Hunger is making a comeback. The UN estimates that almost 300 million people are acutely food insecure, nearly double the number at the start of the decade. Updates about the looming threat of famine in Gaza and Sudan, horrific pictures of malnourished children, and ever-more desperate humanitarian funding appeals commonly intrude into our social media feeds. It is hard to think that only a decade ago, hunger was on the decline, and that the world’s governments even committed to eliminating it by 2030.
Longtime aid workers like me have had a nagging sense that many of the places we’ve worked in are getting worse. Why have the tables turned? Our world has become a more dangerous place, for one. A decade ago there was nothing like the concurrent wars that have erupted in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine and that have triggered large-scale food emergencies. Right here in Haiti, in the fertile and troubled Artibonite Valley, I visited a farming community where piles of mangoes were rotting on the ground because armed men controlled access roads, while just a few kilometers away, young children were wasting away for lack of food in a hospital ward.
And it is more than the impacts of conflict. The pandemic brought hunger back to places where it had been forgotten, including my own country, the USA. In 2020, after the wave of Covid-19 layoffs, we all saw on our screens the lines of cars snaking around parking lots to receive food handouts, a scene we thought we would never witness in such a rich country. The specter of widespread white-collar hunger pushed the USA to spend more than a trillion dollars in pandemic relief for individuals and households. The pandemic food crisis revealed that hunger is a common experience, not one that only afflicts countries we think of as poor.
If hunger is back, it is also because the era of cheap food that prevailed on global markets is gone. The dramatic global food price spikes we now face on a recurring basis have harmed people’s ability to afford a square meal, famously igniting the Arab Spring. The world’s smart money – from private equity to sovereign wealth funds – is now vying to purchase farmland in poorer countries as a hedge against food scarcity, even if it means dispossessing small farmers in the process. We live in a food risk society, where recurring food crises are a very real prospect.
If hunger is man-made – and most experts believe it is – we can also end it. There is reason to be hopeful: the current resurgence notwithstanding, the systems we have built have substantially reduced hunger’s toll in the past century. The aid industry is now abuzz with talks of emerging technologies that promise to boost both food production and famine prevention efforts. Drones may enable delivery of assistance to difficult places, and artificial intelligence could make food production and distribution systems much more efficient. But these advances raise difficult questions, especially in risky humanitarian contexts. While we should embrace innovation, we need to ensure technology does no harm, and serves the needs of the world’s most vulnerable people.
How can we move forward? Humanitarian responses must enable grassroots responses to hunger, even during active conflicts. Here in Haiti, much of the relief the World Food Programme provides is in cash, boosting the local economy. For its hot meals program targeting people who have had to flee their homes, WFP exclusively uses locally grown. This ensures those in need receive a vital meal, while supporting the nation’s beleaguered farmers. In southern Haiti, aid agencies are promoting the use of breadfruit flour – a neglected tree crop – for the local school lunch program. The program delivers nutrition and taste, while supporting the emergence of a local value chain. Government and civil society have been calling for such programs for years.
Hunger’s unsettling resurgence cries out for global action. We must charge the norms of war and ensure that starving out civilians to achieve military objectives forever lies beyond the pale of what’s acceptable in a conflict. Governments must allocate more predictable financial resources for frontline agencies. Because humanitarian aid remains a short-term fix, our societies need to broaden their safety nets to avoid the ad hoc responses we saw during the recent pandemic-induced food crisis.
What is at stake is nothing less than our social fabric. History teaches us that unaddressed hunger is not only a predicament for those who suffer from it, but also corrosive for the societies that allow it to bloom.
Jean Martin Bauer is a humanitarian with over two decades of frontline experience working to reverse the causes and impacts of hunger from Asia to the Western Sahel and Central Africa to the Caribbean. Mr Bauer is the author of The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century, published by Knopf and Profile Books which chronicles his personal views, experiences, challenges, and motivations as a life-long aid worker dedicated to the global fight against hunger.
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