Introduction - Facing the Challenge: Ending Hunger and Malnutrition

Entering a therapeutic feeding center for the first time is unsettling. Therapeutic feeding centers are for young children suffering from severe malnutrition. Three staff from Bread for the World Institute visited such a center in rural Ethiopia at the height of the “hungry season,” the period before the next harvest when food is most scarce. The center was a few hundred kilometers from Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa, and it was a Spartan environment. The room where the children were treated was bare except for blankets spread across the concrete floor. There were a dozen children there that day, their mothers sitting beside them. They had carried their children here on foot, some walking from more than 10 miles away.

Between 2005 and 2008, global food prices increased by 83 percent and more than 100 million additional people were pushed across the threshold into hunger. There were food riots in 37 countries, all of them nations whose hunger rates were high even before the price hikes. The riots were predominantly an urban phenomenon. Most of the world’s poor and hungry people live in rural areas, but in the face of steep price increases, poor families in urban areas are no better off than those in rural areas.

Bread for the World Institute’s 2009 Hunger Report, Global Development: Charting a New Course, discussed the main factors that led to the steep rise in food prices in 2008. These factors have not gone away; food prices are a key theme in this report as well. Overall, grain prices have come down from their 2008 peaks—but not to pre-crisis levels. In the summer of 2010, wheat prices suddenly doubled in less than two months—a striking reminder of just how volatile food markets are and how hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity are inextricably connected with the rest of the global economy.

Improvements in food security and nutrition are linked to a productive agricultural sector. Common sense might suggest that we need to make sure that domestic food supplies match demand for food—but that’s not the core of the problem. The recent increases in hunger were because of the high food prices, not because there wasn’t enough food to go around. Although grain stocks were low, they were not too low to feed everyone if some nations with surpluses hadn’t panicked and banned exports. In the same vein, famines have occurred in countries where some parts actually have food surpluses. The unprecedented rise in hunger recently was a consequence of the high costs.

In the United States, the Obama administration announced a long-term commitment to investing in improving agriculture and food security in developing countries. Other leaders have joined President Obama with commitments of their own. At a 2009 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, G-8 leaders pledged to invest $22 billion over three years in agricultural development and food security. G-8 countries have made promises to increase development assistance before—and were slow to deliver or did not live up to their promises. They must be held accountable for following through.

Bread for the World President David Beckmann, in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2009, said that the then recently-proposed Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, before it was named Feed the Future, “is remarkable for its vision. It recognizes that a comprehensive strategy to address hunger must go beyond simply increasing agricultural production, and that improving maternal and child nutrition is a central component of the administration’s plan. Focusing our agriculture and food security investments on improving the nutrition of women and children will shape better, more targeted programs that have a lasting development impact.”

This introduction has laid out where we are today in efforts to end global hunger and malnutrition. In the following chapters, the report covers where to go from here. The first step is showing how and why we need a comprehensive approach: hunger and malnutrition are complex issues that require action on multiple fronts.

In Niger, hunger is a part of life. A “hunger season,” as it’s called, occurs during the months leading up to a harvest, when supplies of food from the last harvest are depleted. The difference between a normal hungry season and a bad one is measured in terms of how early therapeutic feeding centers begin treating the waves of severely malnourished young children.

Food insecurity means that people are undernourished as a result of the physical unavailability of food, their lack of social or economic access to adequate food, and/or inadequate food utilization.

Food security means that all people have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient safe, nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

Hunger is a condition in which people lack sufficient macronutrients (energy and protein) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) for fully productive, active, and healthy lives. Hunger can be a short- or long-term problem with many causes and a range of effects ranging from mild to severe.

Malnutrition occurs when people’s diets do not provide adequate nutrients for growth and maintenance of health, or their bodies cannot fully utilize the food they eat due to illness. Malnutrition includes being underweight for one’s age, too short for one’s age (stunting), dangerously thin for one’s height (wasting), and/or deficient in vitamins and minerals (micronutrient deficiencies).

Nutrition security means all individuals and households are food secure, have good access to preventive and curative health care, and can take advantage of healthy and sustainable care practices such as basic sanitation.

Source: United Nations