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Hunger and How to End It
Fact: 24,000 people die of hunger every day. The number of people Saddam Hussein murdered every year when he was in power is equal to the number of people who die of hunger every fifteen hours. The number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks is equal to the number of people who die of hunger every three hours. Most people would agree with me that this number is 24,000 deaths per day above the optimal level of death from hunger; to those who don’t, all I can say is that political ideals—liberty, quality of life, equality, and so on—are all meaningless to a dead person.
There are a lot of ways to reduce this figure; in this article, I will concentrate only on solutions as opposed to the blame for the problem, and I will only present solutions that will have substantial effect by the end of the decade, in exactly six years. Therefore, I exclude solutions such as investment in scientific and medical research; while those are very important in the long run, they probably will not be noticed before the third decade of the third millennium. However, it is important to note that while my solutions are constructed for quick implementation, they are also constructed for a lasting effect, hopefully one that will eradicate the problem of death from hunger once and for all. Finally, all solutions presented here outline what the first world can do, with the first world here including the United States, Europe, Japan, and international organizations such as the WTO and the UN.
Probably the most important political solution is eliminating agricultural subsidies. They help American, European, and Japanese farmers make more money, but at the cost of substantially worsening the worldwide situation. First, they depress prices worldwide and thus hurt farmers in the third world. Second, the destruction of abundant products such as milk is clearly worse than the government buying excess milk cheaply and donating it to hunger-stricken areas. The UN’s 2003 Human Development Report * comments on agricultural subsidies: “That [subsidizing agriculture] leaves rich country farmers as the sole true beneficiaries of agriculture, with a multitude of losers around the globe” (156). Eliminating subsidies will help farmers in poor countries, in which an average of 75% of people live in rural areas, compete against farmers in rich countries, who are not in food insecurity, let alone death from malnutrition. The “big three” of the first world—the United States, the European Union, and Japan should eliminate subsidies on their own, but failing that, the WTO should be more aggressive with this form of protectionism.
Increasing aid will also help the global situation. The reasons should be self-evident: directly giving food directly helps hunger in the immediate run, birth control helps in the short-to-medium run, building a manufacturing base helps in the medium-to-long run, and so on. Many will argue that there is not enough money to give; however, this is very far from reality. The OECD countries spend a total of 311 billion dollars per year on agricultural subsidies but only 52 billion per year on aid; the total GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa is 301 billion per year, for comparison. Another interesting comparison is aid per capita: the European Union’s total aid to Sub-Saharan Africa, the most poverty- and hunger-stricken region of the world, is just eight dollars per African person per year, whereas its subsidy to cows is 913 dollars per cow per year; Japan is even worse, with the figures being $1.47 and $2,700 per year respectively (UN 155).
The first world should also open up the gates for immigration on the one hand and outsourcing on the other; if it does not, it would be wise for the UN to enact and enforce a ban on immigration restrictions and for the WTO to crack down on restrictions on outsourcing. While problematic environmental clauses in NAFTA, the FTAA, and the WTO can and should be changed, the essence of free trade should be retained. While the free market in most cases screws the poor, in the case of trade it helps them by encouraging investing in poor countries. Immigration will help poor people in the third world in a Muhammad-and-the-mountain fashion: if jobs don’t come to the third world, then the third world can come to the jobs. Besides, immigration restrictions serve to foster nationalism, which causes people to be less receptive to programs that help the third world at the expense of the first.
Birth control does wonders everywhere, and it will especially in the third world. Three quarters of people who die of hunger are children below the age of five, so it is safe to assume that aggressive birth control will get rid of three quarters of the problem within five years. There are several ways to encourage birth control, forced abortions notwithstanding. The easiest, which is also the most widely used, is giving people more access to contraception and abortion; the USA under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, has systematically defunded abortion worldwide, so hungry people have far less access to birth control than they would if the USA gave aid to it. Family planning is also extremely important, but its effect is more moderate because it requires substantially higher literacy rates; education, similarly, will greatly improve the situation but only in the early-to-mid-2010s.
