ROME, Italy – Arriving at a politically sensitive conclusion about the number of chronically hungry people in the world is a guessing game.
Even the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization official, which co-ordinates the effort, concedes the point.
“It is an estimate we make,” said David Wilcock, co-ordinator of the FAO ‘food insecurity’ mapping project. “It has its strengths and weaknesses but it serves the purpose of focusing.”
Last week, during FAO meetings, the focus was on the estimate that there are 815 million undernourished people in the world. Despite a 1996 pledge to cut the number of hungry in half by 2015, the effort is flagging.
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FAO director general Jacques Diouf insisted last week that small progress is being made but at a pace far short of what is needed. He said at the pace of the past five years, it would take 60 years, rather than 20, to reduce the legions of the hungry to 400 million.
Diouf has invited world leaders back to Rome next June to renew their commitment.
“We see ending hunger as a first and vital step in eradicating the deep poverty that continues to afflict so many millions in our world,” he said in an FAO report The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2001.
But an examination of the FAO numbers makes the presumption of progress, or even the extent of the problem, fuzzy at best.
The latest estimate of 815 million hungry includes 777 million in the developing world, 27 million in the transitional eastern European countries of the former Soviet Union, and 11 million in developed countries.
But wasn’t the 1996 pledge to reduce the number of hungry from 800 million to 400 million?
Wilcock said that target was based on hungry people in developing countries and since the current estimate is 777 million, that is progress.
Digging deeper into the numbers produces another perspective.
The FAO estimates that in China, 76 million people rose above the status of chronically undernourished between 1992 and 1999. That more than accounts for the total drop, which suggests the number of hungry people actually increased in the rest of the developing world.
“Much of the progress has come from China,” said Wilcock. “If you subtract China, the balance sheet is increasing.”
And of course, the numbers from China are estimates.
The measures of progress also do not include all the estimated 7.5 million Afghani refugees and peasants now thought to be at risk of starvation after years of drought and government mismanagement, compounded by the current bombing campaign led by the United States.
Wilcox agreed the numbers may be imprecise but he insisted they point in the right direction.
