John Agyekum Kufuor serving schoolchildren

Fourteen out of every 100 people on this planet live hungry while the world is headed towards a population of over nine billion in less than 40 years. This makes food security, or the lack of it, one of the toughest challenges for policymakers and scientists everywhere. “Hunger is the worst weapon of mass destruction in the world which does not kill soldiers, but innocent children,” said Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president of Brazil, in October. “The fight against hunger is the state’s responsibility, and therefore requires integrated social policies, combined with a schedule of income distribution and sustainable economic development.... Put the fight against food insecurity at the top of government priorities and create a public policy to stop this fight,” da Silva told an audience of thousands from around the world that had come together at Des Moines, Iowa for the 2011 Norman E. Borlaug International Symposium in October earlier this year. The symposium brought together policymakers, agronomists, activists, corporate leaders, scientists and journalists from over a hundred countries to discuss the scourge of food insecurity — with an emphasis on the famine caused by drought in the Horn of Africa — and find possible ways to overcome it.

The former president of Brazil received the prestigious $2,50,000 World Food Prize at the Iowa State Capitol on October 13, along with the former Ghana president, John Agyekum Kufuor, for vastly reducing hunger and poverty in their countries over the past decade. Six of the 25 World Food Prizes have come to India, but that is little consolation when one out of every 10 of the world’s hungry lives in this country, around 60 per cent of them being women.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, over a third of the 92.5 crore people on this planet who do not have enough to eat reside in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Unicef points out that more than 50 lakh children below the age of five die each year in developing nations and five out of every 10 underweight children live in South Asia alone. The Indian agriculture scientist, M.S. Swaminathan, who received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987 for introducing high-yielding wheat and rice varieties that started India’s Green Revolution, harped on the “utmost need” for “political will” to fight hunger. “The utmost need for political will in this regard cannot be overemphasised. That is what India needs. The lack of food security is a concern that needs to be addressed as top priority in our country,” Swaminathan told The Telegraph on the sidelines of the award ceremony.

This year’s global hunger index, developed by the Washington DC-based International Food Policy Research Institute, says that global hunger remains at a “serious” level. India has ranked 67th, two ranks below that of last year, in the index as one of the most hungry nations, eight ranks below Pakistan and only three ranks above Bangladesh. The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale — from the “no hunger” score of 0 to the “most hunger” of 100 — combining three indicators: the undernourished as a percentage of the population, the proportion of underweight children below the age of five and the mortality rate of children under five. Values between 20 and 29.9 are “alarming”. That is where India stands, with a score of 23.7.

While the Indian government is trying to project concern for the hungry through the proposed national food security bill, it does not even have updated data on under-nutrition since 2005. Bangladesh does nutrition surveys every three years and Pakistan released updated data earlier this year. India has only got figures from the national family health survey released six years ago. “The data used for the 2011 index are for the period between 2004 and 2009, the most recent available global data for the three components. Since India’s data post 2005 is not available, its position in the index does not reflect the real picture, which could actually be worse,” said an IFPRI source.

According to Tom Arnold, the chief executive officer of Concern Worldwide that partners IFPRI in bringing out the index, the “root cause” of hunger is that we have “taken our eyes off the ball”. “Food security demands greater investments in agriculture,” said Arnold. Though India ranks second worldwide in farm output, slow agricultural growth is a problem area for policymakers, according to the World Bank’s India Country Overview.

“Current agricultural practices are neither economically nor environmentally sustainable and India’s yields for many agricultural commodities are low,” says the World Bank in the overview. It further adds, “Poorly maintained irrigation systems and almost universal lack of good extension services are among the factors responsible. Farmers’ access to markets is hampered by poor roads, rudimentary market infrastructure, and excessive regulation.”

During the symposium, ActionAid released a report highlighting the growing impact of climate change on harvest, the spiralling resource crunch and soaring food prices, which pose a threat that could lead to a collapse of the global food system in the near future.

Other key causes of hunger, says the World Food Programme, include natural disasters, conflicts, poverty and poor agricultural infrastructure. In 2008, the global financial crisis pushed more people into hunger. “These factors have reduced the access of a larger portion of the global population to food despite sufficient production to feed everyone,” said Swaminathan.

The assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs of the United States of America, Jose Fernandez, said on the opening day of the symposium that the challenges of feeding the world are “great”. “Agricultural production systems are under pressure as never before. And this pressure will not decrease in the coming decades,” he said. The FAO estimates that a doubling of agricultural output will be needed by 2050 to feed a population of more than nine billion people. “That doubling of production will need to occur despite challenges caused by climate change…. We have an enormous task ahead of us to maintain and expand our economic growth in the agricultural sector,” said Fernandez. He, however, noted that the global community was not powerless to meet the challenge: “Through a multi-pronged approach, and efforts by governments, business, and civil society, we (the global community) are adapting to change and moving forward.”