Governance for a resilient food system
, Oxfam Discussion paper, June 2011
INTRODUCTION: HUNGER AND RESILIENCE
‘Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough to eat.’
At the beginning of the 21
century, humanity has achieved an astonishing feat. Even asthe world’s population has grown exponentially – to the brink of the seven billion mark – ithas managed to ensure that food production has kept pace. Yet this breathtaking successis matched by an equally astonishing failure. For even though enough food is available tofeed each one of the world’s people adequately and healthily, the reality is that today,every seventh member of the human race – 925 million people – is denied access toenough food. In many parts of the world, women are especially likely to go hungry.And the total of hungry people is rising, not falling. Back in 1995, there were around 790million people without enough to eat.
During the global food price spike that peaked in2008, the total topped the billion mark for the first time. And while it began to fall again asthe global financial crisis brought commodity prices down from mid-2008 onwards, thefact that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index is, at the time ofwriting in April 2011, even higher than it was in 2008, strongly suggests that the dip in thenumber of hungry people was just a lull.
Fig 1: The global hunger total
Source: FAO and World Bank data
Even in proportionate terms, with agricultural productivity growth outstripping populationgrowth, no real inroads have been made into tackling world hunger – and we are now inserious danger of starting to go into reverse. While the percentage of undernourished
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
, Clarendon Press (1981)
FAO /WFP, State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010
FAO Food Price Index: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/