HUNGER: THE BASIC PROBLEM NO ONE IS WILLING TO FIX

Armed with the dramatic latest report from the United Nations World Food Program, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O'Brien was recently quoted as saying that 108 million people in 48 countries worldwide are currently facing “crisis-level food insecurity.” In layman’s terms, what that means is that this total is in imminent danger of starving to death. Indeed, even as I’m writing this, many of their number may already be dead.

And that’s only the beginning of a tragic and continuing story, as witnessed by the fact that just two years ago the number of people in that ultimate crisis situation was 80 million—a shocking enough total even then, which has risen by more than 25 percent over the course of the past 24 months.

People in the most immediate danger of starving to death currently number some 20 million, and among these, worldwide relief organization experts estimate that at least 1.4 million children are so severely malnourished that they may be past the point of no return. While poor governance and corruption can be mentioned as two of numerous causes for this crisis situation in many of the countries where starvation is prevalent, there are clearly other major reasons why certain nations can’t feed themselves, including climate, lack of arable land and other food resources, and a lack of international aid, not only in terms of cash money but also of help in developing improved food production. But in certain countries, like Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan, the number one cause of starvation and malnutrition is war, revealing another urgent reason for world leaders to make an effort to put aside their differences in order to become the architects of world peace, instead of purveyors and promoters of conflict.

The track record of the world’s most powerful nations is, in this sense, abysmal, and currently far from improving. On the contrary, US President Donald Trump, for instance, has vowed to not only not increase the amount of money his country—by far the most affluent on earth—devotes to foreign aid, but to slash it by nearly 30 percent. CNN host and Washington Post editorialist Fareed Zakaria recently made reference to a public opinion survey in which one of the questions asked of Americans was what proportion of the US discretional spending budget they thought was spent on foreign aid. The majority selected a shockingly inaccurate response of 26 percent. The truth is that even before any move by President Trump to significantly diminish foreign aid has been made, the total of money devoted to foreign relations is only about three percent of the US discretionary budget and only about one percent goes to actual foreign aid. If the current administration gets its way, that amount will shrink by another third.

By comparison, the US currently invests more than 50 percent  (e.g., 54 percent in 2015) of its discretionary budget—the amount negotiated each year by the Executive Branch with the Legislative Branch, as opposed to the mandatory or fixed budget—on the country’s vast military interests. The more than 600 billion dollars a year that the US currently spends on maintaining its military might is already a greater total than the military budgets of the next eight ranking world military powers combined and the Trump administration wants to increase military spending still further, as part of the president’s campaign promise to “make America great again.” In my view—and that of Fareed Zakaria, apparently—a good way to “make America great again” would be by helping it become the world’s greatest peacemaking and humanitarian power, but the trend appears to be toward an opposite sort of role.

And indeed, that would seem to be the trend worldwide. Global relief networks including the UN’s, which is, by far, the largest, are this year calling on the world’s richest nations to put up the 21.5 billion dollars that they need to provide not only emergency food supplies but also refugee assistance, shelter, medical care and other types of vitally urgent aid. But as 2017 moves into its fifth month, global relief organizations have only been able to collect about 17 percent of that amount (3.7 billion dollars).

It’s interesting to note that the 18 billion-dollar deficit between the paltry amount of money that the world’s richest nations have pledged to international humanitarian aid and the amount aid organizations reckon they would require to even minimally cover the needs of the sick, the destitute and the starving is only about a third of the amount by which US President Trump hopes to increase his country’s already astronomical budget for war.

Furthermore, if you take into account that Trump’s proposed foreign relations budget cuts will prioritize continuing to provide abundant military aid to perceived allies (to the detriment of humanitarian and development aid), the outlook for the world’s poor and destitute grows even more grim. For instance, so far in 2017, the US has only provided about 640 million (yes, million) dollars in non-military foreign aid, compared with the already meager 3.6 billion dollars pledged by the Obama administration in 2016.

