Every year some 9 million children across the world die before they reach their fifth birthday, and about one-third of these untimely deaths is attributed to under-nutrition, with the majority of deaths the result of long-term chronic hunger rather than famines and sudden food crises, according to a report. Production is not the primary issue – it is poverty and access to food. Today three-quarters of Africa's malnourished children live on farms.
The World Disasters Report, published by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, says 178 million children under the age of five have stunted growth as a result of a lack of food. The number of people who are undernourished is at least 1 billion. Of these, around 60% are women. When food is scarce it is often women who receive less or give their share to their children.
Mother and child undernutrition has been widely neglected by national governments and the international community. Nutrition levels before birth and up to the age of two have a major impact on a child's future mental and physical health. "The critical period of growth and development is the 1,000 days from conception to a child's second birthday," the report says. "The problem of stunting has its roots in poor nutrition during this time: undernourishment during the foetal period contributes up to half of a child's failure to grow by the age of two." It says "Breastfeeding advocacy has always been hard to sell to donors when more exciting issues such as HIV and vaccination are competing for attention."
David Peppiatt, international director of the British Red Cross, said: "It is distressing that such huge numbers of people are hungry and can't get enough food to eat for reasons that are avoidable. It's a sad fact that this is a disaster on a large scale, and the situation isn't improving … With the continuing volatility of global food prices it is essential that the most vulnerable are better prepared to cope with changing agricultural and food markets."
The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, told a high-level summit on non-communicable disease* in New York: "The lives of millions of children are at stake. We can help them realise their physical and intellectual potential. Without proper nutrition the children and pregnant mothers will suffer irreversible damage." [ *see SOYMB post here]
The World Disasters Report also argues that promoting smallholder farming could be the best way forward in Africa, rather than encouraging "capital-intensive oil-dependent largescale farming, which can lead to displacement of poor people and environmental damage". In the past 40 years, during which the world’s population has more than doubled, food production has always kept ahead of population growth. But the hungry remain hungry. Average global calorie consumption has risen – but so has the number of hungry and malnourished people. One reason is that only about one-third of the food produced is actually eaten. Nearly half of the grain harvested each year is not fed to humans, but is converted into biofuels or fed to livestock to produce meat or dairy products – an extremely inefficient method of feeding people, since it requires eight calories of grain to produce one calorie of beef. Sustaining livestock now occupies a staggering 80 per cent of the world’s agricultural land, either through grazing pastures or cultivation of feed crops. Additionally, an estimated 30 per cent of all food crops is wasted. In low- and middle-income countries, crops fall victims to pests or rot in warehouses and elsewhere in the supply chain. In larger economies, the resulting processed food is often simply thrown away by the profligate. Investing in addressing such failures is crucial. Halving the amount of food that is wasted by 2050 would cut the amount of food required by one-quarter of today’s production. There is increasing evidence that small farms have a great potential to increase their output yet in the crazy world of capitalism in 2002, the coincidence of good weather and the introduction of new seeds and fertilizer produced a bumper maize crop in Ethiopia. The result was not richer farmers, but 300,000 tonnes of grain rotting in fields and a market glut that saw the maize price fall by 80 per cent.
High prices have resulted in a massive increase in food insecurity around the world. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that by the end of 2008, high food prices had added 109 million people to the ranks of the undernourished, raising the number of hungry people to an all-time record of 1 billion in 2009. Save the Children estimated that in 2008 alone, a minimum of 4.3 million (and potentially as many as 10.4 million) additional children in low- and middle-income countries may have become malnourished as a result of food price rises. Poor people in both rural and urban areas, who typically spend between 50 and 80 per cent of their income on food, were hardest hit. Faced with high food prices, poor people in low- and middle-income countries cut back on the quality and quantity of food they consume, struggle to pay for education and healthcare and are forced to sell assets. The strategies that poor households employ to cope with higher food prices often have far-reaching detrimental effects, especially on children. Across Bangladesh, for example, when the price of rice increases, rice consumption remains steady or even increases as non-rice consumption falls. When households are already spending most of their income on food – and often more than half of their food costs on rice alone – there is no safeguard when prices increase. Families will therefore maintain rice consumption at the expense of more nutritious foods, such as vegetables, fruits, meat, fish and dairy. As well as reducing the consumption of nutritious food, such strategies include cutting back on health expenditure, removing children from school (often so that they can work) and selling productive assets (e.g., livestock). These problems are compounded when poor families borrow money in times of high food prices, often prioritizing loan repayments over investing in livelihoods or more diverse diets.
The report concludes "a drive for more commercially grown food, and more international trade in food, may be the last thing we need. It may entrench and extend commercial farming, while depriving the billion rural poor of the rights to resources they need to feed themselves. It may fill warehouses but leave the poor with empty stomachs."
In a world where there is enough food for everybody but 1 billion people are hungry and another billion are malnourished, hunger amid plenty, it just doesn't make sense, does it but that's the logic of capitalist economics.
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