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Why Does Hunger Persist?

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‘Hunger…is intolerable in the modern world…because it is unnecessary and unwarranted’ (Dreze and Sen, 1989 cited in Watts, 2009: 240), yet between 2014 and 2016 it was estimated that one in nine people were thought to be suffering from hunger globally (FAO, 2015 cited in World Hunger, 2016). This forces us to ask why. Why, in a world where hunger is not necessary, does hunger persist? This essay aims to provide an answer to this question, and to begin, I must establish a definition of what hunger is. Hunger can be understood as a state wherein individuals cannot consume sufficient food to sustain themselves (Watts, 2009), due to persistent food insecurity (United Nations, 2015). Food security was originally defined as the continuous ‘availability’ of world food supplies (United Nations, 1975), hence suggesting that the reason for hunger’s persistence is an unavailability of food. However, a study by Evans (1998, cited in Runge et al., 2003) suggested that there is plenty of food available globally – enough for every person to consume 2,700 calories per day; this forced the term ‘food security’ to be redefined. More recent definitions do not refer to the ‘availability’ of food, rather they emphasise the importance of ‘physical, social and economic access’ to food (FAO, 2001: n.p.), hence it is apparent that hunger’s persistence is not so much an issue of availability but of accessibility (Runge et al., 2003). Countries and individuals can struggle to access available food supplies for a variety of reasons, some of which will be interrogated in this essay to help explain hunger’s persistence. Firstly, I will explore how poverty, at both community and national scales, has prevented economic access to food, allowing hunger to persist (Von Braun et al., 1992; Patel, 2009). Then I will interrogate how inputs of foreign aid, despite their good intentions, can exacerbate the issue of hunger, allowing it to persist (Glennie, 2010). And finally, I will look at how wars and conflict, which are sometimes implications of aid-giving, can increase the incidence of hunger within a country (Brautigam and Knack, 2004). Altogether, this essay aims to answer the question ‘Why does hunger persist?’. Shaw argues that poverty is the first cause of hunger (2007, cited in Saad, 2013). Economic inequality at the community level has skewed the accessibility of food in favour of the wealthiest households (Patel, 2009). Patel (2009: 667) explains that ‘the modern food system has been architected by a handful of privileged people’, whereby the wealthiest people push up the prices of food to the extent that the poorest households can no longer afford access to this supply (Von Braun et al., 1992; Gonzalez, 2010). This exclusion of the

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poorest households from food acquisition networks sets up a hunger trap, wherein poverty and hunger are inextricably interlinked. Within this trap are the poor, who lack the income to buy sufficient quantities of food. This lack of food makes individuals more susceptible to illness, which, as Runge et al. (2003) explain, cripples their capacity to work and earn money. As a result, these individuals lack the funds to afford access to food, and so the cycle continues, trapping them in a state of constant hunger and poverty. Economist Jeffrey Sachs (2005) proposed that this trap is escapable via a ladder of development, however, this idea is countered by Unwin (2007: 942), who argues that the ladder is unclimbable for the poorest people because the rich continually ‘kick away various rungs’ as a means of maintaining their dominant power relations with the poor. With many households around the world ensnared in this trap, it is apparent that the hungry are primarily the poor (Hunger, 1992 cited in Watts and Bohle, 1993), and since this trap is inescapable (Unwin, 2007), hunger persists. As well as being ensnared in a hunger and poverty trap, the poorest households around the world tend also to be those with the highest fertility rates (Runge et al., 2003), with 97 percent of projected population growth expected to occur in these households (Walker, 2016). It is these, the poorest and most hungry families, who have the most children as a means of compensating for the likely child mortality their family will endure (OIPA, 2014). However, both Runge et al. (2003) and Walker (2016) explain that these households are the least equipped to absorb this growth, because they have the fewest resources to meet the needs of the expanding family. A study carried out by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (2006) found that having more children often equates to lower parental income, yet in these large families there are more mouths to feed; this means that these growing households can afford even less food per capita, hence exacerbating this issue of the inaccessibility of food. Devereux (2001: 246) explains that this poverty, which is concentrated in those households with the highest fertility rate, will continually prevent poor households from acquiring food, ‘irrespective of food availability’, because the food is economically inaccessible. So, so long as poverty exists, hunger too will persist. Just as poverty is seen to make food supplies inaccessible at the household level, so too does it prevent access at the national level (Von Braun et al., 1992). Most nations tend to have a hybrid food supply, sourcing both domestically produced food and importing surpluses from other regions through world food markets. This way, when local harvests are inadequate,

