This year's World Food Day theme, Fight hunger to reduce poverty, highlights the fact that hunger is the most critical manifestation of poverty, so eliminating hunger is the first step towards reducing poverty and ensuring Food for All.
Around 800 million men, women and children are chronically hungry. Hunger causes illness and death, robs people of their potential to work and cripples children's learning capacity. It also undermines the peace and prosperity of nations and traps individuals in a vicious cycle of poor nutrition, ill health and diminished capacity for learning and work that is passed on from one generation to the next. Above all, it is a fundamental violation of the right to food.
Unfortunately, most poverty reduction strategies fail to specifically target hunger. Policy makers long assumed that if income levels rose and economies grew, the benefits would trickle down to the hungry. But this has not proved to be an effective strategy."
We cannot assume that hunger will disappear as a by-product of poverty elimination," says FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. "A sharper focus is needed on hunger and agricultural development within the broader objective of poverty reduction."
A hungry mother gives birth to an underweight baby, who then faces a future plagued by stunted growth and frequent illness. A physically and mentally weak generation is doomed to pass the cycle of deprivation on to the next.
Education is one of the surest ways out of poverty. But hungry children have a harder time concentrating and assimilating knowledge. Depriving them of the benefits of education, hunger seals their poverty into adulthood.
The majority of the world's poor are women and girls. Research shows that increasing women's education and skills raises family incomes and nutritional levels and reduces infant death rates. Education also leads to smaller families. But throughout life women and girls have fewer opportunities for education and training than men. And in many cultures men eat first and most, despite the fact that women in the developing world frequently have heavier workloads.
Chronic hunger limits the body's ability to convert energy into work, weakening people physically and leaving them feeling hopeless and unmotivated. Not surprisingly, the undernourished have difficulty both finding work and being productive. Employers may see hungry people as slow or lazy, when in fact they suffer from lethargy, the body's physiological response to prolonged calorie and nutrient deprivation.
If hunger has such a devastating effect on society, why don't governments make fighting hunger a priority? One answer is that countries are so burdened by a host of overwhelming problems that they resort to putting out the biggest fires first: famines get their attention, while chronic, "invisible" hunger may not. Besides the world has become so good at producing food, some decision-makers have become complacent, assuming they need not take action. So instead of setting specific goals for food security, they follow the conventional wisdom and focus on economic growth, with the expectation that hunger will diminish as a result.
In order to make significant strides in reducing poverty, a nation's people must first have enough to eat. When people have access to the food they need to be strong and active participants in society, productivity increases, markets grow and poverty drops.
Improved nutrition influences economic growth directly through improved labour productivity and indirectly through longer life expectancy and better health. A recent study of the relationship between rising food intake in developing countries and gross domestic product (GDP) over a 30-year period found that if countries with high rates of undernourishment had increased food intake to an adequate level, GDP in those nations would have risen by 45 percent.
To make progress in the fight against hunger, governments, the private sector and the international community will need to focus their efforts in rural areas, where 70 percent of the poor and hungry live. This must include directing more investments to those regions.
FAO advocates a twin-track approach to fighting hunger, encompassing both short-term and long-term measures. Hungry people cannot wait for the benefits of improved infrastructure, a more equitable distribution of resources, access to land and credit, and other elements of macroeconomic policy. They need urgent help in the form of safety nets, including school feeding programmes, supplemental food for pregnant and breastfeeding women, emergency food aid and programmes that help people to become self-sufficient, such as employment or credit schemes. When well designed and targeted, these programmes not only meet immediate food needs but also put in place essential elements for future development, such as irrigation schemes and tree plantations.
Raising people's awareness about the problems of hunger and food insecurity is also a vital step. World Food Day activities aim to heighten public understanding of hunger and strengthen solidarity in the struggle to make sure that everyone has enough to eat every day.
At the 1996 World Food Summit, world leaders committed themselves to cutting by half the number of hungry people by 2015. They will meet again next year to review the progress made and consider ways to accelerate efforts to reach this goal.
