How Farming Contributes to Ending Global Hunger

By David C Brooke-Mee

It is the United Nations’ stated goal to end world hunger by the year 2030.

Without knowing the numbers the statement is pretty meaningless. When armed with the facts the goal seems incredibly ambitious. Let me explain.

The world population currently stands at about 8.5 Billion. Of that total, approximately 815 million people, approximately 10% of the population, are undernourished because of starvation while, incredibly, perfectly good food is literally thrown away in other parts of the world.

Challenges to Farming

Some families depend entirely on their land and livestock for food and income. At first glance one could be forgiven for thinking, “I wouldn’t mind doing that — giving up the rat race and living off the land”, but when faced with the reality of it, it would take only one small disaster for you to realize how perilous an existence that can be. Anything can go wrong, from one day to the next, which subsistence farmers have no control over and, worse still, cannot recover from. Crop disease and destructive weather invariably cause widespread disaster and entire communities are affected all at once; take the Great Irish Famine for example.

The Great Famine or the Irish Potato Famine as it is known outside Ireland was a disaster that reduced that country’s population by about 25%. Approximately one million people starved to death and another million emigrated.

The main cause of the famine was potato blight (hence the name) which affected potato crops throughout Europe but it affected Ireland so severely because, for mainly political reasons, a large percentage of the country’s population relied on potatoes for their livelihood and when the disaster came there was nothing to fall back on.

Businesses succeed or fail worldwide for reasons that can be controlled! That is to say that if there is a market for one’s product, one has sufficient financial reserves and one employs sound practices the business is likely to succeed but if one of those aspects is neglected there is the risk of failure. The same is true of farming except that external influences (weather, crop disease, pest infestation, and pollution) add uncontrollable and unforeseeable risk.

Still want to be a farmer?

Hunger is a terrible thing!

I’m not talking about the type of hunger you and I have all felt from time to time when we’re simply impatient for our next meal. I’m talking about hunger without reprieve; the hunger that is so severe that you have to watch helplessly as your loved ones waste away and die. Every one of us wants to have enough nutritious food for ourselves and our families. While most of us have access to adequate food we have to be mindful of those who, through no fault of their own, do not. For them, hunger seems like an inescapable trap and unless we come up with the right solutions we are practically acknowledging that allowing people to die of starvation is acceptable.

Having said this we should be aware of the caution that needs to be taken with aid initiatives because corruption claims much of it and the fact that much aid — food, medicine and so on — can have unintended consequences. Those consequences can be dealt with in another forum but, for now, I sound a word of caution.

More Facts about Hunger

According to the World Aid Foundation:

• The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries, where 12.9% of the population is undernourished.
• Asia is the continent with the most hungry people — two-thirds of the world total. The percentage in southern Asia has fallen in recent years but in western Asia, it has increased slightly.
• Southern Asia faces the greatest hunger burden, with about 281 million undernourished people. In sub-Saharan Africa, projections indicate a rate of undernourishment of almost 23%.
• Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five — 3.1 million children each year.
• One in four of the world’s children suffers stunted growth. In developing countries, the proportion can rise to one in three.
• 66 million primary school-age children attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone.

In some parts of the world, excellent farmers are being chased off their lands (Zimbabwe, South Africa) to be replaced with incompetent, unskilled, untrained individuals who are turning the once fertile lands into wastelands and destroying or ignoring the principles of productive commercial farming.

In other parts of the world (Albania) thousands of fertile acres lie fallow and unused because there isn’t anyone skilled enough to farm the lands.

Solutions are not obvious but they do exist; they have to exist.

Thoughts to Think About

Is one solution to invite displaced farmers from one part of the world to bring their skills to another part of the world?

Is investment in smallholder farmers a solution? Can co-ops work? Recent Central and Southern African experience suggests considerable difficulties in this regard.

Do you want to find out more? Go to http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger