45 Countries Will Still be Going Hungry by 2030 as World Fails in Global Hunger Fight

12 Oct 2016 --- At the same time as developed countries are wasting one third of the food they produce, the global community is not on track on to meet the 2030 deadline set by the United Nations to end world hunger.

The latest data from the 2016 Global Hunger Index (GHI) says that if hunger declines at the same rate as it has been since 1992, more than 45 countries - including India, Pakistan, Haiti, Yemen and Afghanistan - will still have alarming hunger scores in 14 years time. 

While some progress is being made in developing countries, 795 million people around the world face the prospect of going hungry on a daily basis. 

Across regions and countries, GHI scores vary considerably. Regionally, the highest GHI scores, and therefore the highest hunger levels, are still found in Africa south of the Sahara and South Asia. The Central African Republic, Chad and Zambia had the highest levels of hunger in the report and seven countries had “alarming” levels of hunger and 43 had “serious” levels. After that comes Haiti, Madagascar, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and Niger. 

The global community at large needs to seriously pick up the pace in the fight against world 
hunger or face falling well short of the target set by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal.

“Simply put, countries must accelerate the pace at which they are reducing hunger or we will fail to achieve the second Sustainable Development Goal,” says International Research Policy Institute director general Shenggen Fan. “Ending global hunger is certainly possible, but it’s up to all of all us that we set the priorities right to ensure that governments, the private sector and civil society devote the time and resources necessary to meet this important goal.”

The GHI is designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger globally and country and region. Calculated each year by the IFPRI, it highlights successes and failures in hunger reduction and gives insights into the driver of hunger. This is the eleventh in an annual series. 

It outlined some positive details such as the level of hunger in developing countries has fallen 29 percent since 2000 and 20 countries - including Rwanda, Cambodia and Myanmar, have reduced their GHI scores by more than 50 percent each since 2000. For the second consecutive year, there are no developing countries (for which data was available) that have been classified in the “extremely alarming” category.  

However, declines in average hunger levels do not go anywhere near telling the entire story of a country or region’s hunger problems and challenges, and the averages can actually mask lagging areas where million of people go hungry every day. 

Latin America had the lowest regional GHI score in the developing world, while Haiti has the fourth highest score, and Mexico has a low level of overall hunger, but also contains areas within its borders where child stunting, which is an indicator of child undernutrition, is relatively high. 

“Whilst the world has made progress in the fight against hunger there are still 795 million people condemned to facing hunger every day of their lives,” says CEO of Concern Worldwide, Dominic MacSorley. “This is not just unacceptable, it is immoral and shameful. Resources like the Global Hunger Index provide us with a critical insight into the scale of the global hunger crisis. Agenda 2030 provides us with the ambition and commitment to reach zero hunger. We have the technology, knowledge and resources to achieve that vision. What is missing is both the urgency and the political will to turn commitments into action.” 

Another limitation is the lack of data for calculating the index scores for 13 countries, 10 of which have indicators such as stunting, wasting and child mortality. They include Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and the Syrian Arab Republic.

“Armed conflict is the leading cause of hunger and undernutrition in many of these countries,” says president of Welthungerlife, a German non government aid agency. “Zero hunger will only be possible is we significantly increase political commitments to conflict resolution and prevention.” 

The 2016 report ranks 118 countries in the developing world, almost half of which have “serious” or “alarming” hunger levels. The GHI scores for the developing world as a whole is 21.3, which falls in the low end of the “serious” category. 

by Gaynor Selby