World Hunger

10 Myths

Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780802190987
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique en matière d'agriculture

"The definitive solutions-based book for all those questioning why hunger still exists when there is such an abundance of food." — The Huffington Post, "Food Tank's 2015 Recommended Fall Reading List" From bestselling authors Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins comes the twenty-first century's authoritative book on world hunger. Lappé and Collins refute the myths that prevent us from addressing the root causes of hunger across the globe. World Hunger: 10 Myths draws on extensive new research to offer fresh, often startling, insights about tough questions—from climate change and population growth to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the role of US foreign aid, and more. Brimming with little-known but life-changing examples of solutions to hunger worldwide, this myth-busting book argues that sustainable agriculture can feed the world, that we can end nutritional deprivation affecting one-quarter of the world's people, and that most in the Global North have more in common with hungry people than they thought. For novices and scholars alike, World Hunger: 10 Myths will inspire a whole new generation of hunger-fighters. " World Hunger ... should become not only a book for study, but a guide to action." —Noam Chomsky

myth 1

Too Little Food, Too Many People

MYTH: Food-producing resources are already stretched to their limits, and in many places there’s just not enough to go around. More people inevitably means less for each of us. So continuing population growth, which could lead to several billion more people by mid-century, is a major crisis. To end hunger today and to have any hope of preventing ever-greater hunger in the future, we must stop population growth.

OUR RESPONSE: “Too many people pressing on too few resources” is perhaps the most common and intuitive explanation for continuing hunger. But sometimes our intuitions just don’t line up with the evidence. The world produces more than enough food today. And, given the striking decline in population growth in recent decades, there’s every reason to believe it is possible to halt population growth before we overshoot the Earth’s capacity.

Let’s begin by probing more deeply the extent of hunger that many assume to be evidence of too little food for too many mouths. How we measure hunger turns out to be trickier than we’d long assumed.

In our opening essay we noted that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines hunger only in terms of calorie deficiency, and reports about 800 million hungry people.1 In this widely used measure, the FAO explained to us, those who lack calories for many months at a stretch—say, between harvests or jobs—do not register if their calorie supply averaged over a year is minimally sufficient. Yet, medical authorities tell us that even short-term calorie deficiency can have devastating effects, especially on children and anyone weakened by disease.2

Appreciating the inadequacy of this single measure, in 2013 the FAO began to emphasize a “suite of food security indicators” that includes not only the adequacy of available protein and calorie supplies but also stunting and factors such as grain-import dependency and access to safe water and sanitation that signal vulnerability to hunger.3 The FAO also added an assessment tool called Voices of the Hungry, drawing on self-reported experiences of food insecurity.4 We applaud these efforts to gain a truer understanding of the depth of hunger.

Still, only one hunger measure—that of calorie deficiency—reaches the broad public, even as this measure increasingly fails to capture nutritional well-being.

Why do we say “increasingly”?

Because the quality of food in many parts of the world is degrading, so more of us can be suffering from lack of nutrients even when our calories are more than sufficient. For example, take India, where one in seven people is “hungry” by the current calorie measure, yet at the same time four in five infants and toddlers and half of all women suffer from iron deficiency, with potentially deadly consequences.5

From 1990 to 2010, unhealthy eating patterns outpaced dietary improvements in most parts of the world, including the poorer regions, reports a 2015 Lancet study. As a consequence, “most of the key causes” of noncommunicable diseases are diet-related and predicted by 2020 to account for nearly 75 percent of all deaths worldwide, the study emphasizes.6 By 2008 nearly four-fifths of deaths from cancer, heart disease, and other noncommunicable diseases were not in the Global North, long associated with these largely diet-related ailments, but rather in “low- and lower middle-income countries,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO).7

In these alarming trends, The Lancet’s study implicates “transnational marketing and investment.”

This widening disconnect between calories and nutrients has another devastating outcome: Worldwide, roughly one in eight people is now obese, and thus at risk for heart disease and diabetes among other ailments.8 Almost two-thirds of obese people live in the Global South.9

These realities hit us when a doctor working in a rural Indian clinic serving two thousand impoverished farmers each month described a major change in his practice over the last few decades: “My patients get enough calories, but now 60 percent suffer diabetes and heart conditions.”10

Clearly, the world urgently needs a more meaningful primary indicator of the nutritional crisis than one based on calories alone—a measure of what we call in this book “nutritional deprivation” that captures both calorie and nutrient deficiencies. Since we don’t yet have one, let’s review the indicators we do have and then see where we stand.

In addition to the calorie-deficiency measure, arriving at about 800 million people worldwide in 2014, another is “stunting,” estimated by the WHO in collaboration with UNICEF and the World Bank.11 In children under five, stunting is diagnosed when a child’s height is significantly below the median compared with the “reference population.”12 To most ears, “stunting” merely suggests being unusually short; but it actually indicates a set of medical problems including a depressed immune system and impeded cognitive development.13

One-quarter of the world’s children are stunted, report these agencies, with many factors conspiring to cause the problem, including too little food and nutritionally poor food for pregnant women and children, along with other deprivations.14 New research underscores that poor sanitation also contributes to poor nutrition, and thus perhaps to as much as one-half or more of stunting, even when a child is well fed, because repeated bacterial infection associated with unsafe water interferes with nutrient absorption.15

Stunting remains “disturbingly high,” notes the FAO. Without China, the global decline in stunting since 1990 would be significantly less than the decline in calorie deficiency—to us more evidence of a widening gap between calories and nutrition.16

Evidence grows that the consequences of stunting commonly last a lifetime, including cognitive impairment and a weakened immune system, as noted; and, for females, reproductive problems. All show up in reduced educational and economic achievement. Thus, we believe, because stunting typically brings lifelong harm, individuals designated as stunted during childhood should be counted throughout their lives among those suffering the consequences of nutritional deprivation.

By this reasoning stunting affects not just one-quarter of our children but one-quarter of our whole population, or 1.8 billion people. We know this approach breaks with conventional wisdom, but we ask you to weigh it seriously.

One might counter by observing that not every child diagnosed as stunted experiences significant harm as an adult, so isn’t applying the same percentage to a whole population bound to overstate the problem? Unfortunately, no. Because stunting afflicted prior generations as well, this measure actually undercounts many adults born when stunting was even more common. Those in their 30s today, for example, were themselves under five years old at a time when stunting was much more widespread than it is today.17

Beyond calorie deficiency and stunting, are there any additional indicators that might help us to grasp the magnitude of the nutritional crisis?

A third is WHO’s estimate that two billion of us have a deficit in at least one nutrient essential for health—a deficit often causing great harm. Vitamin A deficiency, for example, means blindness for as many as half a million children each year, and iron deficiency is linked to one in five maternal deaths.18

So taking into consideration these three indicators, with considerable overlap—calorie deficiency at about 800 million, stunting at 1.8 billion, and nutrient deficiency at 2 billion—arguably at least one-quarter of the Earth’s 7.3 billion people suffer from nutritional deprivation. That’s roughly twice as many as are “hungry” measured by calorie deficiency.19

We’ve chosen “nutritional deprivation” to define the crisis this book addresses, mindful that it isn’t a co...