Sometimes something happens that can have a fundamental impact on mankind, but passes largely unnoticed at the time. Such an event occurred in December last year in Rome. The council of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) decided that the organization’s goal should no longer be merely to reduce hunger, but to eradicate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. The next step will be to confirm this change in June at the FAO Conference, in which all member countries participate.
To many, this small change of wording must seem trivial. Critics will also say that adopting such a goal without setting a target date for achieving it is largely meaningless. Others may claim that even the idea of eradicating hunger is nonsense, because we lack the means to do it.
For the last 12 years, the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015 has been the driving force for hunger reduction. The proportion of hungry people in developing countries has declined significantly — from 23.2 percent in 1990 to 1992 to 14.9 percent today. However, this decrease owes more to a rise in the world’s population than it does to the slight reduction in the actual number of hungry people (from about 980 million to 852 million).
A “halving” goal has only slight political appeal, as it implicitly condemns the excluded half to a life on the fringes of society, exposed to illness and premature death. Brazil’s Zero Hunger strategy, by contrast, has shown that adopting the absolute goal of hunger eradication provides a powerful means of galvanizing government departments into large-scale coordinated action, and of mobilizing society in a truly national effort to end one of the greatest injustices of our time.
To be sure, it will be increasingly difficult — though far from impossible — to meet the world’s growing demand for food and to do this in sustainable ways. Additional food must be produced using technologies that do not damage the natural resources that future generations will need in order to feed themselves; that do not fuel climate change, which weighs heavily on farmers; and that do not accelerate the disintegration of the delicate fabric of rural society.
However, the challenge may not be as daunting as it seems. The rate of population growth will be much slower than over the past 50 years and there is much room for reducing the vast quantities of food that are now wasted. Moreover, as people’s incomes rise, they might more easily be persuaded to adopt healthier and more environmentally friendly diets than those taken up in the developed world. The double burden of malnutrition — with hunger existing alongside obesity, diabetes and other diseases of overconsumption — clearly shows the increasing importance of global dietary rebalancing.
There is nothing really new about a commitment to hunger eradication. Indeed, the FAO was created in 1945 to bring about a world in which there would be “freedom from want,” which, in the words of its founders, “means the conquest of hunger and the attainment of the ordinary needs of a decent, self-respecting life.”
Because of the widespread fear in the postwar years of emerging global food shortages, the organization, and the international community as a whole, focused mainly on food production — a focus that remained essentially the same in the following decades.
Those investments yielded good returns: Despite staggering global population growth, from 2.5 billion in 1945 to 7 billion today, food availability per person has risen by more than 40 percent.
The problem is that hunger still persists on a vast scale; so, our focus must now shift to ensuring universal access to adequate food. This should be a top priority for governments and a goal embraced by citizens everywhere.
Breaking the vicious cycle of hunger and malnutrition requires complementing the focus on agriculture and rural development (more than 70 percent of the food-insecure population lives in rural areas of developing countries) with investment in other social and productive programs, including modest, but predictable, financial transfers to the poorest families. With the right policies in place, the incremental food demand created by these transfers, as well as by school meals programs and nutrition supplements for mothers and infants, could create opportunities for small-scale farmers to expand their output and improve their livelihoods.
In June last year, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the Zero Hunger Challenge at the Rio+20 Sustainable Development Conference. The FAO has accepted this challenge and is formally setting its sights on hunger eradication.
I look forward with confidence to a progressive expansion in the number of member governments that commit themselves to moving as quickly as possible toward ending hunger and malnutrition within their borders — and to helping other countries to achieve the same goal.
It is never the wrong moment for the world to set its sights on ending hunger, once and for all. Now is the time.
Jose Graziano da Silva is director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past