Nutritional failures could hamper progress on other development goals
Just four years shy of 2015, the date by which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will have been met or missed, the world is preparing to celebrate a major success: the 2011 progress report shows that the world is on track to reach the headline target of MDG1 – to halve the global poverty rate, defined as those living on less than $1 a day.
The proportion had already been brought down from 46% in 1990 to 27% in 2005 and – despite the economic downturn – is likely to resume the downward trend and fall to below 15% by 2015, exceeding the original targets.
However, the sub-target of halving the proportion of hungry people is veering well off course. Food poverty fell from 20% of the global population in 1990 to 16% in 2000-2002 – but subsequently stagnated, remaining at that rate as late as 2007. This unhappy picture is only half the story, given that food prices have subsequently ballooned, putting basic foodstuffs out of reach for many developing country households. The most recent price spirals, rising through 2010 and peaking in early 2011, have left an extra 44m people hungry, according to the World Bank.
Lifted out of poverty – just
But what is worrying is the lack of progress on hunger even when food prices were stable and economic growth was raising incomes. The figures suggest that people are being lifted out of extreme poverty – but only marginally, and not far enough to allow them to obtain the quality and quantity of food necessary to lead a healthy life.
If the hunger target is missed, this means that the poverty target will, for all intents and purposes, also have been missed, despite what the numbers say. Beyond the arbitrary dollar a day figure, this will mean that the most basic input for a human being – food – has not been brought into reach in the quantity and quality needed. What use alleviating poverty in relation to an income threshold, when crossing the threshold does not overcome the most basic hallmark of poverty – not being able to nourish oneself sufficiently?
The UN has acknowledged that the disconnect between the two figures merits a major rethink of hunger strategies in the remaining time before 2015.
Knock-on effects of under-nourishment
Come 2015, the hunger failings could not only undermine the poverty reduction claims, but could also unravel the apparent progress on other health and education-related MDGs.
According to the 2011 progress report, primary school enrolment has risen from 82% (1990) to 89% (2009), the under-five mortality rate has been reduced by one third since 1990, access to reproductive health has shot up from 64% to 81% in the developing world, and HIV incidence and malaria deaths have been brought down by 25% and 20% over the last decade alone. These advances may not be enough to make the ambitious 2015 targets, but they are still saving millions of lives and improving countless others.
But failing to combat hunger – and the related scourge of under-nourishment – could undermine all of this. UN officials indicated this week that the combined figure of hungry and under-nourished people is as high as 2.5 billion.
1,000 days
Worryingly, the MDG progress report shows that – despite some progress over the past two decades – nearly a quarter of under-fives in the developing world remain undernourished. Failure to secure adequate nutrition in the critical ‘1,000 days’ – stretching from pregnancy through to age two – is known to lead to irreversible stunting of physical and intellectual development.
New schools and hospitals are crucial, but how much of a difference can they make if the infants arriving for their lessons and check-ups have already been consigned to debilitating physical and mental limitations by early life nutritional deficiencies?
The missing progress on hunger and nutrition highlights the need to see the MDGs as a single, interconnected undertaking. Targeted actions in the health and education fields are clearly paying off (e.g. the removal of school enrolment fees, TB immunisation programmes) and should not let up. But a failure to deliver parallel investments on the food/nutrition side could jeopardize it all, with huge human and financial costs in the long run.
Extra development cash must bolster food and agriculture
There is therefore a very strong argument for additional development support to be channeled to tackling food security and nutrition. G8 countries pledged to raise development aid to 0.7% of GNI but are only on 0.32% at present. Should they come through with the funding – as is necessary to make meaningful and sustainable progress on the MDGs – then the current trend, whereby nutrition schemes focused on breastfeeding awareness, maternal health/education, and the provision of micronutrients are gradually growing in coverage, should continue.
But support for nutritional programmes should not displace agricultural development aid, which has finally been restored as a priority area after decades of neglect. It is after all the global imbalance of food production, and the failure of the market to make food available at affordable prices, which imposes the basic limits on developing world diets, causing both hunger and deficiencies in key nutrients.
