World Food Insecurity
October 16, 2009
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf has denounced a cruel truth: the political will to eradicate hunger in the world is missing. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme noted in their 2009 UN State of World Food Insecurity Report that the number of people who go hungry and are undernourished has been steadily on the rise these past 10 years.
The global economic crisis has drastically aggravated that increase. Just 13 years ago, a UN resolution had pledged to halve the number of hungry people in the world by the year 2015. That sounded good, and was soon forgotten.
In effect, the global economy has been jumping back and forth between growth and contraction after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The world’s rich nations must show stong action to combat hunger
That just proves how right the FAO is to say that rich nations together can react surprisingly quickly to all sorts of challenges: terrorism, the financial crisis and even climate change. But they have gotten used to the fact that hundreds-of-thousands of people are dying of hunger. That may be awful, but it can wait - the hungry in Asia and Africa have no lobby, not in Berlin nor in Brussels, and if they have the right to vote, it is not here.
The political will to conquer hunger is missing.
Financially, it would be possible. The FAO has found out that in order to feed the world population in 2050, $44 billion annually would have to be pumped into poor nations' agricultures. That is not even a 10th of what the German government has earmarked as a bank rescue package.
The world has the means to make hunger disappear
Technically, it would be possible, too. The FAO says that, for instance in sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture has made some promising progress.
But if the political will is lacking on the part of the rich and mighty, then all that is left are individual efforts and patchwork. Thus, it would certainly be desirable for high-level members of the new German government to show up at the next food security summit in Rome in force.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has proven her adroitness on the international stage, should try to put herself at the forefront of the fight against hunger along with the US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
Just as re-thinking has set in concerning climate change, there has to be a change of heart in the fight against hunger: the rich west has not only borrowed the earth from its children, it has also borrowed its prosperity from the poor.
Gregor Hoppe is the Rome correspondent for public broadcaster ARD (db)
Editor: Rob Mudge