Tens of millions of children will face starvation in 20 years if governments do not increase spending now on irrigation, education and agricultural research for poor countries, according to a new analysis.
This was performed by the world’s most complex computer model of the global food system and shows that a 39 per cent increase in spending now could mean a corresponding decrease in the number of malnourished children in 2020.
The report was released on Tuesday by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC, a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research funded by the World Bank and rich countries. Using a computer model named IMPACT, Mark Rosegrant and colleagues predicted that 132 million children will face starvation in 2020 if current government policies do not change.
That is less than the 166 million malnourished in 1997. But the model found that over the next 20 years, increases in population, coupled with slower rates of increase in the yields of key crops plus a vastly increased demand for meat in newly-prosperous, industrialising countries, will make food security ever more elusive.
While with current policies the number of starving children will halve in China, the number will decrease only a few percent in South Asia and will grow by 18 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“The world’s decision makers face a fork in the road,” the team concluded. Either they can continue current policies, or boost spending on measures that increase food security.
Under current policies, Rosegrant and colleagues calculate that improvements in food security will cost $570 billion between 1997 and 2020, with 21 per cent going for research. Boosting this total to $802 billion would cut the number of starving children in 2020 from 132 million to 94 million. Most of those would be in Africa, but malnutrition could end completely in Latin America.
This increase in spending is less than five per cent of developing countries’ overall government spending now. However, the report notes that public funding for agricultural research and for production technologies such as irrigation has fallen over the past decades. If spending declines from current levels to $323 billion, then 178 million children are calculated to starve in 2020.
IMPACT models the entire world food system, both the production of food and people’s ability to buy it, by calculating the effects of agricultural changes each year over successive years.
This is immensely complex, as a price change in one crop one year can lead farmers in one region to boost its production the next year, and others to abandon it. The system also incorporates assumptions about changes in technology and environmental constraints.