The past 40 years have seen the proportion of hungry people in the world drop from 33 to 18 percent. However, this promising statistic does not disguise the fact that millions of people are still chronically hungry and hunger rates in Africa are rising.

The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) aims to halve hunger by 2015. Hungry people are less productive than other people are and often have less access to education, health and water. Reducing hunger is therefore vital to achieving other MDGs, such as health and education, but it is a complex challenge.

Acute hunger tends to occur in emergencies and receives most global attention and support. This is not the primary problem though. Only ten percent of hungry people are acutely so; the rest suffer from a lack of quantity and quality of food. They miss essential nutrients, especially important in child development.

The causes of hunger are complicated and varied:

• Poverty means people cannot improve what they produce or buy supplementary food.
• Poor health, water and sanitation cause infectious diseases and parasite infestation, which hinder the absorption of nutrients.
• In places where women have low status, child nutrition is poor because of a greater lack of access to food, income, education and sanitation for their mothers.
• Many pregnant and breastfeeding women lack knowledge of nutrition and adequate quality food to keep their babies healthy.
• Poor infrastructure, such as roads, limits access to markets and opportunities to increase incomes, meaning people cannot benefit from better quality food produced elsewhere.
• The potential impacts of climate change, as well as current impacts of HIV/AIDS and gender inequality, increases the vulnerability of hungry people.

The research makes seven key recommendations. Countries should prioritise these interventions according to their context:

• The commitment to halve hunger has been made many times, but this has not led to action. The scale of proven solutions should be widened and funding for these approaches increased.
• Policymakers need give greater priority to agriculture, increasing spending on this sector to ten percent of national budgets. Policies should also focus on resolving gender inequality and poor people’s access to resources.
• Half of the world’s hungry people are small-scale farmers. Increasing their productivity will increase food security. Assistance is required to improve soil quality, water management, high value crop production and extension services.
• Women and girls play a key role in ensuring nutrition. Empowering them through education, increased income and control over resources will help to improve nutrition and health among pregnant and breastfeeding women and their children.
• Improved warning systems and quick emergency responses can reduce vulnerability to shocks. Programmes targeting chronic and acute malnutrition should also aim to reduce vulnerability in non-emergency situations.
• Improved infrastructure, such as rural roads and grain storage mechanisms, reduces poverty. The non-farm sector should also be encouraged to promote alternative employment opportunities.
• Community-based initiatives should restore degraded natural resources, such as land and water supplies. These should include strong community ownership rights.

Source(s):
‘UN Millennium Project 2005 - Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done, Summary version of the report of the Task Force on Hunger’, Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, by Pedro Sanchez, M.S. Swaminathan, Philip Dobie and Nalan Yuksel, 2005                                                                                                 Full document.

Funded by: The United Nations Millennium Project

id21 Research Highlight: 26 January 2006

Further Information:
The United Nations Millennium Project
One United Nations Plaza
21st floor Rm. 2160
New York, N.Y. 10017
USA

Tel: +1 212 906 5735
Fax: +1 212 906 6349
Contact the contributor: info@unmillenniumproject.org

United Nations Millennium Project

Other related links:
'Agriculture, food systems and the Millennium Development Goals'

'Helping the rural poor: the key to halving world poverty'

'Improving food aid in the Great Lakes region of Africa'

'Are fertiliser subsidies right for African agriculture?'

United Nations Millennium Development Goals