Ending Hunger

The quest to feed the world without destroying it

Anthony Warner

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786079275
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Globale Entwicklungsstudien

'A provocative vision.' Sunday Times In 2017, the number of people going hungry in the world increased, for the first time in a decade. Pesticide-resistant bugs lay waste to crops across the globe, from bananas to potatoes. Food production releases billions of tons of carbon into the world, and it's only getting worse. The writing is on the wall: our food system must change. But no one can agree on how.With his trademark counterintuition, Anthony Warner reveals that we have the ability to make a world where no one starves. And one where we don't feel guilty about tucking in.

1

Hunger

When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can’t use it for progress.

– Hans Rosling

Fighting for Food

It is often said that we are just six meals away from rioting in the streets. There have been many food riots throughout history, but they don’t happen in the way that we might predict. The countries where food riots occur are not those with the greatest numbers of hungry people, or the worst food shortages. Riots happen where food justice is threatened, perhaps when corrupt merchants unfairly raise prices, governments restrict supply as a form of control, or the rich hoard, leaving the poor majority to starve. The rioters themselves are rarely the hungriest people in a given country, driven to violence by desperation and months of shortage. Often the rioters are from the cities, where access to food is always far better than in rural areas. Rioters have enough calories to fuel their anger, battling for their brothers and sisters quietly dying elsewhere. When people starve during famines, on the other hand, it is the end of a long process. They will have sold their livestock, their possessions, their homes. They will have gone for weeks with barely enough to eat before supplies run completely dry. When the hunger really bites, they are already too weak to fight.¹

In the course of writing this book I have spoken to many people who have experienced famine and seen the shadow of mass hunger fall over a land and its people. Perhaps the most surprising thing I have learnt is how that shadow seems to fall. Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and has studied the effects of famine and food shortage across the world. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts on humanitarian crisis and response, particularly in Sudan and the Horn of Africa. His book Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine examines the nature of and reasons for food crises around the world. On the experience of entering a region stricken by famine, he told me that the biggest surprise is how normal it feels in the towns. Despite what many of us might assume, when you arrive you can get a hotel, go out for a meal and visit markets stocked with food. He explained that the reason for this is that famines do not involve everyone going hungry. They affect the poorest people, which means they are easy to ignore. As he told me, ‘When there is a famine, that doesn’t mean that there is no food around. You can always get food if you have money.’ He also explained that in his experience, hunger is not the only thing that devastates the lives of those affected by famine. He told me, ‘There is a societal breakdown, with people abandoning land and selling all their assets in order to survive. Most of the deaths are not from hunger, but from disease.’

Corrie Sissons works for the famine relief charity Oxfam as Emergency Food Security and Vulnerable Livelihoods Coordinator. Her work recently took her into South Sudan in the midst of the 2017 famine. She told me, ‘It is sometimes hard to talk about these things as a white middle-class person who has never experienced hunger. We say we are hungry when dinner is half an hour late. But there are people in the world who consistently go for months, even years, eating less than required.’

Corrie explained that whilst she was in South Sudan, she came across groups of people who had been surviving for weeks off the roots of lily plants. Others were eating wild berries that caused sickness and stomach pains, because that was the only food available to them. But even in these desperate conditions, death from starvation is actually quite rare. ‘It is disease that kills people,’ she told me. ‘Most of the deaths in children under five are from diarrhoea, which leads to malnutrition as it stops them from absorbing food. Or they are from other infectious diseases that become more common as immune systems are compromised and water supplies become contaminated.’

Kate McMahon is Food Security Advisor at the global humanitarian aid charity Mercy Corps, working in some of the most food insecure regions of the world. On the issue of what causes famine, she is very clear. ‘All famine is human made. There is enough food today to feed the world, the real issue is access. Famine is an issue of markets and governance. There is plenty of food today, it is just that some have it and some don’t.’

The Right to Food

Providing every person with enough food to live is the most important role of a civilised society. If the world falls apart and we can do nothing else, we need to make every effort to keep people fed. Without food, nothing else is possible. If people are hungry, there can be no science, music, art, poetry or progress. Food fuels everything we do, and without it, it doesn’t take long for our bodies and minds to shut down. Why else is it that culture, art, science and politics have traditionally been the preserve of the rich and privileged?