Perversely, some 75% of the world’s hungry live in subsistence farming households. Malfunctioning price signals and voracious food commodity speculators were much discussed at last month’s G20 agriculture summit. But success in combating the global food system’s failings should not be measured in terms of volumes of derivatives trade or the ratio of food supply to demand. It should instead be traced back to the MDGs, and measured in the ability of subsistence farmers to make a basic living from their trade and to feed themselves.
Otherwise, when the wealthy world toasts its successes in poverty reduction in 2015, it will be toasting little more than the headline economic growth figures in China and India, themselves riddled with discrepancies between regions and population groups.
In the big emerging countries and elsewhere, the world will have failed to make any durable, systemic change. It will have empowered millions more people with schooling, vaccines and drinking water, but will have failed, cripplingly, to address the food system that still fails to provide them with adequate quantities of food with the right nutritional values at the right price, while consigning generation after generation of rural poor to toiling in order to produce that food – and receiving only economic hardship in return.
There is scepticism about what will happen post-2013, with a new set of numerical development targets unlikely in the current climate. All of this makes it even more crucial to make the current MDGs count, and to secure progress that genuinely resonates beyond 2015, rather than pushing the requisite number of people temporarily above the poverty line.
Photo by Valentina Pavarotti
#1 by Anonymous on July 8, 2011 - 10:42 pm
All that needs be done is Doha round to be agreed. Then your subsistence farmer will get his fair share.
#2 by Lawrence on July 9, 2011 - 10:22 am
What is disgusting is that the eu pays its farmers not to produce and when the harvest is good buy the excess so that prices do not drop instead of giving the surplus to the poor countries.
Isn’t this crass hypocrisy?
#3 by Felix on July 9, 2011 - 10:18 pm
I think part of the “success” is “accounting trick”: $1 1990liat half if its value
#4 by Felix on July 9, 2011 - 10:24 pm
Lawrence, I think you are the hypocrite: EU’s job is to take care of the well being its citizens (farmer in this case). It is normal for EU to have policies that target price stability for agriculture products and thus make sure they don’t become poor due to over production and prices collapse.
The “poor” in the other countries should stop fornicating like rabbits and produce less mouths to screen for “free” food.
#5 by Lawrence on July 11, 2011 - 11:52 am
Felix well I think that it is those who support the eu policies who are hypocrites.
Does the eu really believe in the market economy where the supply and demand determine the price or not?
Or is it OK to preach it to others but it doesn’t implement the policy itself?
Don’t you think that this is crass hypocrisy, preaching one thing and practicing another?
You said that the poor in the other countries should stop fornicating like rabbits and produce less mouths to screen for free food.
Don’t you think that this is a great contradiction when the eu is importing immigrants because it says that the pensions are not sustainable because the “Europeans” are not fornicating like rabbits and are producing less workers to pay for the pensions?
#6 by Felix on July 11, 2011 - 2:58 pm
Lawrence, if EU would “buy the excess [...] giving the surplus to the poor countries”, you would moan here how EU is “wasting taxpayer’s money”. I’ve seen that before.
Second, today’s free markets are more complex than basic supply & demand. Sure, supply & demand is the basic law governing the field, but each state or Union of states have policies to attenuate variances for basic things like food or energy. Subsidies to produce or not produce certain things, insurances for randomness of weather, flooding controls, complex insurance schemes are all methods to stabilize the *variances* of supply & demand.
US has its own version of “CAP”, with farm subsidies, export subsidies, US Corp of Engineers managing complex flood gates, etc. I am not sure if you can understand either CAP or the Agriculture subsidies in the United States Farm Bill.
Third, increased automation will slowly reduce the need of raw human labor. Germany already produces and exports more than US with 1/4 of the population (!). And the profile of the immigrants to the EU coming from Asia and Africa is far from the highly educated worker needed in the XXI century. How many immigrants in the EU can meet these standards? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704913704575453652182261156.html Not even many Europeans can do that, because they “Lady Gaga” or bash the EU on blogs instead of study hard and work hard to have a life and a future.
#7 by Lawrence on July 11, 2011 - 7:02 pm
Felix the eu is simply being managed by the french who do not want the CAP to be done away with and by the Germans to secure their exports.
It is the French who would say that he eu is wasting money when it give food to the poor of the world. Is it not wasting a lot of money on its own elite with their fabulous salaries and perks?
If the eu had to give away food it will get more sympathy from the poor of the third world countries and would prevent the USA from continuing to undermine the food supply.
