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Overview
From bestselling authors Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins comes the twenty-first century’s authoritative book on world hunger. Lappé and Collins refute the myths that prevent us from addressing the root causes of hunger across the globe. World Hunger: 10 Myths draws on extensive new research to offer fresh, often startling, insights about tough questions—from climate change and population growth to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the role of US foreign aid, and more.
Brimming with little-known but life-changing examples of solutions to hunger worldwide, this myth-busting book argues that sustainable agriculture can feed the world, that we can end nutritional deprivation affecting one-quarter of the world’s people, and that most in the Global North have more in common with hungry people than they thought. For novices and scholars alike, World Hunger: 10 Myths will inspire a whole new generation of hunger-fighters.
“World Hunger . . . should become not only a book for study, but a guide to action.” —Noam Chomsky
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802190987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 396 |
| Sales rank: | 866,407 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
myth 1
Too Little Food, Too Many People
MYTH: Food-producing resources are already stretched to their limits, and in many places there's just not enough to go around. More people inevitably means less for each of us. So continuing population growth, which could lead to several billion more people by mid-century, is a major crisis. To end hunger today and to have any hope of preventing ever-greater hunger in the future, we must stop population growth.
OUR RESPONSE: "Too many people pressing on too few resources" is perhaps the most common and intuitive explanation for continuing hunger. But sometimes our intuitions just don't line up with the evidence. The world produces more than enough food today. And, given the striking decline in population growth in recent decades, there's every reason to believe it is possible to halt population growth before we overshoot the Earth's capacity.
Let's begin by probing more deeply the extent of hunger that many assume to be evidence of too little food for too many mouths. How we measure hunger turns out to be trickier than we'd long assumed.
In our opening essay we noted that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines hunger only in terms of calorie deficiency, and reports about 800 million hungry people. In this widely used measure, the FAO explained to us, those who lack calories for many months at a stretch — say, between harvests or jobs — do not register if their calorie supply averaged over a year is minimally sufficient. Yet, medical authorities tell us that even short-term calorie deficiency can have devastating effects, especially on children and anyone weakened by disease.
Appreciating the inadequacy of this single measure, in 2013 the FAO began to emphasize a "suite of food security indicators" that includes not only the adequacy of available protein and calorie supplies but also stunting and factors such as grain-import dependency and access to safe water and sanitation that signal vulnerability to hunger. The FAO also added an assessment tool called Voices of the Hungry, drawing on self-reported experiences of food insecurity. We applaud these efforts to gain a truer understanding of the depth of hunger.
Still, only one hunger measure — that of calorie deficiency — reaches the broad public, even as this measure increasingly fails to capture nutritional well-being.
Why do we say "increasingly"?
Because the quality of food in many parts of the world is degrading, so more of us can be suffering from lack of nutrients even when our calories are more than sufficient. For example, take India, where one in seven people is "hungry" by the current calorie measure, yet at the same time four in five infants and toddlers and half of all women suffer from iron deficiency, with potentially deadly consequences.
From 1990 to 2010, unhealthy eating patterns outpaced dietary improvements in most parts of the world, including the poorer regions, reports a 2015 Lancet study. As a consequence, "most of the key causes" of noncommunicable diseases are diet-related and predicted by 2020 to account for nearly 75 percent of all deaths worldwide, the study emphasizes. By 2008 nearly four-fifths of deaths from cancer, heart disease, and other noncommunicable diseases were not in the Global North, long associated with these largely diet-related ailments, but rather in "low- and lower middle-income countries," according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
In these alarming trends, The Lancet's study implicates "transnational marketing and investment."
This widening disconnect between calories and nutrients has another devastating outcome: Worldwide, roughly one in eight people is now obese, and thus at risk for heart disease and diabetes among other ailments. Almost two-thirds of obese people live in the Global South.
These realities hit us when a doctor working in a rural Indian clinic serving two thousand impoverished farmers each month described a major change in his practice over the last few decades: "My patients get enough calories, but now 60 percent suffer diabetes and heart conditions."
Clearly, the world urgently needs a more meaningful primary indicator of the nutritional crisis than one based on calories alone — a measure of what we call in this book "nutritional deprivation" that captures both calorie and nutrient deficiencies. Since we don't yet have one, let's review the indicators we do have and then see where we stand.
In addition to the calorie-deficiency measure, arriving at about 800 million people worldwide in 2014, another is "stunting," estimated by the WHO in collaboration with UNICEF and the World Bank. In children under five, stunting is diagnosed when a child's height is significantly below the median compared with the "reference population." To most ears, "stunting" merely suggests being unusually short; but it actually indicates a set of medical problems including a depressed immune system and impeded cognitive development.
One-quarter of the world's children are stunted, report these agencies, with many factors conspiring to cause the problem, including too little food and nutritionally poor food for pregnant women and children, along with other deprivations. New research underscores that poor sanitation also contributes to poor nutrition, and thus perhaps to as much as one-half or more of stunting, even when a child is well fed, because repeated bacterial infection associated with unsafe water interferes with nutrient absorption.