Until relatively recently, only the rich have been consistently free from hunger. It was only when most of us gained access to adequate food that we saw the rise of popular culture, leaders, artists, scientists and writers from working-class communities. Freedom from hunger began to enable people of different backgrounds to achieve status based on merit.

In The Truth About Fat, I asked why obesity in the UK and Europe had risen so sharply since the 1960s. Although there is much complexity surrounding these issues, the most compelling answer is depressingly simple. Before then, many people in society did not have enough food. Those that did, the rich and growing middle class, were obese in much the same proportions as the rest of the population are today. In the 1960s, although it is a truth we now struggle to accept, hunger still dominated the lives of many of the poorest people, even in the Global North. Worldwide, despite huge increases in population, we now produce fifty percent more food per capita than we did in 1962. Although a lot of people still go hungry today, a far greater proportion did back then. As we free more people from the chains of hunger, so we free them to make their own progress.

When hunger dominates, all is lost. If you are ever unlucky enough to go without food, it will not make you rise up and fight for justice. It will not be the mother of invention, forcing you to create new solutions to confounding problems. Hunger breaks the strong and cripples the weak. Hungry people sink away from life, shatter bonds with those around them, and lie beneath the storm in the hope that it will pass. Hunger rips away humanity and turns societies into dust. Hungry people die alone and lose hope long before their fate is sealed.

It is up to those whose bellies are full to fight for them. We must prevent hunger at all costs, and make sure that the right to proper food and water remains the central right of all humanity. Although our agriculture and food systems are in desperate need of change, at the heart of that change must be the prevention of hunger. The environment, the climate, soil erosion, water loss, biodiversity, rainforest depletion, mass extinctions, sea level rises and extreme weather events are all desperate challenges that we must face to ensure that we have a future on this planet. But in my mind, they are dwarfed by one hungry child crying out for food.

Of course, you could argue that this is foolhardy and shorttermist. The planet has limits and climate change is surely a bigger threat than one child’s tears. If you place foxes and chickens in a field, the foxes will gleefully eat and breed without thought for the future, eventually consuming every last chicken, then slowly starving from lack of food. Humans, many will claim, are just the same. High birth and low mortality rates mean that the world population is growing exponentially, requiring huge, costly increases in agricultural production to keep pace with rising demand. We are just like hungry, randy foxes, thoughtlessly breeding and gobbling up delicious chickens, ignoring doomsday until it is upon us. Agriculture, food systems, social care, birth control, energy management, sanitation and medicines are simply clever tricks to push the fence back a little further. All our technology and innovation does is to buy us a few more precious years before the inevitable collapse. The world, the argument goes, needs to feel some pain now to avoid a greater loss down the line.

But the question we must then ask is: who will feel the pain of this inevitable hunger? Perhaps when we picture mass starvation, it becomes a little too easy for us to think of it as a distant problem. Maybe instead we should imagine our own children emaciated and crying, with us alongside them, too weak and destitute to find food. If images of white-skinned, European or American children filled our screens whenever the threat of starvation was mentioned, I am quite sure many campaigners would take a different view of how much misery we should accept today. I know that I am not brave or strong enough to accept my own starvation, nor that of my children, however noble the cause. I cannot see how it is fair to expect anyone else to make that sacrifice.

This seems to leave us in a pretty hopeless situation, as the world’s population continues to grow. We cannot jump over the fence into a new field, and the chickens are sure to run out eventually.

Or perhaps not. Humans are innovators, creators, scientists, agriculturalists, statisticians, systems analysts, engineers, politicians, medics, cooks and builders. Unlike foxes, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Place humans and chickens in a field and, eventually, there will be more humans and more chickens, and perhaps some cute little houses for the chickens to live in. And although there will always be selfish individuals who care only for themselves, the field will also be full of people thinking about how to make a better life for everyone.

In researching for this book and speaking to some of the smartest people working in this area, I have been shocked by how bleak things really are. The problems are very real and the stakes extraordinarily high. But I have also been left with a surprising amount of optimism. Humans are an extraordinary and unique species, and although we will always be bound by the limits of the natural world, there is a chance that we might just find a way through.

