HUNGER POLITICS: OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO A WELL-FED WORLD

Considerable progress has been made in reducing world hunger and boosting food security in recent decades, yet more people are hungry today than were even alive a century ago.


Three challenges central to the global conversation on hunger reduction that need to be addressed, according to a paper produced by the Worldwatch Institute are:

• Unify the food security, climate change and ecosystem agendas.


• Rise above conflicting projections on the causes and solutions to hunger.


• Empower farmers and communities to feed themselves.

"Historically, there has been a major disconnect between policymakers focused on hunger reduction and the newer voices mobilizing around ecosystem conservation and climate mitigation and adaption," says Sara Scherr, president and CEO of Ecoagriculture Partners and co-author of the paper.


She added: "Yet in the midst of all this conflict, a rapidly growing set of individuals and institutions has been exploring innovations for reconciling these objectives for developing landscape mosaics that overcome these challenges simultaneously."


Technical and institutional innovations to boost smallholders productively, gain market access, and restore natural resources are transforming agriculture in ways that can ensure food security, mitigate climate change, and conserve critical ecosystem services, including watershed protection, pollination, and pest and disease control.


Such innovations are often hidden, however, as entrepreneurial farmers are overlooked by national and international government leaders and funders.

,"Despite these obstacles, agricultural innovation is taking place in the fields of Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and elsewhere across Africa to overcome the blight of global hunger," says Danielle Nierenberg, senior reseracher at Wordwatch and co-director of the Nourishing the Planet Project.


"In order to feed the 1.02 billion people who go to bed hungry every night," she stresses, "change-makers must overcome the policy challenges that have plagued this issue for generations and embrace the innovations that have proven most effective to date."


One in nearly six people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life and hunger and malnutrition are the leading risk to health worldwide, greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, according to the United Nations World Hunger Program.


Among the principal causes of hunger are natural disasters, conflict, poverty, poor agricultural infrastructure and over-exploitation of the environment. Recently, financial and economic crises have pushed more people into hunger.


As well as the obvious hunger resulting from an empty stomach, there is the hidden hunger of micronutrient deficiencies which make people susceptible to infectious diseases, impair physical and mental development, reduce their labor productivity and increase the risk of premature death.


Hunger does not only weigh on the individual. It also imposes a crushing economic burden on the developing world. Economists estimate that every child whose physical and mental development is stunted by hunger and malnutrition stands to lose 5-10 percent in lifetime savings.


The WHP observes that whereas good progress was made in reducing chronic hunger in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, hunger has been slowly but steadily rising for the past decade.