LONDON – Food security is the sine qua non of human existence. Without food nothing happens, no economic endeavor, no science or engineering, no music or literature, not even, in a year of famine, procreation.

Since 1974, the year of the Henry Kissinger-sponsored World Food Conference, called at a time of catastrophic food shortages, there has been immense progress on the journey towards providing food for all, even though the world remains a long way from fulfilling the great ambition of the conference’s final declaration that “within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition.”

Hundreds of millions of people who were suffering from malnutrition in the 1970s are now eating two square meals a day despite the rapid onward march of population growth. Yet rightly last week the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization signaled a major alert: for the first time in many years, it said, the numbers of hungry are beginning to rise again. In some countries- in Africa in particular but also most worryingly in India, a country which hitherto has made phenomenal progress in feeding its people- the numbers of hungry are going up. Even in China where the numbers keep falling the rate of improvement has slowed. 

The FAO latest estimate is that there are around 798 million malnourished people in the world. In the most recent four years for which figures are available (1997 to 2001) the number of hungry has increased by 19 million, wiping out almost half of the decrease of 37 million achieved in the five years previous to that.

These incremental changes are not big in themselves and putting on one side for a moment these absolute numbers it is important to underline that in percentage terms of the world’s population as a whole the hungry are a decreasing part- a crucial point that the FAO fails to point up. Nevertheless, in the view of many experts this report could be a warning sign of worse to come. Professor Neelambar Hatti of the University of Lund in Sweden, an Indian-born development economist, says, “In India you have increased salinisation from botched large scale irrigation projects, together with many years of poor monsoons, and in Africa you have recurrent drought, more serious than previous decades. Add to that the effect of AIDS depleting farming families, and there is the explanation.”

Has the tide in the fight against world hunger turned? Are we going backwards after nearly 30 years of forward momentum? Nobody can be really sure. The FAO’s figures are already out of date. India recently has had a good monsoon and its economy is strengthening on all fronts. The Congo, whose precipitous decline has skewed the sub-Saharan African figure, is slowly beginning a recovery from the mayhem of years of continuous warfare, now hopefully in abeyance.

But even if there is once again some improvement underway the battle to overcome hunger is far from within sight of being won. The promises of 1974 look ludicrously optimistic in hindsight, even though they were based on good science and no expert at the time questioned their achievability.

Poverty remains widespread and poverty remains the principle reason why under-nutrition persists. In the majority of the poorer countries increasing food production remains the quickest and most satisfactory way of diminishing poverty since the majority of poor depend primarily on agriculture for both employment and income.

Rapid economic growth, a growing openness to international trade, an end to agricultural subsidies in the developed countries, a quickening of the application of the fruits of biotechnology (whatever too many of the “Greens” say), progress in combating AIDS and the improvement anti-drought measures in southern Africa are all important factors in upping food production. But I would single out two important but underrated and under mentioned items- land reform and the role of women.

Land reform is politically hard- look how it is resisted in countries like India, the Philippines and Brazil, all countries with masses of poor people and a badly skewed ownership of land and resources. Yet the great post war land reforms of Japan and Taiwan were two of the main reasons for these countries’ phenomenal economic progress. (The first was decreed by the American occupiers; the second by the rightist nationalist government of the fleeing mainlanders led by Chiang Kai-shek.)

In Africa in particular women are expected to grow the food crops. Women now produce three quarter’s of sub-Saharan Africa’s food. However, ninety percent of the time new technology, training and credit are targeted on men. Where are the female extension agents to advise the women farmers on new techniques? Where are the women micro bankers to offer them small but vital loans? Empowering the women farmers of Africa with knowledge and finance (and water) is probably the only measure that could turn the hungry continent round.