The forgotten crisis

We are in the midst of two crises. One has dominated newspaper headlines and television programs for almost a year. The world is wracked by a global recession and economic crisis of proportions unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is a situation though, that will be rectified through the passage of time: Economic downturns, recessions and depressions are at their core cyclical. Our world governments, utilizing tools of communication unparalleled in our history, are working in concert to limit the severity of the global recession. We are sure that these measures and over time, what once was a bust period will become another boom era. The other crisis, though, is possibly of even more dire concern. The rate of hunger is rising around the world. More people go to bed at night without food in their stomachs and with little hope of food in the morning. In an economic recession, people lose money, in a hunger crisis, people lose their lives.

There are a multitude of causes for the current hunger crisis: food supply is decreasing, while demand from developing nations and countries such as China and India is increasing exponentially. The concern of rapid population growth, also linked as a core cause of the environmental crisis, is putting stress on existing agriculture and food supplies. In the rush to create new alternative sources for fossil fuel, corn and grain that was originally allocated for human consumption was bought up to create clean-burning biofuel. In the United States, concern over the supply of oil has driven the American government to encourage their subsidized farmers to stop producing corn and grain for food, and produce it for ethanol. It is estimated that production of biofuel will rise 30% by 2010; further constricting the corn and grain supply. Biofuel is an excellent solution to the fossil fuel problem, but not at the expense of the well-being of people. The changing environment, with rising floods and more droughts around the world is also damaging the food supply. The rush to globalization also had an adverse effect on agricultural programs around the world.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that in 2007, 923 million people were undernourished. Even worse, in a world suffering through the economic crisis, Oxfam (a Britain based organization) estimated that globally 119 million people are going to slip below the poverty line: less money to buy food and rising food prices means more people going hungry. We have seen in the news the over $1 trillion economic bailouts in the United States and Europe and are shocked at the sheer amount of money being spent. To put it into perspective, according to Eastern Africa Farmers Federation, that same amount of money could feed the poor in Africa for three years.

Earlier this month, Gallup International polled 58,000 people from 55 countries to try and discover the level of global hunger. Four out of ten Filipinos say that they “oftentimes or sometimes” lacked food. This is an increase in responses over 2007. Globally, only Cameroon, Pakistan, Nigeria and Peru had a higher rate of hunger than the Philippines. Hunger on this scale is a political problem: an issue that must be addressed through coordinated global policies. Agricultural producers must be protected, but the problem also extends to structural concerns. Proper infrastructure for transportation and warehousing of agricultural produce must be built to prevent wastage and spoilage.

The economic crisis will abate, they always do; it is the nature of economies to go through cycles of prosperity and recession. However, the problem of hunger does not move in cycles. People will not magically become less hungry one year, five years, ten years down the road unless transformative action is taken by world governments and organizations to address the problem. Hunger, not the economy, may very well be the defining issue of this generation.