Stunting remains "disturbingly high," notes the FAO. Without China, the global decline in stunting since 1990 would be significantly less than the decline in calorie deficiency — to us more evidence of a widening gap between calories and nutrition.
Evidence grows that the consequences of stunting commonly last a lifetime, including cognitive impairment and a weakened immune system, as noted; and, for females, reproductive problems. All show up in reduced educational and economic achievement. Thus, we believe, because stunting typically brings lifelong harm, individuals designated as stunted during childhood should be counted throughout their lives among those suffering the consequences of nutritional deprivation.
By this reasoning stunting affects not just one-quarter of our children but one-quarter of our whole population, or 1.8 billion people. We know this approach breaks with conventional wisdom, but we ask you to weigh it seriously.
One might counter by observing that not every child diagnosed as stunted experiences significant harm as an adult, so isn't applying the same percentage to a whole population bound to overstate the problem? Unfortunately, no. Because stunting afflicted prior generations as well, this measure actually undercounts many adults born when stunting was even more common. Those in their 30s today, for example, were themselves under five years old at a time when stunting was much more widespread than it is today.
Beyond calorie deficiency and stunting, are there any additional indicators that might help us to grasp the magnitude of the nutritional crisis?
A third is WHO's estimate that two billion of us have a deficit in at least one nutrient essential for health — a deficit often causing great harm. Vitamin A deficiency, for example, means blindness for as many as half a million children each year, and iron deficiency is linked to one in five maternal deaths.
So taking into consideration these three indicators, with considerable overlap — calorie deficiency at about 800 million, stunting at 1.8 billion, and nutrient deficiency at 2 billion — arguably at least one-quarter of the Earth's 7.3 billion people suffer from nutritional deprivation. That's roughly twice as many as are "hungry" measured by calorie deficiency.
We've chosen "nutritional deprivation" to define the crisis this book addresses, mindful that it isn't a common term. With this background, we can now clarify its meaning. Here and throughout our book nutritional deprivation means being so deprived of healthy food — and the safe water needed to absorb its nutrients — that one's health suffers. It thus captures both calorie and nutrient deficiency. "Being deprived" in this definition refers to the result of inequities in power relationships, such as those we touched on in the opening essay, that block people's access to food and to santitation. It therefore conveys a social malady — not simply being in a state of deficiency but the widespread harm caused by being actively deprived.
The implication of all of this?
We'll say it again: In a world of abundant food resources, at least one in four of us suffers from nutritional deprivation, yet humanity still lacks a comprehensive measure of this crisis.
In our opening essay, we described hunger as painful, universal human emotions that arise from feelings of powerlessness to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and here we stress that hunger must be measured not only as calorie and nutrient deficiency but also as the resultant, ongoing impairment and disease. Hunger means all of this, and it affects all of us.
Because the word "hunger" carries such powerful emotion, we will continue to use it. We hope that you do, too. Still, we want to be clear that for us hunger means not only calorie deficiency but the much broader, and often more devastating, dimensions captured in "nutritional deprivation." In this sense, "hunger" is no longer understood primarily as an uncomfortable, even painful experience; it is a condition creating great and often lasting harms that we can all be part of ending.
Now let's tackle head-on the premise that scarcity explains the widespread misery of not being able to secure a healthy diet. Does scarcity hold up as an explanation in light of the facts?
BEHIND THE SCARCITY SCARE
Global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, but world food production grew even faster. So today there's about 50 percent more food produced for each of us. In fact, the world produces enough food to provide every human being with nearly 2,900 calories a day. That's enough to make many people chubby!
Plus, those 2,900 calories are just from the "leftovers" — what's left after we've diverted about half of the world's grain and most soy protein into feed for livestock and nonfood uses. Worldwide, 9 percent of major crops is now used to produce ethanol — what we call "agrofuel" to remind us of its agricultural roots — and for other industrial purposes.
Nor do the 2,900-and-climbing calories for each of us include much of the breathtakingly large amount of food we waste each year, about one-third of all edible parts of food, amounting to 1.3 billion tons in 2009. As a result, we lose one out of every four calories produced. Consumers in industrialized countries waste almost as much food as the net food production of sub-Saharan Africa.
Beyond the vast abundance represented by these numbers are the uncounted but sizable quantities of food that 1.6 billion people living in or near forests secure for themselves from herbs, animals, fruits, nuts, and berries. A sense of the richness that's not counted in the world's food supply is suggested in a finding of the National Academy of Sciences that "most of Africa's edible native fruits are wild — rarely cultivated or maintained or improved."
While we hear from longtime food analyst Lester Brown that scarcity is the "new norm," the UN agency responsible for forecasting our future food supply, the FAO — even after taking into account expected population growth — forecasts global calories available per person in 2050 to be even slightly higher than the generous supply we have today.
Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply.
