The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s annual report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) aims to raise awareness about global hunger issues, to identify causes of chronic hunger and malnutrition and to record the progress being made towards reaching global hunger reduction targets.

This year’s report, Strengthening the Enabling Environment to Improve Food Security and Nutrition, provides not only current estimates of undernourishment around the world and progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets but also presents the experiences of seven countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malawi and Yemen) in developing an enabling environment for food security and nutrition.

As the report states, 805 million people, or 1 in 9, are estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2012–14. This is a reduction of over 100 million people over the last decade and 209 million fewer than in 1990-1992. In the last two decades, the prevalence of undernourishment has dropped from 18.7% to 11.3 % globally and from 23.4% to 13.5% in developing countries alone. Latter figures show progress towards the MDG of reducing the proportion of people suffering hunger by half is within reach but in terms of the WFS target of halving the number of people chronically hungry, we are still a long way off.

Progress towards these targets is uneven geographically with only Latin America and South Eastern Asia having reached the WFS target. The highest numbers of hungry people live in Asia while the highest proportions live in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that is seeing relatively low levels of progress in tackling hunger.

The report also explores a range of indicators of hunger that try to encompass the multiple components of food insecurity, namely:

Availability or the quantity, quality and diversity of food. Indicators include the average protein supply and the average supply of animal-source proteins.

Access or physical access and infrastructure. Indicators include railway and road density and economic access, represented by domestic food price index.

Stability or the exposure to food security risk and the incidence of shocks. Indicators include cereal dependency ratio, the area under irrigation, domestic food price volatility and fluctuations in domestic food supply.

Utilization or the ability to utilize food and outcomes of poor food utilization. Indicators include access to water and sanitation and wasting, stunting and underweight measures for children under five years old.

Results from this wide range of indicators show that food availability in still a problem in poorer regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. Access has improved considerably in many places largely where economic growth, rural infrastructure development, social protection programmes and poverty reduction have occurred. Utilisation is identified as the largest challenge for food security and levels of stunting, wasting and malnutrition in children remain high. Stability is also challenge particularly in regions that are heavily dependent on international food markets for domestic supplies and have limited natural resources with which to produce food such as the Middle East and North Africa. The report summarises that “the greatest food security challenges overall remain in sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen particularly slow progress in improving access to food, with sluggish income growth, high poverty rates and poor infrastructure, which hampers physical and distributional access”.

Global Multidimensional Poverty Index

Launched today, the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2014 (MPI) is designed to be a comprehensive measure of acute individual poverty across over 100 developing countries. Developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), since 2010 it has been published in the UNDP’s flagship Human Development Report. The MPI is said to be complementary to traditional income-based measures of poverty, capturing scarcities people face in terms of education, health and living standards.

The complete set of indicators includes nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, water, electricity, floor and assets. If an individual is deficient in a third or more of these (weighted) indicators then they are defined as poor. The severity of poverty being a measure of the number of indicators for which they are experiencing deprivation. Income is not included as an indicator due to data deficiencies. The datasets that inform the MPI include the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS), and the World Health Survey (WHS).

The MPI can be used to compare between countries and within countries by ethnic group, location, and other key household and community characteristics. Thus the MPI is a tool for identifying the most vulnerable people, for understanding the drivers of poverty and to aid policy makers target resources and design effective poverty eradication policies. Case studies reveal the translation of measures of poverty into practical action, for example, Mexico’s poverty targeting programme and Colombia’s poverty reduction strategy are informed by nationally adapted MPIs.

2013 Global Hunger Index

On the 14^th October 2013, the latest Global Hunger Index report was launched. Produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Welhungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, this annual report details the progress the world has made in tackling hunger. The index itself is “a multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger” that combines measures of child underweight, child mortality and undernourishment (discussed in chapter 2 of One Billion Hungry). This year’s figures reflect hunger during the period 2008-2012 and show global hunger has fallen by a third since 1990.

While the world has made some progress in reducing hunger since 1990, we still have far to go. Global hunger remains “serious,” and 19 countries suffer from levels of hunger that are either “alarming” or “extremely alarming.” 23 countries, however, have reduced their GHI scores by 50% or more. The top ten so-called success countries in terms of improvements in GHI scores since 1990 were Angola, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Sub-saharan Africa has one of the highest GHIs per region along with South Asia but since 2000, an increase in political stability and the achievements made in tackling HIV/AIDS, malaria and childhood diseases have seen SSA starting to make considerable progress towards reducing hunger.

There are a number of big data reports that come out annually around this time of year not least the Global Hunger Index and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s State of Food Insecurity in the World. The merit of these analyses lie in tracking progress and raising awareness but their data cannot be taken as a true reflection of what’s happening on the ground, merely an indicator of the global situation. That is not to say that there isn’t value in such data. McKinsey states that so-called big data has been exploding in recent years and highlights its use in uncovering emerging trends and future issues. Indicators such as the GHI have the power to inform if delivered at the levels at which key decisions are made but also potentially predict how hunger and its causes might change in the future.

