PART I

WORLD REVIEW

WORLD REVIEW

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN WORLD FOOD SECURITY

The Sixth World Food Survey,¹ issued shortly before the World Food Summit, concluded that while significant progress has been achieved in global food security during the past decades, 20 percent of the population in the developing countries still had inadequate access to food in 1990-92 compared with 35 percent two decades earlier. The absolute number of people with inadequate access to food had declined only slightly from 920 million in 1969-71 to 840 million in 1990-92. As was forcefully pointed out during the World Food Summit, the latter is an unacceptably high figure and implies that about one out of five people in the developing world was facing food inadequacy in 1990-92. This is what motivated the World Food Summit’s commitment to halve, by 2015 at the latest, the present number of undernourished people. The set of objectives and actions for this purpose were enunciated in the World Food Summit Plan
of Action.

Assessing more recent developments in food security presents a number of difficulties, given data limitations for a large number of countries. The interpretation of short-term changes in indicators underlying food security should also be subject to caution, as such changes may reflect, for the countries concerned, transient factors that have limited significance in food security trends. Nevertheless, recent data do present a number of distinct patterns that enable tentative conclusions to be drawn.

Table 1 presents selected indicators relating to food availability, stability and access in developing countries. The countries are grouped according to average levels of dietary energy supply (DES) in 1993-95 (column 4). A close relationship between the various indicators is evident: in particular, the higher the average per caput income (column 11), the lower the level of relative food inadequacy² (column 6) and the higher the ability to finance food imports (columns 13 to 16).

TABLE 1

Selected indicators relating to food security in developing countries, by DES group

Note: This review focuses on experiences at the country level. Therefore, all country group averages are simple arithmetic averages, in which all the countries are given equal weight. Population-weighted averages were inappropriate for the purposes of this review, since a few countries dominate each of the country groups in terms of population. It may be noted, nevertheless, that the percentages of undernourished population in the different groups, as shown in column 6, are very close to population-weighted averages. Sources: FAO and World Bank data.

As regards recent trends, the following main features can be observed:

