,000 people, an average of one lifelost every few seconds.Children are badly affected both in their physical and mental development as a consequence of malnutrition. According to UNICEF there are almost 200 million children under the age of five indeveloping countries who are suffering from stunted growth due to a lack of sufficient nutritionalintake, of which 90 percent live in Asia and Africa. While there has been progress in Asia with thepercentage of children afflicted by stunted growth falling from 44 percent to 30 percent between1990 and 2008, the situation improved only slightly in Africa, as the percentage declined from 38percent to 34 percent. It has been estimated that over 25 percent of children in the South areunderweight and as many as 10 children die each minute from undernourishment and relateddiseases.Tragically, this situation exists in a "world of plenty" where, despite a 70 percent population increaseover the past 30 years, agriculture globally is producing 17 percent more calories per person todaythan it was then. We would appear, therefore, to live in a world where hundreds of millions go tobed hungry simply because they are too poor to be able to purchase sufficient food. As the economist Ross Copeland has written:

[A]ccess to food and other resources is not a matter of availability, but rather of ability to pay. Put bluntly, those with the most money command the most resources, whilst those with little or nomoney go hungry. This inevitably leads to a situation whereby some sections of humanity arguably have too much and other sections little or nothing.

Food is like any other product in a market economy, a commodity. Farming is a business.Accordingly, large tracts of the best agricultural land are devoted to the cultivation of tea, coffee,tobacco, cotton and so forth, given the significant market demand for them. Similarly, over half thegrain produced in the United States is used as livestock feed, despite the fact that it would providefood for far more people than the livestock to which it is fed.Poor people in the South who possess insufficient power in the marketplace, due to inadequateincome, tend not to count in the food equation. Approximately 80 percent of all food commoditiesproduced globally is consumed by the richest 20 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the World HealthOrganization estimates that there are now a billion overweight adults, with at least 300 million of them obese, a figure that is almost identical to the worldwide total of people who exist in acondition of food insecurity.Furthermore, many farmers produce cash crops for export as well as for alternative energy. There isnow more corn being grown than staple food items such as wheat or rice, as corn can be used forbio-fuel. According to the World Bank (WB) as much as 60% of the worldwide rise in corn productionwent to the US alone. Conversely, the reduction in wheat and rice production has led to shortages inthese crops, thus triggering higher market prices and rationing. This concentration on producingcrops and food for export instead of domestic consumption has exacerbated the Food Crisis, whichbegan in 2007, as for many in the South the price of food procured from the internationalmarketplace is prohibitive.According to Aditya Chakrabortty, writing in The Guardian, a confidential World Bank reportcalculated that bio-fuels had forced global food prices up by 75%, through diverting the productionof grain for food to fuel, the encouragement of farmers to devote land for bio-fuel production andfinancial speculation in grains due to the increase in bio-fuels.The volatility of food prices, particularly of those essential for the staple diets of the poor, has had adrastic impact on the nutritional intake of hundreds of millions of people. Studies have shown thatstaple foods are responsible for between 40 and 80 percent of energy intake for the majority of population groups in the South. Even a slight increase in the price of staple items can therefore havea significant impact on food consumption. Families that might previously have been able to affordtwo or more meals a day may now have to cut back to just one, often with less costly ingredients of inferior nutritional value.Women and children tend to be the worst affected. Children frequently suffer from retardedphysical and mental development and mothers often do without in order to be able to provide foodfor their children.While governments in the South have tried to tackle the food crisis and stem the rising prices of