In this book I will attempt to show that there is hope of a future where no one has to go hungry, and that this can be achieved without allowing the world to burn. I will also try to show that even though there is a pressing need for change, the future need not be a joyless desert of meal replacement shakes, plastic techno-burgers and compulsory vitamin injections. Food needs to meet the physiological needs of the population, but it also needs to be culturally appropriate, tempting and delicious. It needs to bring meaning and joy, bind us together in shared love, and help us define our identity. Food is more than just fuel, and if we are to create a better future, we need to develop new systems with that in mind. Throughout this book, I will be taking some tentative steps towards setting out what that future might look like.

But first we need to deal with a problem, and it’s a big one. As populations continue to grow around the world, just how many people can our planet sustain? What stops the population from expanding for ever? And if, as it seems, we are perilously near to the cliff edge, how on earth are we going to stop ourselves from falling off?

2

A Brief History of Hunger

The first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.

– Norman Borlaug

Birdageddon

I am writing this in early springtime in the UK, and a pair of blue tits are busy preparing a nest box just in view of the window that I occasionally stare out of for inspiration. At this time of year, they spend most of their day frantically searching for nesting materials, pulling up any useful pieces of moss, leaf matter, hair or feathers in preparation for the arrival of their new brood. Most of the time, they look as if they are under a lot of stress. They are busy, hardworking and seem to be in constant fear for their lives.

On average, birds similar to them will lay around eight eggs per year, and perhaps six of these will hatch into fledglings. Each blue tit will probably live for a maximum of around eight years, and if they spend six of those years successfully breeding, then they can expect to produce around thirty-six chicks in their lifetime. That’s eighteen each. No wonder they’re stressed.

Let’s just imagine what would happen if every one of those blue tits survived into adulthood and had six crops of fledglings for themselves. Within two generations, we would jump from the two blue tits visible from my window this afternoon, to 648 birds. A generation on from that, if all those birds continued to breed successfully, there would be 11,664 frantic little critters, no doubt putting a fair amount of stress on the availability of nesting materials in my garden. A few more years down the line, there would be 209,952. Then 3,779,136. A generation later there would be over 68 million, more than one for every human in the UK.

If things carried on, in only twelve generations, or just under a hundred years, the two birds in my garden would have spawned around 25 billion tonnes’ worth of hungry blue tit progeny, all desperately hunting for nesting materials every spring. That’s enough to vastly outweigh all humans on Earth, and all of the animals we produce for agriculture.¹ In the unlikely event that they worked out how to organise themselves into a terrifying bird army, they would be capable of taking over the world. My great-grandchildren would wonder what I was thinking providing a nest box for the nasty little blue fuckers. All of a sudden, I feel compelled to rush outside and stamp on them. Or perhaps just buy myself a cat.

It is not just blue tits that have this remarkable talent for exponential proliferation, as almost all species have the same potential for rapid population growth, including our own. So long as it is possible to breed at above the replacement rate during a lifetime, populations can expand at an extraordinary pace. That’s in theory. In reality, the natural world has pretty strong checks that prevent things getting out of control.

The harsh reality for blue tits is that the vast majority of their babies are destined to die prematurely. Some will get sick; others will be eaten alive by predators. Domestic cats will playfully clear out their carefully constructed nests, gutting and beheading baby birds with surgical precision, then proudly offering up the bloodied corpses as gifts for their owners (I’ve never been a cat person). Others will be torn apart by sparrow hawks in order to provide a meal for chicks of their own. Some will be murdered by their own family, with weaker chicks being selfishly pecked to death by hungry siblings not keen on sharing. Or perhaps they will fall from the nest and be crushed underfoot by my blundering Springer Spaniel carrying out one of his regular garden patrols. In lean years when the weather is not kind, many young birds will die from a lack of food, as desperate parents cannot forage enough to keep them alive.

If blue tit populations are to remain stable, in all their years of breeding, only about two chicks from a possible thirty-six are likely to survive to adulthood. Any more and the population would rapidly rise, allowing avian world domination. Any fewer, and soon blue tits would disappear from our gardens. It is a brutal yet essential balancing act that nature inflicts upon each species. Every creature spends most of its time hungry, afraid and desperately clinging to life. Every time we loo...