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Food and Nutrition - fighting hungerAfrica south of the Sahara has the highest proportion of impoverished people in the world, with nearly half its population living below the international poverty line. At the same time, nearly a third of the regions population is severely undernourished and Africa is the only continent where child malnutrition is getting worse rather than better.
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), approximately 852 million people worldwide experienced chronic hunger and were undernourished in 2000–2002. Of these, about 204 million were in sub-Saharan Africa. Here, hunger kills more children than the infectious diseases HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis – put together.
In sub-Saharan Africa the incidence of undernourishment has remained around one-third of the population since the 1970s. The region has the highest number of countries with increasing rates of malnutrition for children under the age of five. About 1 in 4 children under five are underweight in this region, about 32 million. The prevalence has been rising during the last three decades, contrary to the development in other regions. The picture is not entirely bleak. Whereas more than half the populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique are malnourished, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria have seen malnutrition falling dramatically in recent years. While more than 60 percent of all malnourished Africans live in East Africa, West Africa as a whole has countered the trend.
Poverty is a major cause of hunger, but hunger is both a cause and an effect of poverty, holding back economic growth and limiting progress in reducing poverty. There are three kinds of hunger: acute, chronic, and hidden. The most visible, through media coverage of droughts and famine, is acute hunger – which, however, represents only about 10% of the world’s hungry. The rest are chronically undernourished, suffering a constant or recurrent lack of access to food of sufficient quality and quantity, good healthcare, and necessary caring practices. Hidden hunger, caused by a lack of essential micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), afflicts more than two billion, even when they consume adequate amounts of calories and proteins.
Chronic, or endemic, hunger is caused by poverty and lack of access to balanced diets including both energy-rich and protein-rich foods, leading to protein-energy malnutrition. Productivity growth in the agricultural sector can play a major role in alleviating this form of hunger. Also, as income growth leads to a more diversified diet, agricultural productivity growth is the primary ingredient, particularly in Africa. The FAO states that economic growth alone in important, but not sufficient to reduce hunger, and that growth in the agricultural sector has a much greater impact in reducing hunger than do urban and industrial growth.
Malnutrition and hunger constitute the number one risk factor for illness worldwide, increasing vulnerability to several deadly diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. About 57% of malaria deaths are attributed to malnutrition. Two thirds of child deaths are related to malnutrition.
According to the UN Task Force on Hunger, the negative economic impact of hunger is dramatic, with annual losses of at least 6-10 % in GDP due to lost labor productivity. The impact of hunger on an individual’s labor productivity is determined early in life. Malnourished infants tend to enter primary school later and drop out earlier. And to the extent that hunger affects the lives and productivity of individuals, it is also bound to affect the economic growth performance of nations, especially those with a high incidence of chronic undernourishment.
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