Next month
Ahungry man, goes the adage, is an angry man. Perhaps it was with this in mind that the Norwegian Nobel Committee handed its 2020 Peace Prize not to a person but to the world’s largest humanitarian organisation, the World Food Programme (WFP). The gesture was recognition of the WFP’s efforts and of the knotty relationship between famine, food and conflict but it also acknowledged the daunting to-do list faced by the UN’s most overworked logistics arm. There is, David Beasley, the head of the WFP, recently warned, ‘a lot of bad coming our way’. In next month’s issue of Geographical we use our bi-monthly dossier to examine global hunger, a phenomenon that, despite declining in recent decades, is now a top priority once more.
Today, the WFP openly speaks of an unfolding ‘hunger pandemic’, exacerbated by climate change, Covid-19 and, above all, political unrest. According to the WFP, in 2017, there were 80 million people facing imminent starvation; by 2020 this had risen to 135 million; in
2021 it already stands at 270 million. ‘It’s good to be recognised but we know the prize is a call to arms,’ says Arif Husain, chief economist at the WFP. ‘The job is far from done. It’s a shame in the 21st century in a globalised world we are still talking about trying to give people a decent meal once a day.’
On the plus side, there are now tools at our disposal. The fear of the 1970s, that we genuinely might not have enough food to feed a growing global population, has long gone. ‘We have capacity to move food from surplus to those areas with a deficit. We have early warning systems of drought and other extreme weather,’ says Professor Stephen Devereux, fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Putting these systems to good use is essential.