As regards increased automation, are you now suggesting that we do away with workers and simply use robots?
Where do we go from here?
Where will the workers get the money to buy their needs?
Re immigrats, I am against immigration because they are undermining European workers but that is exactly what the eu elite who are in the pay of the capitalists want.
They want as many immigrats as possible so that there will be a big surplus of labour so that the capitalists will be able to exploit the workers and lower their wages and working conditions because they will have the millions of immigrats who will be ready to accept lower wages and working conditions than the European workers.
This is already happening where European workers from poorer eu member countries go to the richer eu countries and undermine the local workers.
Felix, you can rest assured that the eu has absolutely no sympathy whatsoever from me for depriving me of my Independence and Freedom through its treachery and I shall continue to work to see my country leave the eu dictatorship.
ot that I will have to work for long because if you follow the international media you will easily see that both the euro and the eu are on the way out and nothing can save them.
#8 by Felix on July 11, 2011 - 11:55 pm
Lawrence,
Only a bloody communist will speak in these terms! I should have figure out earlier. I think Belarus, North Koreea, Venezuela, or Cuba needs people like you. On the funny side, the Communist Party of China will reject you, ha-ha!
100 years ago 50% of the US population worked in agriculture (farming). Today 2% work in farming. Two things did NOT happened in this 100 years:
a) US did not starved
b) Unemployment if not 48%
Check yourself here how the demand & supply for various jobs evolved in US in the last 150 years: http://flare.prefuse.org/launch/apps/job_voyager
Automation displace humans from some jobs, and create new opportunities for others (how many web designers were employed before the IT-era?). It’s called “creative destruction” and it happens anyway. Some humans adapt and learn new things. Some others do not adapt and perish. C’est la vie!
The technological advance will happen anyway, no matter how much you bash EU, and even irregardless of countries configurations at any point in time. When the British Empire collapsed in shame and little pathetic pieces this did not stopped the world from advancing, you know?
P.S. What “EU treachery” are you talking about?!
#9 by Lawrence on July 12, 2011 - 1:20 pm
Felix It is bloody capitalists who reason like you do.
Can you deny that the capitalists want immigration in Europe to have a surplus of labour so that they will lower their wages and working conditions because immigrants will be ready to work at lower wages and working conditions?
I did not say that progress and development is to be stopped for no one can stop it thank God, but decent progress that as you said provides alternative jobs and not one that allows the capitalists to take their capital and machinery and open up in countries where workers have little or no rights, work like slaves for a mere pittance and then import their blood money products into Europe free of charges such as customs duties and levies.
As for eu treachery how many things were promised to the people before they join and then they find that they had joined hell and not the promised heaven?
If you read the present international media you will know how the euro and the eu are on the way out, which means that the people, not the politicians on the gravy train, do not want them because if they did they would do everything to save them. Speaks highly of the capitalistic eu with its elite in the capitalists pockets.
#10 by Joe on July 12, 2011 - 3:26 pm
I have found that people who use the word “capitalism” and in particular “capitalist” as an accusatory term don’t have much of an idea how markets work, and the fact that markets don’t make promises to people – only people who think economies and features of an economy can be engineereed and controlled can – i.e.: governments that think themselves to omnipotent and wise that they can control them with intervention.
Simply bundling it up with any bad news you hear, or anything in the world that frightens you is a sad, old trick that dates back to the agitprop of a previous century. The fact is that it takes a socialistic and interventionary government to enable the creation of, and to enforce monopolies, and to have the kind of cronyism that you seem to think is bound up with market capitalism.
Okay, so you detest market economy. 1) What’s your alternative? and 2) has it ever demonstrably worked in history?
#11 by Felix on July 12, 2011 - 3:45 pm
It’s theirs to do what they want! Who are you, a nobody, telling an entrepreneur where and how to invest?
Those people have the right to compete for work in the global world market. They work hard and diligently, and send their kids to school. They do not waste time like Lawrence crying wolf on every single blog entry. They do not behave like this guy, maybe even Lawrence himself: “‘£500-a-week? I can earn more on benefits!’, unemployed driver tells stunned haulage boss” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295236/500-week-I-earn-benefits–unemployed-driver-tells-stunned-haulage-boss.html)
#12 by Felix on July 12, 2011 - 3:56 pm
#13 by Lawrence on July 12, 2011 - 11:35 pm
Have a look at the international media about the junk status of the euro Felix.
