The Makings of a Hunger Crisis

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.¹ 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.

2010 was the first year ever that the world’s urban population outnumbered people in rural areas. The outmigration of people from rural to urban areas continues to accelerate, so that according to U.N. projections, the world’s population will be more than 70 percent urban by 2050.² The poor nations of Asia and Africa are urbanizing fastest. The compelling reason that people leave rural areas is to find work. The opportunities in the city may be few and far between, but this is better than the complete lack of options in many rural areas. Rapid urbanization creates many new problems and dilemmas for the governments of developing countries. One of them is that overcrowded conditions and hunger are a combustible mix. Authorities worry about the possibility of further rioting when food prices rise again.

Why did the sharp rise in food prices cause so much suffering for so many people? A look at the daily realities inside a poor household helps explain. A key fact: poor families spend between 60 and 80 percent of their entire income on food purchases.³ Thus, a small increase in the price of food could make the difference in whether a family has to pull a child out of school, can no longer afford to purchase vital medicines, or can’t fix a leaking roof. Second, poor people’s diets consist primarily of staple grains like maize, rice, wheat, millet, and sorghum. From 2005 to 2008, grain prices rose much more steeply than other food prices. Maize almost tripled in price, rice rose by 170 percent, and wheat was up 127 percent.⁴ If your family spends 70 percent of its income on a staple grain, and its price doubles, the math simply doesn’t add up.

In Addis Ababa, the slums are teeming with poor families and malnourished children. As in other developing countries, many poor people who make the city their home have migrated here from rural areas of the country in search of jobs. Construction projects need laborers, and a craftsman’s skills are easily transferred from rural to urban environments. Men take these jobs. It’s common for them to leave their wives and children behind in the countryside—one reason why women make up the majority of smallholder farmers in developing countries.

An aid worker in Addis Ababa interviews a mother with two children in their home. The family is receiving assistance because the children are malnourished.

The home we enter on our Bread for the World Institute visit is reached down a passage of thin alleyways with the guidance of an aid worker. Homes are crowded against each other. While they appear sturdy enough, there is something entirely makeshift about this community, as if tomorrow all the residents could be gone, probably replaced by others in similarly transient states. The homes have no toilets; the cooking area is communal. A hundred feet away, the neighborhood’s main street is bustling with activity. A market is open and people of all ages are passing through.

Aid workers in this slum community greet the children they meet by measuring the circumference of their upper arms. This is the quickest way to tell whether the child is malnourished. The mothers don’t object—in fact, they treat it as a custom, akin to a handshake under more favorable circumstances.

The mother we visit is home with her two young children. Her husband has left to look for work and will return with his wages, or what is left of them, in a few days. Their home is one room the size of a shed, bifurcated by a thin divider. The children’s eyes are slightly glazed, while the woman’s seem detached. The news that her family may be discussed in a Bread for the World Institute report brings no reaction.

The mother admits the family is no better off since leaving the rural village where they’d come from. It is hard to work for money with two very young children—what little she makes is earned by washing clothes. When the children are older and attending school, she hopes to take advantage of opportunities that open up for women with older children.

The aid worker has brought her and the children food, packages of ground maize she will cook into porridge. An outreach worker in the community discovered the family and referred the mother to the aid program because of the children’s condition. Food will be provided until the circumference of the children’s arms measure an acceptable size. And then the food packages will discontinue. The shifting of help from one household to another as a child’s condition improves is shortsighted, but it is unavoidable because of the limited resources. Many families are in need of help, and there is not enough aid to provide for all of them.

The 2007-2008 surge in food prices grabbed public attention in developed countries—concern rose to a crescendo with the riots and then faded behind other news, pushing the plight of families like the one above back into the shadows. But these families did not suddenly get good jobs and start eating well as the surge in prices started to level off; they continue to struggle to get enough food.

The food price crisis showed the world appalling realities: 100 million people can fall into hunger in a very short time, and their own actions have very little to do with whether they get back out.

Issues