Far too often, the most affluent societies in the world seek to justify world hunger by “selling it” as an insoluble problem. The truth is that it is not. Indeed, more than for any other reason, worldwide hunger goes unresolved because of selfishness and indifference among the world’s most privileged societies. This makes it an easy problem to solve. All it takes is a minimal commitment—the reallocation of a mere fraction of what is spent daily on “defense” (read: war and military domination) to alleviate it immediately and, in the not too distant future, eliminate it entirely. And before you brand me an impractical idealist, listen to some facts.

There are those who will point out that far fewer people are going hungry today than 20 years ago. And that’s true. But only because    awareness was so much lower and programs so much less effective back then. The fact is, according to WorldHunger.org, that developing regions saw a 42 percent reduction in the prevalence of undernourishment in the period from 2012 to 2014 compared with figures for the period from 1990 to 1992. But a lot of this improvement was due to meteoric economic development (one of the surest ways to combat poverty and hunger) in China and certain Southeast Asian countries.

Despite this good news from a 20-year standpoint, the tragic fact remains that Asia continues to be home to one out of every three hungry people on earth. And still more sobering is the fact that, even after this slow but sure progress, one out of every eight people in these developing regions remains chronically undernourished. That’s more than 13 percent of the world population. The least progress in combating hunger has been in the sub-Saharan region. There, at least one out of every four persons is undernourished.

Meanwhile, in southern Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.) the problem of undernourishment has only been marginally reduced in the past two decades, even despite India’s noteworthy rise as a world economy in that time. In this area, there are an estimated 276 million chronically undernourished people.

At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, delegates set a goal to reduce the number of hungry people in the world from the then-total of 991 million to 495 million by 2015. For those of us who understand how absolutely achievable zero-hunger is as a medium-term global goal, this objective seemed far too conservative. Nevertheless, the world came nowhere close to even that goal, with the estimated number of undernourished people in the world totaling 790.1 million in 2015. Latest figures (2014-2016) show that this figure is again on the rise at an estimated 795 million at last count.

For those who are offended by my characterization of the world’s major wealthy nations as selfish, uncommitted and patently uninterested in the world’s starving people and in solving the problem once and for all, consider this: An article in the highly respected British magazine The Economist reported that Americans, on average, throw 40 percent of the food they buy in the trash. And in India, a nation where, as I said before, hunger is prevalent, ineffective distribution means that 40 percent of all food rots before it ever reaches the market. Meanwhile, the Stockholm International Water Institute, which carries out in-depth studies on food production and water use, calculates that more than one third of all food worldwide is either lost or wasted before it can serve to nourish human beings.
Torgny Holmgren, Executive Director of the Stockholm International Water Institute puts it succinctly: “More than one-fourth of all the water we use worldwide is taken to grow over one billion tons of food that nobody eats. That water, together with the billions of dollars spent to grow, ship, package and purchase the food, is sent down the drain.” And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of people are starving and other hundreds of millions are undernourished around the globe. In short, the world’s most affluent societies are grossly overeating—with the endemic obesity and other health disorders that this signifies—and throwing away the food they can’t manage to shove down their throats, while over a billion people can’t get their hands on enough food to properly nourish themselves.

A few weeks ago on his CNN program, GPS, Fareed Zakaria made it clear how simple it would be for the United States alone to make an enormous difference on the world hunger front. He pointed out that, “Helping people on the brink of starvation isn't expensive. According to the World Food Program, it costs about 20 cents, less than a postage stamp, to help feed a malnourished child for a day. But perhaps the best reason to invest in foreign aid is because it embodies what is best about the United States. By helping those millions of people who are now suffering, America will affirm its leadership in the world while at the same time upholding its values as a nation and saving human lives.”

This is a call that should be made to the leaders not only of the United States but of every other major economic power as well. The fact that we must still talk about hunger as a problem that is yet without solution should be a source of shame to every central economy on earth because, beyond all excuses and self-justifications, it denotes an utter lack of simple humanity and empathy, and an attendant lack of interest in the cause of world peace, solidarity and brotherhood.