Food security: the challenge remains.

• Author: Dlouf, Jacques
• Position: Brief Article

The twentieth century witnessed a remarkable agricultural revolution which led to global food production rising even faster than the unprecedented rate of population growth. The world's formers and fishermen now produce more than enough food for every man, woman and child on the planet to be adequately nourished. Yet, one in every eight people in the world remains chronically hungry.

The plight of the hungry all too often evokes a response only when vast populations are brought to the brink of famine and mass starvation-mere bundles of skin and bone fleeing their homes in a desperate quest for survival. Most hunger, however, is far less visible and does not make the headlines or horrify television audiences. Yet widespread chronic hunger--the hunger that comes with one meal-rather than two or three each day--causes immense human suffering and undermines the well-being of nations and makes them vulnerable to disaster. Hunger predisposes people to illness and premature death; it robs youth and adults of their potential to work; and it cripples children's growth and learning abilities. Hunger is as much a cause as an effect of poverty, and it traps families in a vicious cycle that passes from one generation to another.

Five years ago, leaders of almost every nation in the world unanimously decided to cut the number of the world's hungry by half--from 800 million to 400 million persons-by the year 2015. Since making that commitment at the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, only some nations, however, have been successful in reducing the incidence of hunger. On a global scale, the number of undernourished people is being cut at less than half the rate needed to reach the Summit goal on time.

There is very little evidence of the large-scale purposive action needed to get to grips with the underlying causes of hunger. Instead, what we are seeing is a rise in manmade and natural disasters and in the frequency with which regions are afflicted by instability. This has been combined with a worrying decline in the resources being invested in agriculture in developing countries, and particularly in the funding for agriculture and rural development by the international financial institutions, which has dropped by 40 per cent in the past decade to some S3.5 billion per year. These trends are bound to undermine the livelihoods of very large numbers of rural dwellers, who account for 70 per cent of the world's poor and the majority of its undernourished...