Hunger - Politics of Hunger

Politics of Hunger

After World War II, a new international politico-economic order came into being, which was later described as Embedded liberalism. For at least the first decade after the war, the United States, by far the period's most dominant national actor, was strongly supportive of efforts to tackle world hunger and to promote international development. It heavily funded the United Nation's development programmes, and later the efforts of other multilateral organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). Following the successful reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the IMF and WB began to turn their attention to the developing world. A great many civil society actors were also active in trying to combat hunger, especially after the late 1970s when global media began to bring the plight of starving people in places like Ethiopia to wider attention. Most significant of all, especially in the late 1960s and 70s, there was the Green revolution which saw improved agricultural technology propagated throughout the world.

The United States of America began to change its approach to the problem of world hunger from about the mid 1950s. Influential members of the administration became less enthusiastic about methods which they saw as promoting an over reliance on the state, as they feared that might assist the spread of communism. By the 1980s, the previous consensus in favour of moderate government intervention had been displaced across the western world. The IMF and World Bank in particular began promoting market based solutions; in cases where countries became dependent on their finance, they sometimes forced national governments to prioritise debt repayments, and to sharply cut public services which sometimes had a negative effect on efforts to combat hunger. Organizations such as Food First raised the issue of food sovereignty and claimed that every country on earth (with the possible minor exceptions of some city-states) has sufficient agricultural capacity to feed its own people, but that the "free trade" economic order, which from the late 1970s to about 2008 had been associated with such institutions as the IMF and World Bank, had prevented this from happening. The World Bank itself had claimed to be part of the solution to hunger, asserting that the best way for countries to succeed in breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger was to build export-led economies that will give them the financial means to buy foodstuffs on the world market. However, in the early 21st century the World Bank and IMF became less dogmatic about promoting free market reforms. They increasingly returned to the view that government intervention does have a role to play, and that it can be advisable for governments to support food security with policies favourable to domestic agriculture, even for countries that don't have a Comparitive advantage in that area. As of 2012, the World Bank remains active in helping governments to intervene against hunger.

Amartya Sen won his 1998 Nobel Prize in part for his work in demonstrating that hunger in modern times was not typically the product of a lack of food; rather, hunger usually arose from problems in food distribution networks or from governmental policies in the developing world.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "850 million people worldwide were undernourished in 1999 to 2005" and the number of hungry people has recently been increasing widely.

In 2007 and 2008, rapidly increasing food prices caused a global food crisis, increasing the numbers suffering from hunger by over a hundred million. Food riots erupted in several dozen countries; in at least two cases, Haiti and Madagascar, this led to governments being toppled. A second global food crisis occurred due to the spike in food prices of late 2010 and early 2011. Less food riots occurred due in part to greater stock piles of food being available for relief; however several analysts have argued it was one of the causes of the Arab Spring.