The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 published by FAO reports that almost 870 million people were chronically under-nourished in 2010-2012.
There has been a slowdown since 2007-2008 in reducing hunger but still, the study suggests, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the prevalence of hunger in developing countries by 2015 is within reach. Improved estimates show that there is an increase in the estimated number and proportion of hungry people in 1990, the baseline year for the MDG, which leaves the number of under-nourished people in the world in 1990 at 1 billion, as opposed to the 833 million previously reported.
So even though progress in reduction of hunger has fallen since 2007, the newly ‘discovered’ data of 1990 has rendered the MDG target reachable.
The Global Hunger Index published by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide states that food security of the poor around the world is threatened by unsustainable use of land and water resources.
In order to empower the poor and thwart the adverse effects of capital intensive farming, many groups have called to cut down large-scale foreign investments in land.
Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of Nigeria and a member of the Africa Progress Panel, echoes this: “African and donor agricultural policies must focus on the small-holder farmers. Some African governments see the efficiencies of large-scale commercial farming as a means to increase productivity. But Africa cannot increase its food production, create jobs and reduce poverty on the scale required without unlocking the potential of small-holder agriculture.”
Key role
The State of Food Insecurity in the World dedicated an entire chapter to underline the key role of small-scale farming in reducing poverty by providing employment to more number of agricultural labourers and rural non-agricultural labourers.
All these institutions acknowledge the importance of small-scale farming for employment generation and subsequent alleviation of poverty. But after all this, they fall back on some kind of foreign “aid” for support.
Obasanjo, after discussing how foreign investors have exploited the land and natural resources of Africa, called for foreign expertise and foreign aid to improve food expertise in agriculture.
Statistical data and methods entail more scepticism and arguments rather than objective definiteness attributed to numbers.
On the one hand the FAO is claiming that the MDG of halving world hunger by 2015 is achievable (due to the revised 1990 figures) but on the other hand they have stated that they have used the energy requirements for minimum activity whereas many poor and hungry people are likely to have livelihoods involving arduous manual labour. The aim seems to be not to alleviate hunger and poverty but to document the achievement of the “goal” in the stipulated time.
Confusing picture
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo argue in their article ‘More than 1 billion People Are Hungry in the World’ that “the story of hunger and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory”. They have said that the experts prescribe “ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers”. The figures of gargantuan reports also do not capture the diverse problems and anomalies across the world. They have pointed out that in many countries the poverty line is counted on the basis of the purchasing power of minimum requirement of calories and some bare necessities.
But their research has taken them to places where individuals deprived themselves of the minimum requirement of calories in spite of having the money.
This proves that the basic assumption of academicians that the poor would not be in a place to show preferential behaviour given their limited means does not hold true.
Banerjee and Duflo raise the basic questions: What if the poor are not, in general, eating too little food? What if, instead, they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of nutrients needed to be successful, healthy adults? What if the poor aren't starving, but choosing to spend their money on other priorities?
Development experts and policy-makers would have to completely re-imagine the way they think about hunger. And governments and aid agencies would need to stop pouring money into failed programmes and focus instead on finding new ways to truly improve the lives of the world's poorest. For instance, in Udaipur, they found that the typically poor households voluntarily cut down on food expenditure and spent on tobacco, festivals and alcohol.
The article also says that the poor do not seem to allocate their limited resources to get more calories, but to get better tasting food, which may or may not be nutritious.
China’s example would be a lesson for the developing countries which offer subsidies for staples and also for foreign food aid.
Availability of rice and wheat at low cost among the sample population induced them to buy less of those (since they are not tasty) but more of shrimp and meat (since they are more tasty) with the extra money. Thus their calorific status did not improve.
These arguments and examples bring home the point that the relation between poverty and hunger are not linear and are very much region-specific.
The academicians and researchers continue with their complicated statistics, debates on government policies, debates on trajectories of economic growth and leave the “poor” as an imagined community by not coming to terms with the fact that notwithstanding their theoretical expertise they cannot predict and prescribe for the poor.
(Srabasti studied at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.)