But Don't Price Spikes Prove Scarcity?
On average, global food prices in 2014 were 45 percent higher than a decade ago, after adjustment for inflation, a huge increase in a short time. And they are predicted to rise further as climate change affects agriculture.
But are shortages really the cause?
From time to time, the world experiences price spikes in grains and other agricultural commodities — accompanied by experts blaming food "shortages." The most recent and deadly price spikes occurred in 2008 and 2011. But such spikes often do not reflect a real shortage of food: Over the decade that included this food-price crisis, global per capita agricultural production continued, with one tiny dip, its steady growth of the previous decade. Rather, these spikes are "bubbles" generated in large measure by commodity speculators whose gambles transform small declines in forecasted supply into much higher prices. Unfortunately, for impoverished people increasingly dependent on imports, international price swings bring harsh consequences, as we examine in Myth 6.
Beneath the Big Picture: What About the Hunger Zones?
All well and good for the global picture, you might be thinking, but doesn't such a broad stroke tell us little? What about countries we tend to associate with widespread hunger — those in the Global South, especially in Africa?
Are not food supplies scarce there?
Food output per person in what are called "low income, food deficit" countries increased almost 30 percent between 1990 and 2012. If we look more closely at areas that account for most of the world's hungry people, scarcity cannot explain hunger.
India. Over 190 million Indians do not get enough to eat — that's almost one-quarter of the world's calorie-deficient people. Yet, over the years from 1990 to 2012, food production per person in India has outstripped population growth by about a third, while the number of undernourished Indians — almost one in seven — declined by just 10 percent. India not only exports grain, but in 2012 it had the world's second-largest grain stockpile after China. In that year, India's stockpile alone could have provided one cup of cooked rice to every Indian every day plus almost 50 loaves of bread for everyone that year, and bursting granaries often force the government to store wheat outdoors under tarps, exposed to rot and rats.
Despite all this, India is home to 38 percent of the world's stunted children, and stunting brings lifelong impairment and vulnerability to disease. As already noted, new research suggests that poor sanitation, by exposing children to pathogens that interfere with nutrient absorption, likely plays a huge role in this lost potential.
Scarcity of food, however, is not to blame.
Africa. When most people in industrial countries think of hunger, no doubt images of Africa come to mind first. Yet food production on the African continent outstripped population growth between 1990 and 2013 by 22 percent, not that far from the global average of 29 percent.
South of the Sahara, since 1990 the number of Africans suffering from long-term, severe calorie deficiency has increased by 22 percent. But during the same period, food production per person rose almost 10 percent, even though the region includes countries with the world's highest population growth rates.
Roughly 2,300 calories are available per person every day in sub-Saharan Africa. That's somewhat above the "basic minimum nutritional requirement," of 2,100 calories a day, as defined by the United Nations Development Programme. Thus, if food available within sub-Saharan Africa were equitably distributed, all Africans could meet their basic caloric needs.
In rethinking scarcity in Africa, also note that almost a dozen sub-Saharan countries — some with high levels of undernourished people — export more food than they import. The Ivory Coast, for example, uses prime land to grow cocoa and coffee; this makes it a net food exporter, yet 30 percent of its young children are stunted, a proportion higher than the world average.
Despite its production gains, sub-Saharan Africa's food output for local consumption remains far below its potential. This reality of unrealized potential isn't surprising given the range of forces that over centuries have thwarted and distorted the region's agricultural development:
• Foreign interests take over agricultural lands. Colonial seizures of land in the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth. They have displaced peoples and pushed agricultural production from good soils into less fertile areas, with the best land dedicated largely to export crops. In new forms, these seizures continue today as China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and South Korea, among others, are busy buying up or leasing vast tracts of land to provide food — not for local people but for their own consumers — as well as to produce crops for fuel. While reliable data are hard to come by because the companies involved are secretive, a UN report nevertheless includes this dramatic estimate: Up to two-thirds of all of what are now called "land grabs" are to grow crops for fuel. Since 2000 in Africa, land grabs so far total an area as large as Kenya.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "World Hunger: 10 Myths"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Food First Books / Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Beyond Guilt, Fear & Despair,
myth 1: Too Little Food, Too Many People,
myth 2: Climate Change Makes Hunger Inevitable,
myth 3: Only Industrial Agriculture & GMOs Can Feed a Hungry World,
myth 4: Organic & Ecological Farming Can't Feed a Hungry World,
myth 5: Greater Fairness or More Production? We Have to Choose,
myth 6: The Free Market Can End Hunger,
myth 7: Free Trade Is the Answer,
myth 8: U.S. Foreign Aid Is the Best Way to Help the Hungry,
myth 9: It's Not Our Problem,
myth 10: Power Is Too Concentrated for Real Change — It's Too Late,
Beyond the Myths of Hunger: The Takeaways,
Right-to-Food Fundamentals,
Connection & Action Opportunities: What Can We Do?,
About the Authors,
Notes,
Index,