Society: A new millennium free from hunger
By John Madeley
LONDON: More than 800 million people still lack access to the food they need according to a recent UN report. This startling figure is actually smaller than the 960 million 30 years ago, but still accounting for 13 percent of the world's population,.
The report, The State of Food and Agriculture, 2000, from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), highlights the range of threats to food supply in developing countries during the closing years of the 20th century: poor weather, declining prices of major exports and political instability, often the result of armed conflict, and the impact of the 1997 world financial crisis. It also points to the grim statistic that hunger and undernourishment decrease children's learning capacity by up to 10 percent and cost developing countries US$128 billion in lost productivity each year --- productivity they cannot spare.
The FAO is now calling for urgent action and outlines a range of options including increasing agricultural productivity, raising the incomes of rural communities, improving access to food and ensuring that developing countries participate fairly in global trade.
Over the last 50 years some lessons have been learned says the report. Agrarian reform, giving better access to land, does lead to sharp increases in productivity and a key factor is improving the distribution of wealth, resources and opportunities. The report concludes that countries must invest in technological capital such as agricultural research --- and improved extension services so that farmers benefit from the research.
Few would argue with the importance of agrarian reform and improved distribution, but Prof. Jules Pretty, of the Center for Environment and Society at the University of Essex, points out that despite the increase in food output in the last 40 years, 800 million people are still chronically hungry.
Investment in technological capital may not reach those who are hungry, he says: "hungry people need other approaches; we also need investment in natural and social capital, helping people to work together to overcome problems."
The recovery and integration of traditional agricultural technologies, combined with the best of what we know now, plus the participation of people, has led to increases in food output in some areas. The Center for Environment and Society think tank has documented more than 200 examples from Africa, Asia and Latin America of where people have doubled and sometimes trebled their food output.
More than 200,000 farmers in southern Brazil, for example, who are using green manures and who have integrated livestock into their system, have doubled yields of wheat and maize and in Mali and Burkina Faso, in West Africa, there has been a huge spread of water harvesting techniques, which have allowed farmers to make better use of rainfall and substantially increase food output.
-- Observer News Service