Hunger Blog

Uncommon Sense: Understanding Today’s Global Hunger Crisis

As leader of a global organization that strives to eliminate hunger, I want to put the food crisis in perspective and observe how a number of disparate but ultimately interrelated factors combined to create the crisis. Similarly, no single intervention will solve this global dilemma. At Freedom from Hunger, we put tools into the hands of chronically hungry poor people so that they can prevail against such upheavals.

A Growing World Population Demands More

I was an undergraduate at Cornell in 1968 when I first encountered Paul Ehrlich. He had just authored The Population Bomb and was touring campuses to promote his book and his prediction that the 1970s would see hundreds of millions of people die of starvation. Then the Green Revolution started to kick in, and growth of world food supplies soon outstripped population growth and drove down food prices for three decades.

As I was training to be an ecologist, I knew Ehrlich was applying sound principles of population ecology in his doomsday forecast. I was also studying sociology and anthropology and suspected Ehrlich was not appreciating the confounding effects of human adaptability, foresight, and ingenuity. But I took no satisfaction as Ehrlich’s prediction proved wrong.

I believe he was fundamentally right to doubt the Earth’s ability to support unrelenting growth of the food supply. Demand for food by a growing human population would eventually drive food prices up to the point of causing a global reaction.

“Even those of us who have been waiting for the food supply to fall behind global demand are wondering what has happened to create such a “sudden” surge in food prices. There are many factors at work - some expected, some unprecedented.”

The relation between population growth and food supply and prices, however, is not direct and simple. It is muddled in a perversely complex world system. In the past three decades of low food prices, public policy in most major countries turned its attention away from agricultural research aimed at improving soil conservation and crop yields. Less research and less extension of its results to farmers means less innovative energy to create genetic varieties and farming methods to sustain the momentum of the Green Revolution and spread its magic to new crops and livestock and areas of the world, notably Africa, that have yet to benefit. We can no longer rely on putting more land under cultivation to expand food production.

The key is to increase the productivity of the land already in use, which requires continual commitment to research and extension of its results. This commitment has faltered, with the result that growth in crop yields has fallen behind global population growth. This by itself ought to have pushed food prices upward some time ago. But, as just mentioned, the world system is perversely complex.

The Era of Cheap Food Ends

Consider another agricultural policy in North America and Europe – public subsidy not for agricultural research but directly to support the incomes of farmers. The original rationale was to keep farmers farming rather than migrating to the city, maintaining food production for the nation, and in Europe particularly, maintaining the villages and landscapes so entwined with the nation’s image of itself.

The original ideals have been compromised, as corporate farming has displaced the family farm and as costly domestic agriculture has to be protected from cheaper food and fiber imported from developing countries. Still, the public subsidies continue to command strong political support and cost the average taxpayer a bundle of money, not only for the taxes to support subsidies to corporate farming but also for the higher cost of food and fiber protected from import competition.

For decades, subsidized agriculture in North America and Europe has produced more food than these nations need for themselves or their better customers in other nations. Supply greater than demand means, of course, lower prices. To keep prices for domestic farmers from falling below their costs of production, thereby driving up the need for further subsidy to keep farmers in business, Europe and North America “dump” surplus production into overseas markets.

The pernicious effect is depression of prices that developing country farmers can get for their production, driving many out of business and into the cities. With food prices so low in developing countries, net consumers of food (especially urban dwellers) benefit, but the incentive to invest in agriculture is undercut, development of rural communities is stifled, imported food replaces domestically grown food, and the rural areas become impoverished.

It is tempting to think the price of keeping farming alive and well in North America and Europe is deep poverty in the rural areas of developing countries. This is only half true. The real world is oh-so-much more complicated.

Nature, Prosperity, and Food Systems

I have painted a simplistic picture to make a point – the world food system is nuts. But it has been politically tolerable, and thereby stable, for thirty years or so. That’s why we are surprised by skyrocketing food prices and nearly simultaneous food riots in countries as far-flung as Haiti, Cameroon, and Somalia. Even those of us who have been waiting for the food supply to fall behind global demand are wondering what has happened to create such a “sudden” surge in food prices. There are many factors at work – some expected, some unprecedented.

