The Christian case for fighting hunger

Roger Thurow, co-author of Enough, makes the Christian case for fighting hunger through agricultural development.

There's the political side of hunger and a policy prism. But there is this moral imperative to solving hunger. It's the right thing to do. Churches are extremely important for pushing the moral importance of the issue of hunger. It is something appreciated and understood in churches, since one of the main precepts of all religions is to feed the hungry. And for Christians, Matthew 25:35, there it is: "I was hungry and you gave me food … What you did to the least of these my brethren, you did unto me" (v. 40).

Bono referred to that passage when he was at Wheaton College on his Heart of America tour. Francis Pelekamoyo, the head of Opportunity International in Malawi, searched the Bible and wondered: What should I do after my years as central bank governor? That's the passage he kept coming back to. This is what we should do. This is what Jesus wants us to do.

Davos, world hunger and Felix Salmon

After a conversation with Dan Barber of Blue Hill Farm (a phenomenal restaurant, by the way), Felix Salmon is convinced that the Davos approach to solving world hunger is broken:

No one talked about creating relatively small and self-sufficient agricultural communities: the model is still very much that you sell your one crop for money, and then use that money to buy whatever other food you might need.

Here’s my comment in response:

Felix, I love that you posted on this, but I don’t think where you’re coming out is specific enough to the rural smallholder farming households who make up most of the world’s hungry. They are food-insecure because they can’t produce enough to feed their families and/or they don’t make enough money from selling their surplus crops to buy enough food to close the deficit. “Creating relatively small and self-sufficient agricultural communities” is a nice goal, but we can’t get there in poor countries without figuring out the “how” of improving smallholder productivity.

Staple crop monocultures for these smallholders aren’t necessarily as dumb as they might seem from afar. Which staple crop often varies according to local growing conditions (e.g., in Ethiopia, some regions grow mainly maize, others mainly wheat, teff, or sorghum). And if you’re struggling to grow enough to feed your family on your single hectare of land, focusing on the most productive staple crop – perhaps with a small plot of a cash crop like tomatoes or onions on the side – makes sense.

Agricultural innovation (like, say, flood-resistant rice or drought-tolerant corn, or yield- and sustainability-enhancing crop rotation techniques for that matter) is critical not so the developed world can produce more to ship to the developing world, but rather so poor farmers in developing world can produce enough food to feed themselves.

300 well-chosen words on food

At the NYT Room for Debate on "Can biotech cure world hunger?", this is Michael Roberts:

• I don't think biotech crops are evil and could be a big help, especially in developing nations. But I think we'd be naive to think these will solve all the world's food problems going forward. Maybe they will but they probably won't.


• Good development policy, whatever that may be, is surely good food policy. In many ways food is too cheap relative to income in rich countries and too expensive relative to income in poor countries. Both problems are solved if incomes are more equal. Figuring out good development policy is, err..., much harder...


• I think a meat tax makes a lot of sense. Taxing meat would help to keep staple grains cheap and plentiful, which would help the poorest food-importing countries and probably improve health outcomes in rich countries. Some economists would probably cry foul. They might claim lump-sum transfers of cash would be a better way to deal with the underlying distributional issue. The problem is effective transfers to especially poor countries are very difficult. (Consider why those countries are poor in the first place.) Also, given our semi-public health care systems in rich countries, there could be negative externalities from meat consumption.


• Stop ethanol subsidies. These look really silly.


• Then there is that other externality we might want to tax or cap (CO2).

Enough (hunger)

I’m currently reading Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, based on a trusted recommendation, and am finding it surprisingly substantive for a book written by two WSJ journalists. I’m about halfway through and will post more when I’m done, but two quick thoughts for now.

First, I had not appreciated at all the bizarre distortions created by the U.S. food aid system (aid is required to come from U.S. farms) and the “Iron Triangle” of farmers, shippers and charities which upholds is. The resistance to spending just 25% of food aid budget on locally produced food (which would be much more cost-effective) is astounding (it was quashed in Congress four years running from 2005-2008).

Second, everyone (Bono, Tony Blair, the authors, etc.) fixates on hunger in Africa specifically, but there are more undernourished people in South Asia than in Africa, and Africa has less than 30% of the billion undernourished people in the world. The lion’s share are in Asia (despite the Green Revolution!). So it’s good to keep that in perspective.

Update: Right, so apparently I posted on the latter less than two weeks ago, in response to an NYT article on the same topic.

Malnutrition worse in India than Africa

“India is an economic powerhouse and a nutritional weakling.”

This is from this NYT article on malnutrition in India; it is no surprise that malnutrition is prevalent, but this statistic surprised me:

India is often compared — and often compares itself — with China, but the fact is that as China became an economic powerhouse it greatly reduced malnutrition. In an all-fronts effort, China cut child malnutrition by two-thirds between 1990 and 2002. Today only 7 percent of Chinese children under age 5 are underweight, whereas the figure for India is 43 percent. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, which most people assume to have the direst poverty statistics, the average child-malnutrition rate is 28 percent.

I would not have guessed 50% worse than the average of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The new food aid paradigm

Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack signaled a major shift in U.S. food aid policy from providing American-grown emergency food aid to investing in agricultural productivity in developing countries:

"It is a more comprehensive, holistic view of food security that focuses on the notion that we want to make food more available, we want to make it accessible and we want to make sure that it is properly used," Vilsack said in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "If we can help countries become more productive themselves then they will be in a better position to feed their own people," he said.

The World Bank was already moving in that direction. Then this week, the G8 followed suit:

The G8 countries will this week announce a “food security initiative”, committing more than $12bn for agricultural development over the next three years, in a move that signals a further shift from food aid to long-term investments in farming in the developing world.

In many ways this "teach a man to fish" approach is a welcome change (although not unprecedented - under none other than the recently much-discussed Robert McNamara, the World Bank made a major push into agriculture in the 1970s, with mixed results).

On the other hand, improved productivity alone cannot eliminate hunger - the UN Hunger Task Force estimates that only ~50% of the now more than 1 billion undernourished people in the world are smallholder farmers, with the remainder mostly rural landless or urban. Improved productivity can move the poorest smallholders from net food buyers to net sellers, but it is unlikely to have more than a marginal impact on world cereal prices, so social safety nets will remain an indispensable part of the food security equation until economic growth can raise incomes to the point where food becomes affordable to the rest.

1.02 billion people hungry

The FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) publishes new estimates that the number of undernourished people in the world has climbed to 1.02 billion (from ~925m last year and ~850m in 2005). The main drivers of the rise are the global economic slowdown and high food prices, which have subsided somewhat from highs in 2008 but still not returned to 2002-2004 levels.

This is sad because undernourishment has lifelong negative effects and because hunger is, as Amartya Sen argued in his signature body of work, overwhelmingly an issue of economic access rather than physical access. The world produces enough food, the poor just don't have enough money to buy it.