The world is, on the whole, a far wealthier place than it was years ago. Average wealth has grown more than 3% each year since 1995. While only 30% of the global population was literate less than a century ago, today, over half a billion people worldwide have a post-secondary education. Poverty decreased by more than two hundred and 50 million people between 2010 and 2015 alone. Quality of life, measured by wealth, literacy, or access to education, is the best it has ever been.
But whereas many measurements of a society’s well-being, from life expectancy to poverty to child mortality, have vastly improved in recent years, food insecurity has stood out as one metric that has worsened. This is because food insecurity, unlike any problem the world has seen, is closely determined by many other factors, making it incredibly difficult to address. Efforts to address only part of the problem through subsidizing increased food production, preventing conflicts, or fighting climate change will allow food insecurity to continue. To create a lasting impact on the issue of food insecurity, the world needs to radically change how it deals with matters of global concern, fighting food insecurity on all fronts and treating it as the complex and critical issue it is.
According to the World Food Program, 24,000 people die from hunger each day around the globe, and according to the United Nations, nearly 800 million people worldwide are undernourished. This is more than the annual death toll due to war, air pollution, and the flu combined. Creating a solution will therefore require understanding why food insecurity is growing and what its root causes are. Only with this knowledge can policymakers work toward crafting a plan that considers all the ways it arises.
A 2022 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations noted that “around 193 million people in 53 countries or territories experienced acute food insecurity at crisis or worse levels.” That statistic is even more alarming because it represents an increase of more than 40 million people over the record levels of food insecurity reported in 2020. In the last six years, that number has doubled. Furthermore, the report explicitly mentioned that “conflict, the climate crisis, COVID-19 and surging food and fuel costs have created a perfect storm,” pointing again to the difficulty of dealing with food insecurity being attributed to its various causes.
Among the causes that make up this “perfect storm” of food insecurity is the economic recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to an article from American University, global supply chains have been rocked by the pandemic and the vast amount of layoffs it has created. To compensate for this, food prices have gone up, making it even more expensive and less accessible to communities that need it.
Still, costs of food were rising far before the pandemic. Even before COVID-19, the number of undernourished people worldwide increased by 45 million from 2017 to 2019. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, “in the last ten years, the frequency and intensity of conflict, climate variability and extremes, and economic slowdowns and downturns have increased significantly.” The report added that the pandemic-fueled increase in these factors has increased world hunger and “undermined progress in reducing all forms of malnutrition, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.”
In addition, persistent droughts and other natural disasters caused by climate change have generated increasing labor costs and lower production rates, resulting in increasing food prices that were only further hiked by the pandemic’s impacts on the economy.
This being said, hunger is not a fixed issue that countries can solve simply by throwing more money at the problem. Lowering the cost for sustenance will not solve problems related to decreased food production due to climate change, and funding more food production will not solve conflicts that make exporting food politically nonviable. Solving food insecurity will require this large-scale investment on top of many other initiatives to mitigate the effects of conflict and climate change.
Conflict is the most significant single cause of hunger, with most food insecurity attributable to it. Worldwide rivalries and altercations lead to disruptions in local food production, particularly in areas like West Africa, where the global crisis’ impacts are disproportionately felt. The war in Ukraine further proves that foreign conflicts can have immense consequences for global supply chains. The same supply chain issues described earlier have worsened due to the cessation of exports by two of the world’s largest exporters of produce and cereals, Russia and Ukraine. Nearly one-fifth of all global cereal production could be impacted by the war, increasing strain on supply lines. Food insecurity, therefore, requires solutions that can address these disparate factors at each process step.
Climate change also impacts food insecurity at its source, straining the agricultural industry and its farmers. According to the USDA, climate change will have spillover effects, including increased prices and less safe food access. In addition, the continued impact of climate change will limit progress that can be made on food security by pushing more people into conflict zones and hampering global food production.
Evaluating the root causes of hunger is not only crucial for creating solutions to food insecurity, but also for understanding how to address other systemic issues around the globe. As the world grows increasingly interconnected, its problems become more tied to one another. Therefore, all sides of food insecurity must be addressed in order to get anywhere near an adequate solution.
The prior U.N. report on food insecurity and others call for the integration of existing resources, combining their task of humanitarian aid with both development and conflict resolution. This integration would ensure that communities are offered short-term resources that help people transition to more sustainable options and the long-term infrastructure that mitigates the effects of conflict and poverty.
The global community must rally together to build up regional weather resilience, particularly in the developing world, to aid sustainable production and resist the effects of climate change in the form of droughts and extreme weather. This could be done via the monetary aid of organizations like the International Monetary Fund and direct on-the-ground assistance through the U.N. And the framework for these interventions has already been set; U.N. sustainability goals incorporate support from supranational organizations to assess local and global problems.
As a final note to those worried that humanity is doomed due to the seemingly impossible issue of food insecurity: Approximately 60 years ago, much of the world thought that the current levels of food production at the time would not be able to sustain the growing population just decades later. In the end, this did not happen. Solutions did come, even if they were unknown at the time.
Still, the past precedent is not a sign to rely on others for a quick fix to food insecurity. The innovations of prior eras should inspire new, comprehensive, and international innovations to address the full scope of food insecurity. It should push us to become active participants in our own generation’s solutions to the food crisis, to rally together, and to address the global crisis in a truly global manner.
Image by John Cameron is licensed under the Unsplash License.