Who knew that Australia would suffer such severe drought in recent years? Well, it should be no surprise. The natural ecology of Australia has evolved to deal with unpredictable drought – that is literally the nature of the continent. The practical result right now is dramatically higher wheat prices. Rice prices have also surged, but news analysis so far is unclear about the reasons. Several causes have coincided, including rice export restrictions by India and other rice exporting nations, stimulating panic buying and speculation in the commodities markets.

Who knew that growing corn for ethanol would become the primary strategy for reducing U.S. and European dependence on imported oil? Well, it should be no surprise, given the heavy subsidization of agriculture in those countries. The practical effect is that less corn is available to feed livestock and people, so prices have gone up.

Who knew that bird flu would wipe out hundreds of millions of chickens, which are the primary source of protein for the poor in developing countries? Who knew the “starving” Chinese and the Indians would become wealthy enough to demand huge quantities of meat in their national diets, thereby diverting grains and other food crops from direct human consumption to much less efficient livestock feeding? Most of these events we could have seen coming; only a few are real surprises. What takes us most by surprise is the concatenation of events. So many different things are happening all at once.

Food prices have surged to two or three times what they were just three years ago. No one can avoid feeling the effects, but the poor are devastated. The better-off poor are eating cheaper but less desirable foods, the middling poor are reducing the number of meals per day, and the very poor are facing weight loss and malnutrition and increased vulnerability to illness and death. The World Bank estimates that 100 million people will fall into the ranks of the food insecure. Governments and international agencies are already scrambling to ease the pain through relief and welfare programs. The era of cheap food has been declared over. High food prices are predicted to remain with us for at least another 15 years. And we at Freedom from Hunger, like many other international development agencies, are asking what we can do to help.

Immediate Relief and Long Term Solutions

Let’s put recent events in perspective. Estimates of the world population living in poverty so deep that they struggle just to get enough to eat throughout the year have been hovering around 800 million people for many years. It has always been a problem of being able to afford locally available food or the inputs to grow food. And for those many years, Freedom from Hunger has focused its energy and creativity on building effective programs to help these people help themselves – gaining more income and assets and more knowledge of basic life skills to achieve food security.

Over many years, we have discovered that the most effective programs put money and information in the hands and minds of women of food-insecure families. Toward that end, we have mastered the arts of microfinance and education for the benefit of very poor women and their families. The challenge to Freedom from Hunger and our colleague organizations has been to extend these effective programs to 800 million people. Recent events threaten to increase the challenge to 900 million. But the challenge remains fundamentally the same and requires fundamentally the same strategic, long-term response.

Freedom from Hunger needs to keep its eyes on the long-term prize, knowing that other organizations – international agencies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations – will devote their needed efforts to advocate for more agricultural research and less direct subsidy to farmers or scramble to provide immediate, direct assistance to those reeling from the shock of surging cost of staple foods.

“The challenge to Freedom from Hunger and our colleague organizations has been to extend these effective programs to 800 million people. Recent events threaten to increase the challenge to 900 million.”

We are neither a political action group nor a relief organization, but our education modules promoting child nutrition, for example, children being the most vulnerable to long-term effects of hunger, can add enduring value to the relief programs. Indeed, during the last two decades we have sought to create, test, and disseminate a far-ranging array of innovative tools that deliver life-changing education and empowerment, including our modules on managing the little money and enterprises of those hungry poor. We will offer these modules to any and all takers. If possible, we also will offer training in how to most effectively use these modules to educate affected families.

In the medium term, markets will adjust and prices will come down from their spike and then stabilize for a while, albeit at higher levels than the past three decades. The poor will then find ways to help themselves respond effectively to their inability to buy or grow all the food they need. Freedom from Hunger’s role in the international development community is to help them do just that.