The power of religion, and particularly the power of religions that oppose birth control, must be curbed. The Catholic Church’s hardline anti-choice, anti-contraception position has been responsible to about 120 million unwanted births. I don’t have statistics about how many unwanted births have resulted from Hinduism’s opposition to birth control, but this shouldn’t be taken to mean that Hinduism is any better than Catholicism here. The best way to counter the power of Catholicism is to break its hold on very poor people in countries such as Brazil by giving massive secular aid to potential victims, who are also the ones most likely to obey “Go forth and multiply” and have more children than they can feed. Hinduism is harder to undermine, but harder does not mean impossible. This will turn the vicious cycle in which religion and extreme poverty feed each other in a spiraling race to the bottom into a virtuous cycle in which a better economic condition and family planning will feed each other in a spiraling race to the top.
It’s possible to cheapen health care everywhere by doing research in places where costs are cheaper. It makes no sense to research and produce medicine in the United States, where costs are high enough to make prices unaffordable almost everywhere else, when it can be researched and produced in India, where people will work for lower wages (which are still very high by Indian standards) and where costs overall are a little less than a sixth of costs in the United States, thus making medicine affordable in the third world. As an aside, producing in India will also have a positive demand-side effect on the Indian economy, because the researchers will make and spend money in India, thus stimulating India’s economy by a little. It makes sense from both a demand-side- and a supply-side perspective to produce pharmaceutical products such as vaccines and contraceptives in the third world.
In many cases, third world countries produce enough food or have enough income to feed their population comfortably, but corrupt leadership prevents this food from reaching the people. This holds mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the hunger situation is at its worst and every third person is hungry, but such corruption occurs also in China and India. This can be changed in two ways: one, removing corrupt leaders such as Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor through international action (the United States is adept at removing leaders but also at installing new regimes that aren’t any better, and thus the action should be multilateral rather than unilateral); two, criminalizing certain actions when done by a government, such as encouraging childbirth and more importantly, withholding aid from hungry people. The last solution might have prevented the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward in China, in which Mao created food shortages and then refused to receive aid because it would hurt China’s economic independence.
The topic of economic independence brings me to my last point: self-sufficiency fosters hunger. A self-sufficient country will turn inward and engage in either isolationism or unilateralism, both of which hurt everyone. The United States couldn’t have become isolationist in the 1920s had it been dependent on international cooperation the way all countries in the Eurasian landmass but China and Russia are. Were the United States more dependent on other countries, it would cooperate with the rest of the world more and thus have to help hungry people more. The same pattern is emerging with China, only that its situation is worse because its self-sufficiency makes it hardly if at all possible to force it to help its hungry population more; its area and population are too large for it to be defeated militarily, and its economic structure is too self-sufficient for it to be defeated economically. To ultimately solve the problem of self-sufficiency, both consumers and international organizations need to work to make all countries dependent on both exports and imports, but the two countries that it is most important to make economically dependent are the USA and China. It is possible to argue that a dependent USA will have to support regimes such as the House of Saud or else it’ll be blockaded, but American foreign policy has never been particularly supportive of civil liberties and democracy, excluding the creation of the League of Nations and the Marshall Plan, and there is no reason to suspect that it will try to bring down the House of Saud even if it is not dependent on Saudi oil.
Obviously, some of these solutions are more ambitious than others, some are a bit more long-term, and so on. However, all are very likely to have a positive effect within six years of implementation, with the possible exception of making states more interdependent. Increasing aid will obviously help reduce the number of hungry people. Eliminating agricultural subsidies is a form of indirect aid—more precisely, agricultural subsidies are a handicap. Repealing restrictions on immigration and outsourcing will better the financial situation of people who live in the third world and thus reduce the number of hungry people. Giving people in the third world better access to health care, and most importantly access to birth control, will make it far easier for people to support their families. Removing corrupt leaders will make food distribution much more egalitarian and thus drastically reduce hunger in countries affected. And undermining self-sufficiency will force countries to help hungry people and enable the international community to enforce international law better. The sooner any of these solutions is adopted, regardless of whether the adopter is a country such as the USA or Japan or an international organization such as the UN or the WTO, the faster the problem of hunger will be fixed.
* The page numbers given here are those of the printed HDR, which appear on the bottom of every PDF page. However, the page numbers that Adobe Acrobat displays are different; pages 155 and 156 are PDF pages 163 and 164 respectively. Back.
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