development: Means to prevent hunger —Syed Mohammad Ali

Pakistan is amongst the list of countries trying to lease its land to rich Gulf States to grow crops that will be exported, so as to attract more foreign investment, despite the fear of water depletion and increased food insecurity

Access to adequate food is one of the most basic of human rights that still keeps eluding the development community as a whole, despite the billions of dollars spent every year to better the lives of deprived people around the world. While there is said to be enough food in the world to feed the global population twice over, every few seconds a child continues to die from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases.

Hunger, malnutrition and chronic poverty need not exist, but they are a direct result of human decisions. This is despite the fact that the right to adequate food is laid out squarely in the most important human rights document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as numerous other international covenants. In fact, some 200 UN declarations address the right to adequate food and nutrition within varied political, socio-economic, cultural and women or child rights constructions.

Access to adequate food has been defined in terms of intake of nutrients, calories and proteins. It is also recognised that the accessed food must be adequate in terms of quality, quantity and cultural acceptability as well. It is important to realise that malnutrition is not only due to insufficient food intake, but it can also take place if the quality of food is inadequate.

Generally, the biggest cause for both hunger and malnutrition is the problem of access. We live in a world where food insecurity can easily co-exist with an abundant supply of food. Poor and marginalised segments of the population in rural and urban areas lack the purchasing power to buy the minimum amount of food needed to prevent hunger within their households. So, emphasising the need to trade more food does not necessarily help poor people, especially if the rural poor have been increasingly excluded from the process of food production and the urban poor have diminishing means to purchase the imported food pouring into domestic markets. Despite this fact, the liberalised agricultural trade system continues to exclude millions of landless and small-scale farmers, promote agri-businesses, and to deter developing countries from protecting their own farmers. The UN Hunger Task Force finding that three out of five small farmers suffer from hunger should not thus be surprising.

In addition to poor farmers and their families, NGOs like Action-Aid have identified agricultural labourers, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, informal sector workers, unemployed people, street children, the homeless, people living in areas of conflict, refugees, migrant workers and the internally displaced to also be particularly prone to hunger. Such hunger tends to repeat itself through the generations, as undernourished mothers give birth to children who will never fully develop.

It is vital that policy makers around the world begin to address the varied problems that result in hunger, including not only the issue of availability of adequate food, but also the need for more equitable income distribution and to reconsider agricultural trade policies to ensure that they enable instead of deter the human right to adequate food. Recognising the right to adequate food in national legislation can further help formulate the relevant set of obligations of a given state.

In effect, recognising the right to adequate food obliges national governments to refrain from taking any measures that result in preventing existing access to adequate food. It also compels governments to ensure that private actors or individuals do not deprive people of their access to adequate food, and to pro-actively support activities that strengthen people’s access to and utilisation of resources that ensure their livelihood, including food security. Finally, whenever an individual or group is unable, for reasons beyond their control, such as in times of natural disasters or due to conflicts, to enjoy the right to adequate food, states have the obligation to fulfil that right directly.

If states were really committed to implementing policies aimed at eradicating poverty and hunger, world hunger would have diminished instead of increasing. Unfortunately, however, the number of hungry people has increased from approximately 840 million in 1996 to 967 million in 2008. More than 2 billion people worldwide now suffer from micronutrient malnutrition.

Hunger is a very serious problem in our part of the world, especially. Around 41 percent of South Asian children under the age of five are malnourished, whereas the comparable figure for sub-Saharan Africa is 27 percent. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are ranked amongst the bottom 20 countries on the 2008 Global Hunger Index.

The Indian Cabinet has recently cleared a Food Security Bill, however, paving the way for the right to food to be backed by legal provision. This implies that the poor now have the legal right to get 25 kilogrammes of food-grains a month at only Rs 3 per kg. There are problems regarding targeting and the level of subsidisation required and the ultimate sustainability of the proposed bill, but the formulation of legislation is a step in the right direction to help ensure freedom from hunger.

Conversely, Pakistan is amongst the list of countries trying to lease its land to rich Gulf States to grow crops that will be exported, so as to attract more foreign investment, despite the fear of water depletion and increased food insecurity.

The Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad has cited the food security ranking of districts in Pakistan, according to which 48.5 percent of the people in 76 districts of Pakistan are now facing food insecurity. The 10 most food insecure districts include Dera Bugti, Musa Khel, Upper Dir, North Waziristan, Mohmand, Dalbidin, South Waziristan, Orakzai, and Panjgur. Other worse off food insecure districts are Bajaur, Laki Marwat, Lower Dir, Shangla and Malakand.

It is rightly being pointed out that many of these above districts are perceived as being hotbeds of conflict and fundamentalism within Pakistan. While there is little research being done to specifically illustrate how food insecurity is exacerbating militancy in the above-mentioned districts, it is an established fact that food insecurity leads to violence and conflict in varied international contexts.

It is about time that our national policy makers and donors begin to take the above mentioned practical steps needed to combat hunger in Pakistan, which continues to lead to a host of other problems, including, foremost, the indescribable suffering of the many victims of such acute deprivation.

The writer is a researcher. He can be contacted at ali@policy.hu