The euro and the eu are on the way out and nothing can stop their demise.
#14 by Felix on July 13, 2011 - 2:06 am
So you are indeed a “professional” EU-basher on mass-media (and with communist affiliations), most likely under multiple nicknames, under the pretenses of “voice of the people”. Instead, a better description of you is what here in Texas we call “big hat, no cattle”, he-he.
And I thought that customer support was the worse job ever! It seems that I was wrong, some people try harder to find miserable frustrating jobs like bashing the EU and the “bloody capitalists”!
Btw, I think they cheated you on the crack. I took a look on the EUR/USD intra-day tradings today and I noted noting else than normal daily variations:
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1D
From 1.40 to 1.39! Wow, how insignificant, just like the pathetic life of the professional EU-bashers!
#15 by Lawrence on July 13, 2011 - 3:14 pm
Felix FRANCE is the next to go bust.
Enjoy.
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/wirtschaft/8170-euro-krise-frankreich-bald-pleite
Euro-Schulden-Krise: Frankreich bald pleite? Euro-debt crisis: France broke quickly? (France next in trouble)
#16 by Felix on July 13, 2011 - 7:49 pm
From the article you’ve posted: “Deutschlands Finanzlage hingegen hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren weiter verbessert”. This is the only thing that matter! Because Euro is nothing else than DM adopted by the rest of the EU member states in the Eurozone. They’ve picked the strongest currency, rename it, and they’ve all adopted it. Here, this is the Maastricht Treaty in two sentences for you.
Also, it happened before that various forms of “monetary unions” within the ECC/EC/EU consumed their useful life. Nothing new here. What always happened was a next integration stage. Last time it was ERM that failed in early 90′s, when the pound was the laughing stock of the FX markets and Bank of England was robbed legally (so much for national currencies!). DM was then just dented a bit and what followed was that DM was renamed Euro. After this crisis, the Fiscal Union will follow. I can’t wait to see the foaming at the mouth of euroskeptics then!
#17 by Marcel on July 13, 2011 - 8:29 pm
Abolish the CAP today. Allow African farmers to compete with the French farmers. And of course, abolish development aid at once.
Say what? Yes abolish it at once. Sure, it may be a ‘feel-good’ thingy designed to soothe consciences in the ‘west’ but it does not and never has worked. Instead, the correlation between countries that have received more aid and are poor is quite strong. In fact, having received more aid has made those countries the poorest of all. Early 1960s at independence Africa was ahead of South East Asia. SE Asia chose trade, Africa chose autarkism and aid. Guess what happened…
Todays development aid is just designed to make westerners feel good about themselves and to make some NGO directors rich with fat pay checks. They do not WANT Africa to get better, because then they couldn’t prance around anymore acting all ‘progressive’ and ‘humanitarian’.
No aid would mean that those countries would be forced to start serious implementing more sound policies, rather than the current ‘maximize aid’ policies being carried out. Maybe they could do something about the colonial borders that are still plagueing Africa, having been imposed by colonial powers that paid no attention to ethnic and tribal realities.
In fact, I’m willing to wager that without development aid from 1960, today those countries would already have been better off, instead of being artificially kept poor and dependent. And let’s not forget the criminal role of the World Bank and particularly the IMF, which have forced these countries to sell off state resources for a pittance to western corporations, and then to find out many locals cannot afford water or electricity anymore.
Development aid is downright criminal, despite its ‘feel-good’ design.
#18 by Lawrence on July 13, 2011 - 9:14 pm
Felix continue doing an Ostrich. You will wake up to a nightmare when you find out that the euro and the eu no longer exist Thank God.
#19 by Lawrence on July 13, 2011 - 9:20 pm
By the way Felix, since you said that you are from Texas, it is said that they see things big in Texas, too big to allow them to see the whole perspective.
Re the US$, you are also in trouble because the US is simply printing as much $ as fast as it can with nothing to back it up and when it falls it is going to fall down big time.
When China starts pulling your strings you will have to follow their pulling.
