e-news25 Mar 2013 Back to newsletter | to TOS website

    Is there a smarter way to combat hunger?

	While billions of dollars are put into providing food aid in poor countries, minimal progress is being made in reducing world hunger. In a report released in October 2012 by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, it was estimated that nearly 870 million people, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Since 2007-2008, global progress in reducing hunger has slowed and levelled off. In Africa hunger has actually risen with the number of hungry growing from 175 million to 239 million.
The report underlines that overall growth is necessary but not sufficient for a sustained hunger reduction. Agricultural growth is particularly effective in reducing hunger and malnutrition in poor countries since most of the poor depend on agriculture and related activities for at least part of their livelihoods. According to the report, agricultural growth involving smallholders, especially women, will be most effective in reducing extreme poverty and hunger when it generates employment for the poor. In an article in the 12 March 2009 issue of Nature, Pedro Sanchez, of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, argues that changes also need to be made in the way that food aid is provided so that funding is shifted from providing grain produced in developed countries to funding agricultural development.
According to Sanchez, food aid fails to provide a sustainable solution to hunger and poverty and is comparatively expensive. For instance, it costs approximately $812 to deliver one tonne of maize as USA food aid to a distribution point in Africa. In contrast, several agricultural development projects have shown that by providing training, fertiliser and hybrid seeds to African farmers, for less than one sixth of the food aid costs, yields have increased to an extent where farmers have considerable surplus. As much emergency food aid as possible could then be purchased from African farmers.
		The results of these projects suggest that the sustainable way forward is to use increasingly larger proportions of the international food aid budget to provide training, markets and resources to local farmers. This strategy enables farmers to grow food to feed themselves, to sell the surplus and to diversify into high-value crops, livestock and tree products. As Sanchez argues, “This creates a sustainable exit from the poverty trap, thereby decreasing the requirement for aid.”

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