WE are a very hungry world. This is the finding of the Global Hunger Index 2020 (GHI), an annual report published this month by Welthungerhilfe, a German private aid organisation and Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organisation.
It is a world where close to 700 million people, or nearly nine per cent of the global population, are going to bed hungry every night. Do nothing, and the number will grow to at least 840 million in the next 10 years, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation data tells us. Already more than 50 countries face serious to alarming levels of hunger.
And most of them are in Asia and Africa, the two continents contributing a total of 630 million hungry mouths. Yet, the UN has set a very ambitious target as part of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): zero hunger by 2030. Pie in the sky? Not really. A decade is time enough for us to put our mind and money to put food in every mouth. Every day.
But first we must know what is broken in this world, which causes so many to go hungry every night. Only then can we mend it. The GHI report says our food systems are in a shambles. They need to be reshaped to get adequate and nutritious food to all.
Next, a more difficult thing to do, is to summon a global political will to maximise the health of humans, animals and the planet. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is supposed to do this but, as this Leader has pointed out in the past, it is stumbling and falling on the way to keeping the Earth below 1.5°C.
The world may have gone global for awhile now, but not its political will. This is after all a Westphalian world of national borders.
Now for the money. Ceres2030, an organisation headquartered in Cornell University that helps donor countries with their SDGs, has worked out where the money must go and exactly how much, in a research collaboration across 23 countries with International Food Policy Research Institute and International Institute for Sustainable Development. Governments must fork out an extra US$33 billion a year — US$14 billion by donor governments and US$19 billion by countries where the hungry mostly are — to end hunger.
Of the US$14 billion, Ceres2030 research calls for US$9 billion to be spent on the farm, training farmers, developing climate-resilient crops and improving livestock feed. Another US$2 billion is for getting food from farm to fork. Finally, US$3 billion is to be spent to empower the excluded in what Ceres2030 calls "social protection" programmes. But there may be a problem, though, in finding the balance of US$19 billion.
Most of the countries who have many hungry mouths to feed are low-income countries. Money is an issue for them, with Covid-19 swallowing much of what is left. They just can't fork out the money needed.
If the 700 million are to be fed adequately, the international community must help. A section of the world can't feast while another is famished. The well-fed have a moral duty to ensure that the poor do not go hungry. Besides, there is a peace dividend here.
The rich can go to bed in peace when the poor are adequately fed. As one article of The Economist, the English newspaper, put it: one billion dollars would provide many billions of benefits in terms of people fed and food riots forestalled. We agree.