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Hunger

Not a billion after all

The Economist, Oct 10th 2012, 10:24 by J.P.

IN 2010, as food prices were spiking for the second time in three years, governments, international agencies and non-government organisations blared out a new and powerful fact: there were a billion hungry people in the world and this, they said, in a period of plenty, was a disgrace. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which had estimated the figure in an annual report, even had the words ‘one billion hungry’ draped in letters 50 feet high outside its headquarters building in Rome. The number of hungry people in the world is indeed a disgrace. But there was one problem with the precise figure: it was completely bogus. This week, in its 2012 report on the state of food insecurity in the world, the FAO quietly revised it down to 868m and got rid of the spike in the numbers that had supposedly occurred in 2008-10.

The charts above show the new estimates (left hand panel) compared with those for 2010 (right hand panel). Detailed comparisons are complicated by the fact that many of the plots are for slightly different periods. But the big change is clear: instead of a sharp rise and fall in 2008-10, tracking the world food-price spike, the number of hungry people stayed stable throughout the 2000s. For developing countries, the new hunger estimates are lower after the price spike than they had been before it, falling from 885m in 2004-05 to 852m in 2010-12.

There are statistical and methodological explanations for the change. The 2010 report used the computer model of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to estimate the impact of high food prices. The USDA model is primarily designed to calculate how much food countries need to import. So it pays a lot of attention to trade and to importing nations but does not do such a good job of explaining what is going on in countries that are self sufficient or which use price and other controls to reduce the impact of world-price movements on domestic prices. These include China, India and Indonesia, the three largest developing countries. There, increases in staple-food prices were very small in 2007-10. In contrast, the new methodology pays more attention to daily diets and habitual consumption. This means it provides better estimates of chronic undernourishment but, as the report itself says, “does not fully capture the effects of price spikes.”

The FAO has also improved its data collection. New figures for the vast amount of food that gets wasted on farms and in shops pushed up the figures for the number of hungry people in 1990 (from 850m to 1 billion) but not in 2010-12. This alone accounts for much of the decline in hunger numbers in the past 20 years.

At the same time, there is a “real” reason for the lower estimates of hunger (ie, independent of methodological or statistical changes). The great recession of 2008-09 resulted in only mild slowdowns in most developing countries, so incomes were less affected than was expected: people could afford to keep buying food. At the same time the spread of conditional-cash transfers and other programmes to help the poor seems to have been remarkably effective at sheltering the worst off from the impact of price rises. In short, poor countries turned out to less vulnerable to food crises than previously thought.

The new estimates have significant implications. The world is not doing quite such a bad job of feeding itself as many people fear. At the moment, food prices are rising again for the third time in five years, leading to renewed worries about a food crisis and to demands for drastic intervention in world food markets (banning exports or taxing “commodity speculators”, for example). The new figures suggest the worries may be overdone and so are the demands that accompany them. The supply response to high prices seems to be better than expected. Social-protection measures seem to work. A simple measure of how well the world is doing is the first millennium development goal which calls for halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015, ie from 23% in 1990 to 11.5% in 2015. The proportion now is 14.9, only slightly above target.

That said, hunger is still high and, in two parts of the world, is growing. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of hungry people rose by 1m a year in 2000-05 but by more than 6m a year between 2007-09 and 2010-12. In the Middle East and North Africa, there are almost twice as many hungry people now as there were in 1990-92 (41m compared with 22m). It is also worth saying that undernutrition may not have spiked, the world still faces a big problem of poor nutrition (lack of micro-nutrients, as opposed to lack of calories). So the news is good on average, but not everywhere.

It may still take some time to be believed. The notion that there are a billion hungry people was so widely trumpeted that it has taken on a life of its own. On the very day the new FAO figures appeared, Gordon Conway, a professor at Imperial College London, published a (very good) book on food called—you guessed it—One Billion Hungry. Even the UN’s own food bureaucracies have not caught up with the new facts. The same report that details the new numbers also contains a contribution from four UN food agencies (including the FAO) to the big environmental conference held in Rio de Janeiro this July (the Rio +20 meeting). It refers to the old numbers.

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