Hunger is actually the worst weapon of mass destruction. It claims millions of victims each year
AdeRemi Medupin
Hunger begets anger
On November 8, 2021 there appeared a piece, authored by one Lydia Smith-entitled: “Hangry: Why do we get angry when we are hungry?” in which she made a report as follows: Hanger might sound like a silly term, but research suggests it is a very real phenomenon. In a 2018 study, University of North Carolina researchers found that people are more likely to be in a negative mindset when they are hungry. Through a series of tests, assistant psychology and neuroscience professor Dr Kristin Lindquist and her team put participants in slightly annoying situations, such as being faced with computer problems. The hungry participants were overtly irritated and more likely to give negative feedback later on, suggesting that hunger can increase anger in the face of frustrating experiences.
What the above report underscores is the empirical validation of the popular saying that a hungry man is an angry man. There are profound extensions of this simple but heavy-weight statement by concerned personalities about the reality, magnitude and consequences of hunger. Take the following quotable observations:
- There are people in the world who are so hungry that God can only appear to them in the form of bread—credited to Mahatma Gandhi;
- Where there is hunger there is no hope. There is only desolation and pain. Hunger nurtures violence and fanaticism. A world where people starve will never be safe—credited to Luis Lula da Silva—who, by the way, is the man to beat at the Brazilian Presidential election coming up later in the year;
- Hunger is actually the worst weapon of mass destruction. It claims millions of victims each year—credited to same source as (ii) above.
Why we get angry when we are hungry is not the focus of our discussion here because it falls outside of our professional competence; we leave that in the hands of physiologists, nutritionists, dietitians, psychologists and possibly even psychiatrists because it is a much bigger subject than many of us may imagine. In any case, some of these professionals have done extensive work on the subject of Hanger, including for example, the one reported on July 7, 2022 which highlighted the following finding: The data showed hunger was associated with 37% of changes in irritability, 34% in anger and 38% in pleasure, which suggested the emotions were caused by fluctuations in hunger. "Being hangry is real," the study reads [you may wish to visit: www.usatoday.com- for more details]
Hunger in focus
What is of direct interest to us right now is the hunger component of the equation, Hanger=Hunger + Anger. It is my sincere hope that this focus, in combination with the sub-title of the write up, will not make us stand guilty under the charge anticipated by a member of Concern, a US-based NGO-with a mission ‘to work towards zero hunger’, Kieran McConville-who, by the way, had written about ‘Economics of Hunger’ expressed the fear that: On face value, “The Economics of Hunger” seems like a fairly callous title for a piece of writing. After all, hunger is an extremely personal, physical, and individual condition. Most of us would probably equate economics with big-picture, faceless, impersonal statistics, graphs, and numbers. It needs to be pointed out that this American civil society activist reasons within the neoclassical economic paradigm where the lives of human beings are priced in monetary terms, just like other commodities. But here, we rate human life as uniquely precious far and above naira and kobo or dollar calculus.
On 26th August 1985, Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen delivered the fourth Elmhirst Lecture at the triennial meeting of the International Association of Agricultural Economists, in Malaga, Spain entitled, “Food, Economics and Entitlements”, in which, as an aside joke, he recalled how, in a letter to Knut Wicksell, dated the 26th of July 1904, Alfred Marshall complained that a newly arrived student at Cambridge had told him that "the founders of Economics of all nations were inferior in common sense to most children of ten". What a provocation from a cheeky Jambite! Actually, I invoked that joke to pre-empt any critic who may want to suggest that since yours sincerely claims to be a student of Economics, all he would be talking about concerning hunger would be nonsensical especially given the prevalent belief in the charge of “economists' tendency to use complicated ideas to tackle apparently simple problems.”
In the Lecture proper, one of the points made early concerned “the precise mechanisms for acquiring food that people have to use. People establish command over food in many altogether different ways. For example, while a peasant owning his land and the product of his labour simply owns the food produced, a wage labourer paid in cash has to convert that wage into a bundle of goods, including food, through exchange.” The problem of establishing command over commodities, in this case food, is what Amartya Sen termed, the "acquirement problem", and he sought to establish that the acquirement problem is really central to questions of hunger and starvation in the modern world. Ironically, this ‘acquirement problem’ is often neglected by economists and non-economists alike, according to Sen.
It is this neglect that led to Malthusian pessimism, based on the expectation of falling food output per head, but which has not been vindicated by history-in the face of superior and advancing technology-resulting in rising food output per head. So, if there is hunger in the land, the reason must be located outside of supply capacity constraints to more structural societal realities, manifested in inaction and misdirection of public policy. We can close our comment on this point by recalling the instructive observation by Jean Ziegler that: World agriculture could easily feed 12 billion people. That means a child who dies from hunger is a murdered child. Some food for thought there.
Global concern about hunger
Looking at the state of play globally and nationally with respect to the issue of hunger, and setting aside instances of conflict and accompanying insecurity, what we see is that the world food output per head has steadily risen. “This has, however, gone hand in hand with intensification of hunger in some parts of the world”, as Amartya Sen pointed out in his lecture. What a paradox.
