Global food crisis: hidden by political poverty fog

The UN has issued another warning about the deepening food crisis. Rising worldwide in food prices has made a guestimated 40 million more people hungry this year, the UN food agency says.

Hunger, which is an absolute measure of people who cannot manage to find enough nutrition is a much less controversial measure than poverty (which is tied up in political judgment on relative distribution of wealth). Politicians prefer "poverty" as an issue because vague political activity which puts no food in hungry stomachs can be counted as "fighting poverty". Our failure to feed the hungry is a less ambiguous judgment on us all.

Jacques Diouf, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said the world now had about 963million under-nourished people living on it.

"As a result of rising food prices since 2005, 75 million people were pushed into chronic hunger," said Diouf, who was unveiling an annual report on world food insecurity.

Jacques Diouf has argued that providing at least nutrition is a moral imperative, and he has a strong case. His report says that although prices of major cereals have fallen a bit from their peaks earlier this year, they are high on a year on year basis. This fall of course is dollar based, for the many hard pressed UK families who wish to help those even worse off in the developing world, the fall in the value of the pound against the dollar means effectively higher prices for the provision of staples to those in greatest need.

We have reported before on the global food crisis which has pushed food prices up (see previous reports from Kenya, Egypt, Philippines, Kosovo, Haiti, & Bangladesh). Nearly two-thirds of the world's hungry live in Asia, while in sub-Saharan Africa one person in three is chronically hungry. Children, particularly children with no parental care are amongst the worst affected.

The FAO report also said that reduced demand from first world countries following the credit crunch could threaten exporters in developing countries.