#20 by Felix on July 14, 2011 - 12:15 am
Don’t worry about US and Texas, Lawrence, we’ll be just fine. At least we have air carriers left to put up for a good fight. Unlike the “proud” descendants of Nelson who played the country on the financial casino and now must beg the French to borrow their carrier, ha-ha!
#21 by Lawrence on July 14, 2011 - 10:10 am
Felix if you believe you’ll be just fine have a look at these links and enjoy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12940054
US unemployment: The bad news the US jobs figures hide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13645813
American gloom spooks investors
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14121300
US trade deficit widens to more than $50bn in May
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13638120
US jobs: What prospects for the class of 2011?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14081789
US jobs creation stalls in June
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Budget-deficit-on-track-to-apf-957477153.html?x=0
Budget deficit on track to top $1 trillion
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/14/us-markets-global-idUSTRE71H0EB20110714
Dollar drops as Moody’s warning spurs shift to safe havens
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14142621
Moody’s to review US triple-A debt rating
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/gold-hits-record-rally-ninth-day-023144861.html
Gold hits record, extends gains to ninth day
#22 by Felix on July 14, 2011 - 3:01 pm
so is US fails, who is going to put his skin in to the battle to save you for a third time from the Germans? Did you thought of that? Germans booted you twice in the last century, and only because of us you got saved. I’d be cautious enjoying us having too much problem.
Can’t wait for the moment when the London casino will have to pay the Credit Default Swaps “insurance” after Greece defaults!
#23 by Lawrence on July 14, 2011 - 5:40 pm
Felix you are the perfect example of the saying that they say about Texans.
Pity your name does not sound American.
A European immigrant with an axe to grind perhaps?
#24 by Felix on July 14, 2011 - 7:55 pm
My name has Latin roots, it reminds of a great empire that latest 1000 times longer than the failure that the petty British Empire was. No wonder they called your little island “Perfidious Albion”. My name means “Happiness”, because I am happy with my life and my freedoms!
You Brits “know it all” so well, you sold my grandparents to Nazis and then to Bolsheviks in less than 10 years! You Brits took away the freedoms of my parents, and so you’ve became forever shameful accomplices to these historical crimes. Your attitude “I’ll continue to tell you what’s the best to you” shows that you Brits did not changed and you are capable of selling others again, like you always did.
God had mercy for us, my grandparents found their resting place in the Land of the Free, where I was born in freedom. Due to my grandparents I also have EU citizenship, which expands my freedoms on two continents in two Unions of States (too bad EU has this bad apple called UK as a member – maybe not for long).
I’ll be damned if I’ll let another pathetic Brit (maybe even a “paki”) to stole away my FREEDOMS again. I am born Texan and I will fight like a Texas against any nazi, bolshevik, and any of their pathetic frustrated accomplices!
#25 by Lawrence on July 14, 2011 - 11:06 pm
Felix Thanks for confirming what I suspected.
An ex-European stock with an axe to grind.
Grind away Felix, but take care that you do not also grind the axe handle.
Shows how you are brainwashed with what you think is your american superiority but which in actual fact is an inferiority complex.
As for the united states of europe, vain hope Felix. You may be able to get to your grandparents country in s few years from now, but not to any European country that you may wish for the eu is going to disintegrate in the not too distant future.
As for perfiduous, I wonder what they call the american soldiers who ran away with their tails between their legs in Vietnam and elsewhere.
hasta luego felix
#26 by Joe on July 18, 2011 - 3:59 pm
What exactly is an “American sounding” name? Something you once saw on television?
Plus what do “they” say about Texans? Or is this a matter of simply throwing whatever sad lie or prejudice you can out there, and then saying that it’s because “everyone knows that’s true!”
As to what Europeans say about Texans, and what range of expresion millions of Texans have – well, I’m sure it has far more to do with what some wish was true than what really is true.
#27 by Lawrence on July 19, 2011 - 9:18 am
Joe Everyone knows of the saying that Texans see things big, much bigger than reality, so that they only see one thing or the centre of the picture which obscures everything else. Texans believe that they have the biggest and the best in everything.
This is not a sad lie but something which everyone knows but which Texans seem to be unaware of that it’s not the truth.
American-sounding name? Felix is not a common american-sounding name is it? More like derived from Spanish, right?
#28 by Lawrence on July 19, 2011 - 9:20 am
Perhaps someone is still angry because of the routing of the Spanish armada?