According to the UN, after decades of steady decline, the number of people who suffer from hunger – as measured by the prevalence of undernourishment – began to slowly increase again in 2015. Current estimates show that nearly 690 million people are hungry, or 8.9 percent of the world population – up by 10 million people in one year and by nearly 60 million in five years. According to the World Food Programme, 135 million suffer from acute hunger largely due to man-made conflicts, climate change and economic downturns. The COVID-19 pandemic could now double that number, putting an additional 130 million people at risk of suffering acute hunger by the end of 2020. In 2015, the UN estimated that it would cost $267 billion (roughly 0.3% of the global GDP) each year to end hunger by 2030.
By the analysis of Africa Renewal (May 20, 2022), Africa has been particularly vulnerable: about 21% of people on the continent suffered from hunger in 2020, a total of 282 million people. Between 2019 and 2020, in the aftermath of the pandemic, 46 million people became hungry in Africa. No other region on the world presents a higher share of its population suffering from food insecurity. Also, African households spend a large share of their income on food. According to a recent note in the Financial Times, citing estimates from the IMF, food represents 17% of expenditure in advanced economies, in sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 40%. Currently, nearly 10 million children under five years old are acutely malnourished across West Africa and it is feared that “a hunger crisis is looming for 31 million people” in the sub-region.
Hunger in Nigeria
In Nigeria, and as acknowledged by Wikipedia, hunger is one of the major issues that affect the citizens. The country is the most populous nation in Africa; a home for more than 206 million people. Sadly, 40% (82 million people) of the country lives below the International Poverty Line of $1.90 daily, whilst another 25% are vulnerable. It was ranked second poorest in food affordability globally by the Institute of Development Studies, United Kingdom. In 2020, 7.9 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance in Nigeria, yet more than a million people remained beyond the reach of humanitarian actors because they live in areas controlled by armed groups. A report issued by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation had on March 11, 2022 projected that about 19.4 million people will face food insecurity across Nigeria between June and August 2022,
Based on Nigeria Hunger Statistics [accessed at: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NGA/nigeria/hunger-statistics]:
- Nigeria hunger statistics for 2019 was 14.60%, a 3.9% increase from 2018.
- Nigeria hunger statistics for 2018 was 10.70%, a 0.7% increase from 2017.
- Nigeria hunger statistics for 2017 was 10.00%, a 0.6% increase from 2016.
- Nigeria hunger statistics for 2016 was 9.40%, a 0.2% increase from 2015.
Nigeria has the second highest burden of stunted children in the world, with a national prevalence rate of 32 percent of children under five. An estimated 2 million children in Nigeria suffer from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), but only two out of every 10 children affected is currently reached with treatment. In the 2021 Global Hunger Index, Nigeria ranked 103rd out of the 116 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2021 GHI scores. With a score of 28.3, Nigeria has a level of hunger that is serious.
GHI Severity Scale
|
≤9.9 Low |
10.0-19.9 Moderate |
20.0-34.9 Serious |
35.0-49.9 Alarming |
≥50.0 Extremely Alarming |
The GHI score incorporates four component indicators: undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality. It is designed to raise awareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger, provide a way to compare levels of hunger between countries and regions, and call attention to those areas of the world where hunger levels are highest and where the need for additional efforts to eliminate hunger is greatest
Explanatory factors and consequences
.United Nations agencies have noted that conflict and climate change are clear drivers of hunger, along with poor economic performance for many countries following the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The latter factor highlights the problem of unemployment which is very real and indeed daunting, compounded by widening income inequality.
As Wikipedia correctly opined, factors that contribute to the hunger over various states of Nigeria are due to insecurity, and environmental factors such as habitat destruction, economic challenges, and devastating effects of COVID-19. All these have translated to a dramatic rise in food prices.
The author of the April 10, 2021 piece, ‘Economics of Hunger’, cited earlier, has argued that, seen through a purely economic lens, the continuing prevalence of global hunger is bad for business. This is because it inhibits productivity, slows economic growth, and places unnecessary burdens on health and education systems. Using mainstream economic methodology, a team of researchers on Malawi recently “found that the national economy loses nearly $600 million every year due to the effects of child under-nutrition. That’s more than 10% of Malawi’s GDP. A key factor is that 60% of adults in Malawi today suffered from stunting as children. In short, that means their physical and cognitive development was impaired in their early years due to chronic lack of nutritious food. In many low-income countries, stunting is a massive problem”. Similar findings have been reported on Ethiopia and Sudan.
Addressing Hunger
I lend support to the position tabled on Africa Renewal platform which is that, hunger is a many-headed monster of multiple deprivations (biological, social, and economic) associated with hunger and malnutrition. In combination with other measures such as relaxing the constraints faced by small scale farmers, there must be the appreciation of the fact that hunger and famine do not only occur when there is less food but when certain groups of society cannot access food, even if food is available. Which is to emphasize the primacy of access, as Amartya Sen often argued that, “issues of hunger, starvation and malnutrition go well beyond food systems and depend on social arrangements (including the markets for food and labour, for instance), the economy, and the functioning of the state and governments”.
Add to the foregoing, the perspective offered by Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, which is that “To avoid a significant disaster, national governments and the international community must focus on employment and income protection for those groups whose food claims have been negatively affected, via temporary jobs programmes, unemployment insurance or cash transfers. In addition, there needs to be readiness to protect the health and education of members of household under food stress to avoid long-term consequences of the food shock”.
As with all proposals on how to transform the local economy in order to optimize resource endowment usage and meet the real needs of the people, a critical ingredient necessary for actualization of ideals is focused, committed, bold and patriotic leadership backed by a citizenry insistent on accountability. I come in peace, please.
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