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| Business is brisk at a farm produce market in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on Thursday. (Source: China Daily File Photo/DUO DUO) |
By Feng Zhaokui
BEIJING, April 23 -- A lingering drought in a number of areas in grain-abundant Southeast Asian countries and China's southwestern regions in recent months has renewed worries over global food security.
The number of people facing food shortages worldwide reached 1.02 billion last year, the first time it crossed the 1 billion mark since 1970, when a record number of people faced hunger, statistics have shown.
The latest figure was also 100 million more than the previous year and accounted for about one-sixth of the world's population. The increasing number of people facing hunger has raised serious questions about the supply of grain available for feeding a growing global population in the coming decades.
Theoretically, current world grain output is sufficient to feed the global population. The global output of grain amounted to 2.35 billion tons in 2007, which would mean that the per capita output is 0.23 tons a year if distributed to the world's 6.75-billion-strong population, excluding the output of bean and tuber crops. The nearly 1-kilogram per capita daily grain supply should be enough to provide for one person.
But the biggest problem is the uneven distribution of grain supply among countries and regions, with a number of areas with insufficient grain. In some East African nations, it is very common for people to have only one or two meals a day. Their average food intake account for only one-quarter to one-tenth of the grain consumed by people in developed countries in the West. Due to the hikes in grain prices in the past few years, hunger-driven unrests have occasionally erupted in some famine-hit nations, from Cote d'Ivoire in Africa to Haiti in Latin America.
The possession of redundant grain by a number of countries has added to grain shortages in others. In North America, the per capita grain consumption exceeds three kilograms a day, given that meat dominates the daily diet of its people. Statistics show that the production of 1 kilogram of pork, meat, chicken, and eggs needs more than 11, 7, 4 and 3 kilograms of grain, respectively.
A survey published by the Trust for America's Health and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2009, both non-profit organizations, indicate that adults who are overweight or obese in the United States account for 66 percent of the same-age population - contributing to the fact that the number of obese people in the world has exceeded that of hungry people.
There are also people who are enduring hunger in the US and other wealthy countries, but the overwhelming majority of the world's hungry are mainly distributed in developing nations, mostly in Asia-Pacific countries and the African continent. Hunger-stricken people in Asia-Pacific nations reached 642 million last year and the figure in African countries south of the Sahara Desert amounted to 265 million.
Everyone in the world would have enough food to eat if developed countries offer adequate agricultural, technological and funding assistance to less developed nations facing hunger.
Since the 1990s, developed countries' agricultural assistance to developing ones dropped by 75 percent, statistics show. At the World Food Summit in Rome in November last year, no heads of the G8 group of industrialized countries except for the Italian prime minister, whose country was hosting the event, were present.
At the summit, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged donors to help the 1 billion people on the planet who do not have enough to eat. He highlighted the plight of children, saying that more than 17,000 children die of starvation every day. That is one every five seconds and 6 million children a year, he said in his opening remarks to the conference. "This is no longer acceptable. We must act."
Ban said he observed a 24-hour fast to show his solidarity with a billion hungry people worldwide ahead of the event. The observance of a one-day hunger strike prior to the summit highlighted the UN secretary-general's serious concerns about world food safety.
A growth rate of the world population that is faster than global grain growth is also expected to aggravate a worldwide food shortage. From 1996 to 2006, the growth of the world population recorded an annual rate of 13.6 percent, compared with the 12.2 percent rate of world grain growth from 1997 to 2007. It is estimated that an additional 70 percent of current global grain production is needed by 2050 to feed the expected 9.1 billion worldwide population by that time.
