Revised hunger estimates accelerate apparent progress towards the MDG hunger target
Section snippets
Introduction: the challenge of measuring world hunger
The global community, principally via the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has for several decades measured and tracked world hunger. Hunger is most commonly defined as energy insufficiency (measured in kilocalories) rather than micronutrient insufficiency (e.g. of iron, zinc, Vitamin A or even essential amino acids).
It is in the interest of the global community that these data be as accurate, consistent, reproducible, transparent and scientifically defendable as
From the 1974 World Food Conference to the millennium development hunger goal
In recent decades there have been three major global hunger targets, set in 1974, 1996 and 2000. The 1974 summit sought, optimistically, to eradicate hunger in the world within a decade (Anonymous, 1996, Shaw and Clay, 1998). At the 1996 WFS representatives from 186 countries, many of whom were national leaders, set a target that was considerably less ambitious than in 1974. This was to halve the number of hungry people in the world in 1990–1992 (n.b. not restricted to developing countries)
From the MDG summit to 2015
While the SOFI reports are the best-known and most authoritative source of global hunger data, the US Department of Agriculture also collects and publishes estimates of global hunger data, using a different method (Barrett, 2010). In 2014 the USDA reported that it expected the population of “food-insecure” people is projected to fall from 539 million in 2013 to 490 million in 2014. It defined this as the consumption of less than roughly 2100 cal per day per person (Rosen et al., 2014). However,
Discussion
The MDGs, including the hunger target, are a matter of considerable global interest, particularly as the end of 2015 is now so close. The main purpose of this paper is not to document the minutiae of FAO hunger data for their own sake, nor to critique the new hunger methodology (which may well be an improvement, though time will tell), but to explain, first, how the transformation of the 1996 WFS hunger target to MDG 1c made for a more attainable goal, and secondly, how the revised data since
Conclusion
The redefinition of hunger used by the FAO since 2011 has made progress towards the MDG target appear better than was the case in the years leading to 2011. This progress has been widely reported, even celebrated. The official UN website currently states that “the hunger reduction target should be almost met by 2015” (UN, 2014).
There are two reasons for this apparent success. The first is better understood; it is the re-definition of hunger since SOFI 2011, which has led to a downward trend in
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, Future Fellowship grant FTI00I00125, “Health and sustainability: Australia in a global context”.
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