The world has never been wealthier. According to a 2021 McKinsey report, the global balance sheet and net worth more than tripled between 2000 and 2020 with the average net worth being a whopping $66,000 per capita.
Yet in this very same world and during these very same times, world hunger has reached a devastating high. According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, between 702 and 828 million people in the world faced hunger in 2021. As per the World Food Programme, nearly 350 million people are experiencing the most extreme forms of hunger right now and nearly 49 million people are on the brink of famine.
This week, The Global Tiller looks at the countries hit hardest by hunger. How is it possible that we are still unable to feed everyone on this planet even if humanity is going through its highest prosperity levels? What caused this global crisis and why is it urgent to resolve?
Hunger and its extreme form, famine, are not new phenomena. Many of us recall the 'biblical' famine of Ethiopia in the 1980s that killed 1 million people, according to the UN, although African Watch estimates the number was closer to 400,000. The images out of Ethiopia were so devastating, it riled up musicians in the UK for the famous Live Aid concert.
If you think that we have come far from those days, I have some bad news for you. Last year, an estimated 43,000 people died amid Somalia’s longest drought on record and half of them likely were children under five years old. In just the first six months of this year, at least 18,000 more people, and as many as 34,000, are forecast to die.
It’s not only Somalia where the situation is dire. Since the hasty US retreat from Afghanistan, nearly half of the country has been suffering from crisis levels of food insecurity. It has gotten so bad that parents are being forced to drug their children so they stop asking for food, or are selling girls and organs to make ends meet. In my own hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, eight women and three children died last week during a stampede at a food distribution centre.
The problem is widespread but not across the world — global hunger is still concentrated among a few, much like global wealth. Nearly 60% of the world’s hungriest live in just a few countries — namely, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Pakistan and Haiti.
The leading cause of this food crisis is conflict, followed by climate change and rising costs. When countries wage needless wars, it drives people away from their homes and cuts off their access to markets, which in turn pushes them into hunger. Climate change follows the same playbook but instead of just displacing people, it also attacks the source: it destroys crops too. All of this affects supply chains and the few products that reach the markets end up costing a lot. And that’s how the vicious cycle continues.
For the richer parts of the world who make up most of our prosperity numbers, it would be naive to say this has nothing to do with me. The hungry are literally knocking at your door and will only rise in numbers. "If you want to know which countries over the next 12 to 18 months could have destabilisation and mass migration, start with the 49 knocking on famine’s door right now," warns David Beasley, the head of the World Food Programme. In fact, he added, it is much more cheaper for the economically well-off countries to fund food programs in the poor countries and help create stability there, than to wait a few years and deal with the millions of refugees they would need to house, or detain.
But action requires attention and, believe it or not, it is semantics and bureaucracy that’s preventing help from reaching those who need it the most. Despite the thousands of deaths in Somalia, the international organisation responsible for monitoring global hunger, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, has still not declared it a 'famine'. It insists that the worst-hit areas have come close to, but not yet crossed, the threshold needed to formally declare a famine, even if it is known, from the case of Ethiopia, that calling it by its name will galvanise global attention and unlock donations. Similarly, in the case of Afghanistan, the UN food agency is facing funding cuts instead of the other way round.
Clearly the world leaders have different priorities. They are manufacturing consent to wage wars against TikTok, weather balloons, pronouns, hummus and beef-eaters. But for those of us who have more grounded concerns, it is a shameful moment that millions of our fellow inhabitants of this planet will go to bed hungry tonight.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
The New Face of Hunger isn’t just dark-skinned children walking barefoot in an African desert. Hunger plagues the world’s richest country too:
…and now what?
A few years ago, Steven Pinker wrote in his very popular book ‘Enlightenment’ that we are about to solve world hunger and many other problems and that humanity could take pride in its continuous progress throughout civilisation.
The book, enlightening somehow, didn’t age that well eventually. Is it because of Covid-19? The pandemic may have accelerated the trend but blaming it all on Covid is just taking an easy way out.
There was, however, one piece of advice in his book that, to me, was the most important element: it’s not because it feels like we’re doing well that we should stop working and focusing on the remaining issues. He elaborated that it may feel that we have more problems today because there are now only a few to focus on and we don’t feel so overwhelmed all the time that we have actually have enough energy to look more closely at what remains to be done.
This book appealed to my optimism but looking at the state of world hunger today, it seems we just decided to walk backwards and roll back on all the progress we supposedly made.
Is it a generational issue? Maybe. We can blame the boomers for these recurring issues but only if it was that simple. Is it because of populism? That didn’t help for sure. This mentality of only looking inward and serving only those who look like you isn’t fit for a time of global issues. As if making globalisation the problem would eventually solve all the global problems.
Maybe it’s simpler yet deeper than that. Maybe all those are symptoms of our inability to learn from each other’s experiences. The terrible hunger that some are living through in what can seem like ‘remote places’ to us are just a teaser for what will impact many ‘not so remote’ countries. If the climate crisis is destroying crops in Somalia, it will do the same when it’ll get warmer in temperate countries. If people are fleeing places destroyed by weather patterns, it is already doing it in our backyards.
The logic and the connections are obvious and we have the ability to project. That’s how we used to build civilisations: projecting ourselves into a future and finding ways to create systems that were providing adaptive answers to our current and coming contexts. That’s what cultures are about: finding ways to adapt to our context through a social systemic tool. But it seems that today we don’t want to use this ability anymore.
Culture is no longer about adjusting to the environment, it has become about finding ways to adjust the environment (if not, reality) to our desires. Meanwhile, the world is changing fast. And if we don’t eventually accept the fact that cultures are naturally changing and must change for us to survive, we may soon see hunger on every street and misery at every corner, all while celebrating the fact that this is (falsely) how we’ve always done it and there’s no reason to change.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury