by Adele A. Wilby at 3 Quarks Daily: Many decades ago, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity of living in India for several years. I was enthralled by that country: its cultural richness; the environment; the food, but most of all the friendliness and warm hospitality of its diverse people. There were, of course, issues that confounded me and stark contradictions stared back at me from many directions, but of particular concern was the scale of the poverty amongst vast sections of the population, an issue that visited me at home frequently. A small begging community gathered regularly at my front gate, hungry and calling out for food. As my knowledge of the Indian social structure deepened, I came to understand that these people belonged to the most oppressed castes in Indian society and not only they, but a multitude of others were living in poverty, and with hunger.
Jean-Martin Bauer’s book The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the 21st Century addresses those very issues of social oppression and politics also that create the condition of hunger for millions of people across the globe. He is well placed to author such a book. With twenty years of experience with the United Nations World Food Programme and now Country Director of the programme in Haiti, Bauer brings to the book a wealth of experience in humanitarian work to alleviate hunger in West Africa, Syria, Iraq and Central Africa, and now in his home country of Haiti.
Bauer tells us that fewer people than ever starve in the world today thanks to technological progress and the creation of systems to bring food aid to people. Indeed, at the turn of the 21st century the success in winning the battle against hunger was so encouraging the world’s governments publicly committed to eliminating hunger by 2030. That aspirational deadline however appears to have been kicked into the grass as tragically in 2023 it is estimated that 250 million people still faced acute hunger, double the number in 2020.
Acute hunger, Bauer tells us, refers to such a lack of food that it is life threatening. Given the recent outbreak of conflict in the Middle East and northern Africa, we must assume that the 2023 numbers have increased significantly. On the other hand, chronic hunger occurs when there is not nearly enough food for the person to thrive, and it affects 700 million people. For young children in particular, long-term hunger has devastating effects: it leads to stunted growth and impacts on the healthy development of the brain resulting in irreparable cognitive defects, putting the children on the backfoot before their lives have barely started. The figures documenting the numbers of hungry people in the world are even more tragic when, Bauer tells us, ‘There is plenty of food in the world to feed everyone’.
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