Who ’ s really fighting hunger ?

Abstract

Over one billion people – a sixth of humanity - don’t have enough to eat. Almost a third of the world’s children are growing up malnourished.1 Even before the food and financial crises, the number of people facing chronic malnutrition was extremely high, and falling extremely slowly. Since 2005, it has jumped by 20 percent. An extra 170 million people have been pushed into hunger2 Food prices remain stubbornly high in developing countries;3 the global recession is hitting jobs and incomes; and climate change is battering rain-fed agriculture. Already nearly one in three of the world’s children is growing up chronically malnourished. As a result, many will die before the age of five. Those who survive are likely to suffer irreversible cognitive and physical damage. They will complete fewer years of school, and earn less as adults. Their immune systems permanently impaired, they are 12 times more likely to die from easily preventable and treatable diseases. The children of undernourished mothers often suffer stunting while still in the womb, ensuring the vicious cycle will continue.4 However, hunger is a choice that we make, not a force of nature. Hunger begins with inequality – inequality between men and women, and between rich and poor. It grows because of perverse policies that treat food purely as a commodity, not a right. It is because of these policies that most developing countries no longer grow enough to feed themselves, and that their farmers are amongst the hungriest and poorest people in the world. Meanwhile, the rich world battles growing obesity. But policies can be changed. In this scorecard, ActionAid tracks the dramatic progress that has been made when countries translate the right to food into concrete actions, such as investing in poor farmers, and introducing basic measures to protect the vulnerable. Their success makes the inaction and apathy of other countries all the more inexcusable. Our indicators are based on the actions that the UN has identified as most critical to reverse growing global hunger, most recently in its 2008 Comprehensive Framework for Action.5 Developing countries have been graded on four indicators: their legal commitment to the right to food, their investment in agriculture and social protection, and their performance on hunger and child nutrition. Developed countries have been ranked on their aid to agriculture and social protection; and their commitment to sustainable agriculture and tackling climate change. The first section of this report, ‘HungerFREE Global Indicators,’ compares performance and progress across countries. The second section of this report, ‘HungerFREE Country Scorecards’, takes a closer look at each country with at-aglance scorecards. The results (table 1) show that ability and commitment to fight hunger does not depend on wealth. Some relatively poor countries have made striking progress. On the other hand, some middle income countries have allowed rural misery to deepen in the midst of growing wealth. Pakistan, for instance, is performing no better than desperately poor and conflict-torn countries such as Sierra Leone, despite having a per capita income over two and half times higher.6 India ranks below Ethiopia and Cambodia. Brazil tops our league table, showing what can be achieved when the state has both resources and political will to tackle hunger. President Lula da Silva has made it his objective to eradicate hunger. Within six years, the program Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) has introduced food banks, community kitchens and locally procured school meals along with simultaneous support for smallholder family farmers and land reform settlers. The result: child malnutrition has fallen by 73 percent and child deaths by 45 percent.7 China (2nd place), through heavy investment in supporting its poor farmers and a relatively equitable distribution of land, has reduced the number of undernourished people by 58 million between 1990 and 2001. Now less than 9 percent of the population goes hungry.8 Ghana (3rd place) has made food security a national priority and backed this with consistent support to smallholder farmers and democratic, stable governance. Ghana has made remarkable strides in reducing hunger – especially for a low income country.9 Vietnam (4th place) pursued equitable land reform and investment in smallholders, and with relatively strong social policies has made unprecedented progress, reducing poverty by half in the decade of the nineties, with comparatively low levels of inequality.10 Even Malawi (5th place), one of the poorest countries in the world, and burdened with a devastating HIV epidemic to boot – has reaped rich results within three short years. Through a massive boost of investment to small scale farmers, it has trebled production to halt a famine that threatened to leave nearly a third of its population hungry. In line with their different circumstances, our top five countries have followed different paths. However, they have some interesting things in common. • Rejecting the conventional wisdom of the free-market era, all retained – or reclaimed – a central role for the state in agriculture, and especially in developing and supporting poor farmers (whether through credit, research and extension, technology, income or price supports, input subsidies or a combination of these, targeted on smallholders). • While these countries have also invested in commercial agriculture for export, they have maintained or introduced specific policies to ensure that production of staple foods for domestic markets continues to thrive. • They either already had a relatively equitable distribution of land or introduced land reforms (although land reform in Brazil needs to go much further). • Finally, all have introduced basic social protection measures (although in Malawi and Ghana, which endured donor-imposed cuts in social spending in the 1990s, these are still at an early stage). CHANGE: The food crisis has been a rude wake-up call to the fact that markets alone cannot deliver food security. Many world leaders now agree on the need for strong and effective public policies to tackle inequality, support poor farmers and protect the right to food. The World Bank admitted in 2007 that its push for agricultural liberalisation had resulted in “huge costs in foregone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness and, in many cases, their survival”.14 Now, home-grown initiatives such as CAADP in Africa and MERCOSUR’s push for a regional food security framework are helping to foster increased investment in agriculture in the South. Many individual countries, including Nigeria, Ecuador, the Gambia and Senegal, have announced plans to reverse growing import dependence. Some donors are also beginning to gradually reverse the decline in aid to agriculture. Since 2000, more developing countries have taken steps to enshrine the legal right to food in their constitutions and laws. The tide is also slowly beginning to turn with the implementation of a range of social protection policies – from India’s Rural Employment Guarantee Act to Lesotho’s universal social pensions for the aged – which are vital to ensure that poor people can achieve their right to food. ACTIONS: ActionAid calls for all world leaders to work together to end hunger by taking the following priority actions: 1.Sustainable smallholder agriculture: • Reverse decades of neglect of agriculture by increasing developing country budget allocations to at least 10 percent as part of a comprehensive national anti-hunger action plan. Increase donor aid to agriculture by at least US $20 billion per year, and ensure these funds directly support national plans by channeling them through a coordinated funding mechanism. • Prioritise investment in poor farmers, especially women, with support to climate-resilient, low-input agriculture as recommended by the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). • Eliminate subsidies for biofuel production, which directly undermine food security. 2.Social protection of right to food • Make the right to food justiciable in national constitutions and framework laws.18 • Increase both donor and developing country investment in social protection and basic social services. National anti-hunger plans should include programmes to immediately increase food intake (such as school meals, subsidized foodgrains); to boost incomes (such as old age pensions, child benefit, cash-for-work programmes); and to build human capital (such as free basic education and healthcare). 3.Climate change adaptation and mitigation • As part of a just global climate deal in Copenhagen in December 2008, developed nations must agree to limit emissions but also to support and sustain adaptation and mitigation measures in developing countries to the tune of US $182 billion per year.