How Effective Are International Efforts to Ease the Problem of Global Hunger?

In many developing countries, destitutes barely have enough to eat everyday. These people die from starvation and malnourishment, having barely enough to feed themselves, and survival is a struggle. In fact, starvation is a significant international problem. Approximately 815 million people are undernourished, and over 16,000 children die per day from hunger-related causes. Fortunately, many developed economies have contributed significantly to international food aid to help alleviate this problem. However, many critics cast aspersions on this notion and highlight many serious problems and limitations that arises from international aid, claiming that the aid is hardly effective at all.

Firstly, many people claim that developed nations have the wealth, resources and manpower to provide food aid to such nations. In fact, USA has commited $3.5billion over 3 years for food aid to developing nations in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This means that food aid can be given to the poor in large quantities effectively, due to an increase in agricultural producivity and incomes, as well as a decrease in childhood malnutrition. This means more people at the lower-end of the economic spectrum would have access to basic food and have higher income to purchase basic food for themselves.

However, a closer look reviews the problems that comes with food aid. Food aid drives down the prices of domestic food and encourages the consumption of wheat and dairy, which are cheap imports from developed countries like US, UK and Sweden. This actually disrupts the local markets and depresses crop prices. Small domestic producers would be unable to compete fairly and often sell their land, becoming jobless or laborers, or even moving to the big cities. As such economies are encouraged to be exporters of cash crops, and food from food “aid” is so cheap, other work is on the cheap and people struggle to make a living. Inevitably, it also affects the livelihoods of rural populations and helps to create a vicious cycle of increasing food aid dependence and cause their economic growth prospects to be stunted. For some of the poorest countries like South Africa and Ethopia, such dependency combined with scarce resources to finance imports has resulted in increased poverty and hunger, while also giving rise to structural food deficits.

Critics also claim that with many stakeholders - individuals, organisations and government bodies - working together and combining their available resources, it is possible to solve the global hunger problem. In fact, World Food Programme (WFP) had launched the Progress pilot project that involved contracting more than 207,000 metric tons of food from farmers, warehouse operators and traders, valued at US$75.6 million, for international food aid. This means there would be an abundant supply of food available for aid to many poor countries.

However, these people are misguided in their belief that all this is effective. In fact, there are changes in food trends in recent years that have caused cost of food to skyrocket. More attention to biofuel crops has contributed to increased crop value, while fuel costs have risen in recent years, important to both industrial agriculture and shipping. The value of the dollar has fallen significantly in US. While this can help poor countries in their debt repayments, it increases the cost of food imports for the poor country. Hence, the higher food prices have not only reduced the amount of food aid for the hungry, but are also making it harder for the poorest people to buy food for themselves.

Lastly, there are certain areas that have been overlooked. Although international food aid has been given to many poor countries, some countries with a corrupted government such as Afghanistan and Iraq do not use the donated resources and help the impoverished, but use it for military purposes in areas of defence, such as food rations for the army and to purchase more firearms. Often, this worsens the political situation in the country as the government becomes more totalitarian, and the food aid donated would have been wasted. Furthermore, there is a seeming lack of concern for countries with certain belief systems, religious or racial backgrounds, as well as different language. For example, pork is sometimes incorrectly sent to Muslim-majority countries, and the food labels are not written in a language which locals are literate in, if at all, making it difficult for locals to understand the contents of the food. This worsens the efficiency and effectiveness of distributing the food to the poor worldwide.

Overall, although it cannot be denied that international aid has been significant, it is hardly effective in solving the global hunger problem due to its limitations and shortfalls. More should be done to revise the strategies and policies of the food aid programmes, to ensure that they are both efficient and effective in solving the global food problem as a whole.