If Only Just A Billion Were Hungry

• by Paul Virgo (rome)
• Thursday, April 29, 2010
• Inter Press Service

This is not just because no cold statistic will ever depict this scourge's full human toll on those unable to find enough to eat for themselves and their families. It is also due to the simple fact that the number of people living in a state of food insecurity is actually much higher than this already scandalous tally. How much higher, nobody knows.

Each October the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) produces the headline hunger statistics used by international leaders, policy- makers, non-governmental organisations and the media when debating the issue. Given the complexity and resources entailed, it has no rivals for the job.

It takes a conservative approach, presumably to avoid being accused of overstating the problem. The U.N. agency looks at individual states' food production and trade data to see how much food is available and then uses household consumption patterns to calculate access to it and what proportion of any given population are 'undernourished' because they do not have enough to eat to meet their minimum energy needs.

The first major problem is that the estimates for the food needed for minimum energy needs are based on the requirements for a 'sedentary lifestyle'. This suggests that many people are not counted as undernourished even though they are not getting enough calories to sustain a healthy, active working lifestyle.

'FAO's estimates are conservative in the sense that if we used higher energy requirements, more people would be counted as undernourished,' David Dawe, a senior economist at the FAO told IPS.

Perhaps an even bigger issue is that, even if one accepts that the FAO's figure tells us how many people are 'undernourished', it still does not say how many poor people are 'malnourished' because they cannot afford an adequate diet.

The saying 'man cannot live by bread alone' is literally, as well as figuratively, true. A person might be able to meet their energy needs by filling up on staples such as rice or potatoes, but if they cannot afford to have any variety in their diet, they will not get key micronutrients such as iron, iodine, vitamin A and zinc, with dramatic effects for their health and ability to function.

The reference here is specifically to poverty-induced malnutrition. People in developing countries who eat so many calories that they are obese are also considered malnourished, as are people with illnesses that stop their bodies obtaining adequate nutrition from food, even if their food intake is satisfactory -- but these groups are not part of this analysis.

Figures released by UNICEF last year suggest that poverty-induced malnutrition, which is sometimes called 'hidden hunger' and can have irremediable consequences, especially for under-twos and the unborn children of pregnant sufferers, is an enormous problem. The U.N. children's agency says 129 million under-fives in developing countries are underweight and therefore undernourished. But the number of under-fives who are stunted because of inadequate diets, and therefore malnourished, is over 50 percent higher at 195 million.

'The estimated numbers of people who are iron or iodine deficient are actually much larger than the number of 'undernourished' in the sense of dietary energy deficiency,' food security and nutrition specialist Doris Wiesmann told IPS.

The FAO recognises that there are also other elements of food insecurity it fails to cover. 'People who are adequately nourished today, but are at risk of being undernourished in the future due to some possibility of being affected by a natural disaster or negative economic shock, such as the loss of employment, are also food insecure,' said Dawe. 'But there are no reliable estimates of how many people are in such a condition.'

In fairness, the FAO is the first to concede that no one figure can fully represent food insecurity. It also has limited room to manoeuvre because, if it radically changed its methods, it would render its statistics useless for historical comparisons.

Wiesmann helped the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) develop a Global Hunger Index that combines the FAO's figures for the proportion of undernourished with indicators on child malnutrition and child mortality.

But while this system produces a score that gives a broader picture of the hunger situation in a given country and is useful for country, regional and global comparisons, it does not lend itself to deriving absolute numbers of food insecure individuals.

And even if we knew exactly how many people were food insecure, even if we knew it were double today's figure, there are grounds to doubt whether it would make any difference to the sufferers.

At last year's U.N. World Food Security Summit in Rome the international community failed to deliver binding aid commitments or set a target date for the eradication of hunger even though the FAO said the number of undernourished had passed the one-billion mark for the first time just days before.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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