• For most indicators relating to food security, the overall pattern seems to be one of a growing gap between the countries with relatively high levels of average food intake and those with relatively low levels. Indeed, average levels of DES declined between 1989-91 and 1993-95 in the countries where such levels were already initially very low but rose significantly in a majority of countries where the DES was already relatively high. Whereas the average per caput DES of the 20 countries with the lowest levels in 1989-91 was 1 941 kcal per caput/day, it had declined to a mere 1 853 in
  1993-95, indicating more widespread and deeper food insecurity in the latter period. Nevertheless, on a positive note, countries that recorded higher DES levels included some of the most populous countries in each region: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and
  Mexico in Latin America and the Caribbean; Nigeria in Africa; China, India and Indonesia in Asia; and Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic and Turkey in the
  Near East.
• Whereas only 14 countries had a per caput DES of less than 2 000 kcal in 1989-91, the number of such countries increased to 20 in 1993-95, which is further evidence of a worsening situation at the lower end of the food security scale. Moreover, at least two of the countries with a DES of less than 2 000 kcal in 1993-95 (Mongolia and Togo) had a DES of more than 2 200 kcal in 1989-91. Despite limited progress in a few countries, only one, Rwanda, had graduated from the <2 000 category. However, more recent data for this country would probably have shown a marked deterioration of the situation as a consequence of civil strife and poor production and trade performances.
• Underlining the close correlation between domestic supply performances and food intake levels, the largest gains in per caput food production during 1991-96 again took place in countries with already high levels of DES. Food production increased at particularly robust rates in countries with a DES of more than 3 000 kcal per caput/day (those in North Africa, except the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, being among the highest), and moderately in those with a DES between 2 500 and 3 000 (although China, Ghana and Myanmar achieved major gains in per caput food production). By contrast, no progress, and even some deterioration, was recorded in the countries with a DES of less than 2 000. Among the 20 countries in the latter group, only Ethiopia, and to a lesser extent Angola, Cambodia, Chad, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, achieved significant gains in per caput food production during 1991-96.
• The strongest gains in per caput GDP accrued to countries where DES levels were above 2 500 kcal. In the group of countries with a DES of more than 3 000 kcal, strong gains in per caput income between 1990-92 and 1993-95 were recorded, particularly in Argentina, the Republic of Korea and the Syrian Arab Republic. Asian countries in the 2 500 to 3 000 DES bracket, such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Viet Nam, also recorded strong growth in per caput income. Other examples of rapidly expanding economies with relatively high levels of DES included those of Chile, Panama and Uruguay. In stark contrast, countries with the lowest levels of DES actually saw declines in per caput GDP. Such declines were dramatic in Haiti, Angola, Mongolia and Sierra Leone, but all other countries in the <2 000 DES group, except Mozambique and Cambodia, experienced falling or stagnating per caput incomes. Tentative data for Afghanistan point to a particularly disquieting situation, as its average food consumption level was the lowest of all (1 456 kcal per caput/day in 1993-95, 24 percent less than in 1989-91). Furthermore, Afghanistan’s per caput food production fell significantly during 1991-95 and collapsed in 1996, owing to a combination of civil strife, resultant large-scale population displacements and a shortage of inputs because foreign exchange reserves were diverted to import food for current consumption.
• A similarly unfortunate turn of events is suggested by indicators of the financial weight of food imports (the indicators being the ratios of food imports to total imports and food imports to total exports). Not only do food imports represent a large share of total trade in countries with a low DES (more than 50 percent of the value of total exports in those with a DES of less than 2 000 kcal per caput/day in recent years), but the relative weight of such imports appears to be growing. By contrast, the ratios remained relatively constant in the countries with higher levels of DES. For several countries in the <2 300 groups, including Mozambique, Haiti, Comoros, Rwanda, the Gambia and Sierra Leone (and a few others in higher DES classes), the value of food imports exceeded that of total export earnings. An extreme case was that of Iraq, where the trade sanctions following the years of conflict brought the food imports-total exports ratio from 57 percent in 1989-91 to 189 percent in 1993-95. While in some cases these situations implied the availability of other sources of import financing, such as tourism and remittances, in most cases they were explained by grave shortcomings in the export sector and a strong dependence on food aid or various forms of concessional financing.
• Of the 20 countries with a per caput DES of less than 2 000 kcal per caput/day in 1993-95, 16 are in Africa (three – Afghanistan, Cambodia and Mongolia – are in Asia, and one – Haiti – in Latin America and the Caribbean). In 10 of the 16 African countries, the precarious food intake situation in 1989-91 further deteriorated in 1993-95. The steepest declines in DES (of 7 percent or more) in Africa in the <2 000 kcal category were to be found in Togo, the United Republic of Tanzania, Liberia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe. Such gravely deteriorating situations resulted from a variety of factors, including adverse climatic conditions and problems of transition as economies shifted from strong government control to a liberalized environment. However, the worst deteriorations were often associated with civil strife and political instability. In particular, the civil war in Somalia, combined with natural disasters, resulted in a dismal food security situation that has tended to worsen in recent years. With a per caput DES of only 1 727 kcal already in 1989-91, the country faced further declines in food production (by 1.7 percent per annum in the 1991-96 period), large population displacements associated with the civil strife and the destruction of economic infrastructure. The worsening food security situation in Liberia is also mostly a result of civil strife, while the breakdown of economic and administrative infrastructure was at the root of a marked deterioration of food security conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Despite the apparent growing polarization between countries at the high and low ends of the income and food security scales since the early 1990s, the most recent years have seen a number of encouraging developments. The good news came mainly from the region of Africa. As reviewed below, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole saw its crop and livestock production expand significantly in 1995 and more markedly in 1996, with a majority of countries sharing in the expansion. Further, the economic upturn that took place in sub-Saharan Africa in 1994-95 broadened in 1996, bringing the region’s GDP growth rate in the latter year to about 5 percent, the highest in two decades.

¹ FAO. 1996. The Sixth World Food Survey. Rome.

² The methodology for assessing food inadequacy in a given country is explained in The Sixth World Food Survey, Appendix 3. This methodology replaces the Aggregate Household Food Security Index, previously developed for the Committee on Food Security assessment reports.