II Food Security, Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth

There are compelling moral arguments for eradicating hunger. However, these seem to carry little weight in resource allocation decisions, whether within the budgets of developing countries or in aid allocations. Instead, economic and political considerations tend to dominate in decisions on the use of fiscal resources.

One of the main reasons for insufficient direct action against hunger may be the widespread assumption amongst policy-makers that hunger is a consequence of poverty. Many Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) assume that the incidence of hunger will, therefore, drop as a consequence of successful poverty reduction programmes, and hence fail to address food security as an issue in its own right. There are two flaws in this assumption. The first is that it fails to recognise the surprisingly low elasticity of food consumption in relation to increases in income (even at very low income levels) and hence the limited extent to which a general reduction in poverty will bring down the incidence of hunger.^[4] Secondly, it misses the opportunities for using reductions in chronic undernourishment as a prime means of accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and resolving many of the other problems facing very poor people.

There is now growing recognition that hunger contributes to and perpetuates poverty, and holds back economic growth.^[5] Indeed, hunger reduction is critical for achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including those related to poverty reduction, health, education, gender and the sustainable use of natural resources.

Some of the clearest evidence for the causative link between hunger and poverty - which seems obvious from an intuitive perspective - can be found in the work of Nobel prize-winning economist Robert William Fogel. In examining British economic growth between 1800 and 1980, he concluded that "the combined effect of the increase in dietary energy available for work, and of the increased human efficiency in transforming dietary energy into work output, appears to account for about 50 per cent of the British economic growth since 1800."^[6] The implication of this and other analyses of the links between nutrition and economic growth^[7] is that deliberate measures to increase effective food energy consumption and diet quality amongst those with inadequate access to food will open the door to accelerated poverty reduction and faster economic growth. This must be particularly true in economic systems in which manual labour is a dominant factor in production processes, as is the case in rural societies which are dependent on subsistence agriculture using manual tillage systems: it is precisely here that most chronic hunger appears to be now concentrated. Programmes aimed at reducing hunger and malnutrition must, therefore, be a central element of any PRSP.

A further reason for lack of determined large-scale action to cut chronic hunger may be that there has been insufficient analytical work to explain the ingredients of success and failure in hunger reduction. Many programmes aimed at reducing hunger have been relatively costly per person benefiting, fragmented and narrow in their coverage, concentrating mainly on production increasing interventions without ensuring a link to better food consumption. In some countries, food safety net programmes, even though adequately funded, have failed to reach the intended beneficiaries because of targeting difficulties, maladministration and corruption. Yet these problems should not distract attention from the fact that in the 1990s, 100 developing and transition countries managed to cut the proportion of their population classified as undernourished, showing that, where the right measures are applied, good progress can be made in reducing hunger. In contrast, the proportion rose in only 26 countries, of which half were engaged in prolonged conflict.

The world is only slowly awakening to the links between hunger, extreme poverty, social exclusion and conflict. To the extent that improvements in global communications raise people’s expectations, the increasingly visible gaps between rich and poor are bound to fuel still greater tensions, prompting increased flows of illegal immigrants and swelling the ranks of extremist groups. It is clearly in the self-interest of those who now benefit from global prosperity to close the gap and thereby reduce threats to world stability. Getting rid of hunger is the first step in this direction.^[8]