The real hunger crisis

Robert Paarlberg reports for Foreign Policy :

Fluctuations in the world's hungry population are important to monitor, but full-time specialists pay far more attention to the underlying fundamentals. They know that most of the hunger in the world is caused neither by high food prices nor slower economic growth. There were 850 million people chronically malnourished around the world in 2007, at a time when food prices were low and global growth was high. This is a permanent food crisis that is more than four times as large as the temporary spike that began last year.

The underlying crisis derives primarily from persistent rural poverty in Africa and South Asia. Ironically, most of the world's hungry people are farmers who produce food for a living. More than 60 percent of all Africans, for example, work in the countryside, growing crops and herding animals, and earning less than $1 a day. These farmers' crop yields are only about 20 percent as high as in Europe and the United States because they lack access to all the basic necessities for productive farming: improved seeds, fertilizer, water, electrical power, education, and rural roads to connect them to markets. Most of these farmers are women, two thirds are illiterate, and one third are malnourished. When food prices fall, these farmers can actually be hurt because agricultural products are what they have to sell.

The United States' favorite response to global hunger in recent years has been to give away its excess food. In response to the 2008 price spike, the U.S government spent an additional $1.4 billion to ship domestically produced food abroad as aid. This move was generous, but it offered no solution to the problem of low farm productivity. What's more, free food arriving from Iowa or Kansas can actually hurt farmers in Kenya or Ethiopia by reducing demand for their own market sales.

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