THE paradox facing the World Food Summit in Rome this week is no less grim for being very familiar. At an aggregate level, the world still has enough to eat.
But individual people do not eat around an aggregate table. Many dine in comfort. Others continue to get by. And a large minority (800-million) struggle for food in overcrowded slums, on impoverished soils, often amid an abundance which they cannot afford. Africa has the highest proportion of the chronically undernourished (41%). But Asia, in spite of its “miracles”, still has the highest number – more than half a billion.
A host of non-governmental agencies have issued briefings for Rome: they all make compelling sense.
The Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University puts the problem succinctly. Cases of genuine food shortage (after floods in South Asia or civil wars in central Africa) are relatively rare. “All over the world, it is the poor who go hungry” – never the rich.
The World Development Movement points out that even in the United States an estimated 30-million people suffer from malnutrition. The global food market, dominated by a few giant corporations, makes matters worse. Dependence on food imports creates rural unemployment and insecurity. Food aid is diminishing as the market takes over. A Panos Briefing warns that companies will only release food “in response to price opportunities, not need”.
It says much about international priorities that the Rome conference is already being written off as a “talking shop”.
In spite of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s efforts, no new money is expected to be generated. Of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, only Italy, the host country, is sending a senior figure. The crisis in Zaire will not be directly addressed. Please, just for once, could the world’s leaders surprise us by taking seriously what remains the world’s biggest shame?