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[ Editorial ]

Incredible sums

Three institutions are sounding the alarm. In October, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) teamed up with NGOs Welthungerhilfe (Germany) and Concern Worldwide (Ireland) to publish the 2008 World Hunger Index. The document describes the food situation in 33 countries as either “alarming” or “extremely alarming”.

It is particularly disturbing that the Hunger Index – like any serious study – is not based on current, but rather on past data. The organisations involved therefore emphsise that their document shows the state of affairs in 2006. Since then, however, world-market food prices have soared, so the situation has become worse. For 923 million people – 8 % more than in 2005 – the right to adequate food was an empty promise last year, according to the FAO.

There is a grain of truth in the conventional wisdom that high food prices are good for poor countries. Agriculture, which dominates most weak economies, has indeed become more profitable. Nevertheless, it would be deeply misleading to speak of an overall benefit to poor countries. As the Hunger Index shows, the national economies that are most affected by poverty tend to depend on grain imports. In other words: local farmers can do precious little to alleviate the suffering.

Things are likely to get even worse. Media headlines have recently been dominated by the global financial crisis, rather than by food-price inflation. No doubt, poor countries that rely on importing food are going to feel the credit crunch; and lack of access to loans will restrict their ability to import.

In the meantime, panicking rich-country governments have put together bailout packages for banks worth hundreds of billions of euros or dollars. They want to prevent a catastrophic global economic depression. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen. The only thing that is clear are the lessons of the world’s last great economic depression, which set in after the stock-market crash of 1929. Experience tells us that protectionism exacerbates the problems, and so do all attempts to balance public budgets in the middle of the downturn. Even rabid advocates of free-market liberalism are now demanding that governments intervene massively in markets.

It is still unknown how the global economy can be pulled out of this tail-spin. One thing is certain, however: long-standing problems like global poverty or climate change have not been solved. Both issues require governmental action as well as investments on a large scale – in rural infrastructures, in sustainable energy and so forth. These issues must be on the radar of the heads of government and finance ministers of the world's most powerful countries. They have begun to cooperate closely on mobilising incredible sums of money. There is a chance of them forging something good out of the gathering crises.

In the year 2000, the UN agreed on the Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty. They did not only put issues like hunger and child mortality on the MDG agenda, but also promises of a fair world-trade regime and environmental sustainability. In these areas, even less progress has been made than in the fight against hunger. The Hunger Index shows that the global food situation is a little better now in spite of recent setbacks than it was in 1990, but that is no reason to rest on laurels. The fact that poverty was even worse some decades ago does not console parents who do not know how to feed their children today.

D+C, 2008/11, Editorial, Page 398