This year the Global Hunger Index report talks about one key area that looks set to become more important as we continue to face growing global threats such as climate change and that is resilience. The report outlines how we must coordinate activities across the development and international aid sectors to help the most vulnerable better prepare and adapt to oncoming shocks and crises.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

India farmers think big but grow micro to enrich their soil, The Guardian

The radical nature of development in the near future is already assured, The Guardian Poverty Matters Blog

Africa must get real about Chinese ties, Financial Times

Harsh deal climate in sub-Saharan Africa, Financial Times

Goldilocks Had It Right: How to Build Resilient Societies in the 21st Century, New Security Beat

The G8 and land grabs in Africa, GRAIN

The solution to Africa’s woes lies with Africans, not the west, The Guardian

East Africa: East African Farmers to Gain From Disease Resistant Banana, AllAfrica

Climate Conversations – “Part app, part map” tracks Amazon forest loss, AlertNet

Climate Conversations – Threshing mills make life less of a grind for West African women, AlertNet

World poverty: Can the G8 deliver on the promise it made at Gleneagles?, The Guardian

Mark Lynas: truth, treachery and GM food, The Guardian

Technology drives Africa transformation, Financial Times

Amplified Greenhouse Effect Shifts North’s Growing Seasons, NASA

Ghana’s Sustained Agricultural Revolution

Ghana is the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa likely to meet both the Millennium Development Goals of halving the proportion of people in poverty, and the proportion of people who are hungry, by 2015.

In a study of Ghana’s story IFPRI experts have called the country ‘a prime candidate to champion economic transformation in Africa.’ They state that Ghana should grab the ‘unique opportunity for the front-running African countries to set examples on how to achieve economic transformation and prosperity on the continent’.

But there is a side to this narrative that deserves even more attention: Ghana’s quiet and steady agricultural revolution.

According to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Ghana’s agricultural sector has grown by an average of about 5% per year during the past 25 years, making it one of the world’s top performers in agricultural growth. Further successes include:

• Between 1990 and 2004, Ghana cut hunger levels by 75%.
• Undernourishment went down to 8% by 2003, from 34% in 1991.
• Child malnutrition declined, with the proportion of infants underweight falling from 30% in 1988 to 17% in 2008.
  • Political and economic reforms reduced the percentage of the population living in poverty from 52% in 1991-92 to 28.5% in 2005-06.
  • Rural poverty fell from 64% to 40% between 1981 and 2007.
  • By 2005/07, staple food production per person was more than 80% higher than it was in 1981/83.

Modelling Undernutrition

A new paper published in the Lancet in July 2012 aimed to redress the gaps in reporting child malnutrition across the world. Authors wanted to investigate the validity of a modelling approach to determining the status of child malnutrition at global, regional and national levels. Using data from a variety of sources, such as nutrition and household surveys and summary statistics from the WHO Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition, the authors calculated weight-for age Z scores. Using a Bayesian hierarchical mixture model to estimate Z score distributions, the authors investigated the validity of this model and its outcomes.

The overall findings were that globally in 2011, 314 million children under the age of five were mildly, moderately or severely stunted and 258 million were mildly, moderately or severely underweight. These results were also assessed with a view to exploring the achievement of Millennium Development Goal 1 (halving hunger and poverty by 2015). For all developing countries (141 in total), there is less than a 5% chance of meeting the MDG1 target but this chance is not evenly distributed with 61 of these countries reporting a 50-100% chance. Indeed while progress to meet MDG1 in Sub Saharan Africa would appear weak with only three countries on track, a further 13 are on track to halve poverty and 10 to halve hunger.

Africa Human Development Report 2012: Towards a Secure Future

The UNDP recently released (in August 2012) a new report entitled Africa Human Development Report. It emphasizes the need for a coordinated, multi-sectoral approach to hunger and starvation in Africa. Rarely is the frustration and disbelief that the ‘spectre of famine…continues to haunt parts of Sub-Saharan Africa’, put so eloquently. Indeed, one in four Africans is undernourished and yet Sub-Saharan Africa has ‘ample agricultural land, plenty of water, a generally favourable climate for growing food’ and, in the past 10 years, ‘world-beating economic growth rates’ in some countries.

The solutions outlined in the report are not new: greater production, better access and increased human capability but this report goes further in saying these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for achieving food security. Good nutrition, robust policies, which support smallholder farmers, strong institutions and a focus on resilience are also critical. While many reports focus on some of these aspects, complex as they are on their own, this report gives an overview of the myriad of solutions that not only exist but that must come together to achieve food security.

Empowerment and human rights are also integral to the report: …’the basic right to food….is being violated in Sub-Saharan Africa to an intolerable degree’. Giving all people a voice and ensuring governments and are accountable to all people is an argument rarely used alongside the practical means of tackling hunger.

This report that lays out the issues in a powerful way, concluding that, ‘The challenge of food security in Sub-Saharan Africa is formidable, the timeframe for action tight and the investment required substantial. But the potential gains for human development are immense.’ Let’s hope the language is powerful enough to inspire action.