The World is Getting Hungrier Each Year

I have never forgotten my first experience of ordinary life in an African village. I had been in Ethiopia, covering the terrible famine of 1985, with its haunted lines of starving, blank-eyed faces, sitting waiting for death. But I had not been to an ordinary village.

Not long after, I traveled to Sudan, where drought had also shriveled the land. Halfway to the famine area, we stopped to refuel our four-wheel-drive. There by the roadside in the parched scrub was a dusty straw-thatched hut. Outside a family was huddled around a meager fire made from a handful of sticks. The children had swollen bellies and thin limbs. The mother was cooking a single piece of flat bread which was the entire meal for the whole family.

"Why didn't you tell me we were in the famine area already," I said to my guide.

He laughed. "That's not famine," he chided. "That's just ordinary life in Africa. Being hungry is normal."

The world is getting hungrier, according to a report issued by the United Nations food agency. Across the world an estimated 842 million people are today undernourished—and that figure is climbing, with an additional 5 million hungry people every year. The figures, says the report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), "signal a setback in the war on hunger."

The report repeats the familiar statistic that the West spends 30 times more on domestic farming subsidies than it does on aid. It catalogues how the U.S. spends $3.9bn a year subsidizing its 25,000 cotton farmers—more than the entire GDP for Burkina Faso, where 2 million people depend on cotton for their livelihood.

Europe is now the world's second-largest sugar exporter, even though EU sugar costs twice as much to produce as does that of Third World peasants.

The harsh truth is that the industrialized world has abandoned any pretense that trade negotiations have anything to do with development.

"Bluntly stated," the report concludes, "the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will." Bluntly stated, the problem is that none of us really cares.

[Excerpt of article by Paul Vallely, The Independent]