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food ‘shortages in one region can be made up by surpluses in another through trade’ (Ehrlich et al., 1993: 2-3). This ensures food security, as world markets are relatively consistent (Saad, 2013). However, poor countries often fluctuate in their capacity to access this market. This capacity ‘is a function of world food prices and foreign exchange availability’ (Von Braun et al., 1992: 8); if world food prices soar, a poor nation will be incapable of affording access to the market, resulting in a loss of this ‘consistent’ food source. As a result, these nations must rely solely on their own food production, and, with no imported supply of food to act as a safety net, these countries become highly vulnerable to environmental threats and crop failures (Ehrlich et al., 1993). In Bangladesh, for example, extreme monsoon rainfall combined with intense deforestation has seen excessive flooding throughout the country for many years, annually killing and contaminating young rice plants (Runge et al., 2003). These yearly floods wind up putting immense pressure on the environment and result in food shortages throughout the country, leaving many individuals hungry. Here, nature is limiting the availability of harvestable crops within the country, and poverty is preventing the country’s citizens from accessing the world food market, meaning both a localised lack of availability of food and a global-scale issue of lack of access to food, are allowing hunger to persist in poor nations such as Bangladesh (Von Braun et al., 1992). With the intention of providing the resources required to replace lost entitlements in such poor countries, aid programs are often set up (Edkins, 2000). This is because, although most national governments recognise that it is a fundamental human right to have access to adequate food and be free from hunger (WFS, 1996; Moore et al., 2014), many countries require international assistance in the form of aid to provide the economic strength to realise this right (Hossain, 2017). Foreign aid tends either to be channelled into financial aid programmes, which finance public investments; or food aid banks, which distribute food (Sachs, 2005). Although such development projects have good intentions, hoping to improve social justice in poor and politically weak countries, research suggests that instead they frequently create more injustice, and hence more hunger (Brautigam and Knack, 2004; Djankov et al., 2008; Glennie, 2010). Research by Riddell (2007), for instance, suggests that in reality it is very probable that aid might have an adverse impact on the recipient; Riddell proposes that aid has the potential to deepen poverty by means of ‘induc[ing] a rise in the exchange rate’ (2007: 176). This is formally known as the ‘Dutch disease effect’ (The

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Economist, 1977), whereby the inflow of foreign aid strengthens the recipient country’s economy relative to other nation’s currencies. This makes the aid recipient country’s exports more expensive for other countries to buy, hence creating difficulties in export expansion (Riddell, 2007). As a result, the input of aid into the country can be seen to limit rather than enhance wealth creation, making the country even poorer and more incapable of accessing food supplies from overseas. Therefore, large inputs of financial aid can be a reason for hunger’s persistence, instead of ending this suffering as intended. Food aid can be seen to increase the persistence of hunger too. Research carried out by Maren, for example, suggests that disputes between different groups over who had control over the large amount of food aid Somalia was receiving, led to the outbreak of civil war in 1991 (1997, cited in Djankov et al., 2008). This highlights that official aid can actively harm its recipients (Glennie, 2010), in this case by inducing conflict and violence; in turn, this can lead to deeper and more widespread poverty and hunger, despite the positive aid-giving intentions. De Waal (2015), for example, found that armed conflicts tend to disrupt food and transport systems in such a way that supplies are no longer distributed throughout the country. This can be both an indirect consequence of the conflict, where transport infrastructure is incidentally damaged and rendered unusable; or an intentional method of attack, whereby combatants use hunger as a weapon to weaken their enemy (Hossain, 2017), deliberately cutting off food supplies to starve the enemy into submission (ECSP, 2001). Either way, such a disruption to food networks forces households either to become self-sufficient, or else they will become hungry, as was the case for many families during Mozambique’s civil war (Green and Mavie, 1994 cited in ECSP, 2001). Alongside this issue of physical access to food in conflict zones is the issue of economic access (Arezki and Bruckner, 2011). During times of war and conflict, localised economic inflation is common, especially within the food economy. This is because the conflict will have seen a decrease in the economic and agricultural productivity of the region, with many farmers now involved in the conflict instead of agricultural production (Wiesmann et al., 2006). The World Bank (2010) found this to be the case in Darfur, where the food prices increased rapidly following the outbreak of violence in 2003. This low supply is met with a high demand for food, which creates a competitive market in these polarized regions, hence this rise in food prices (Trostle, 2008). This excludes the poorest citizens from accessing food

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supplies in conflict zones, which, as explained earlier, generates an economic injustice, whereby wealth inequalities determine who is fed and who goes hungry. Overall, it is apparent that there is a positive feedback loop between hunger and war, whereby hunger ‘both results from and contributes to repeated rounds of armed conflict’ (FAO, 2016: n.p., quoted in Walker, 2016: 984). It is through ineffective aid giving that hunger can contribute to conflict (Brautigam and Knack, 2004; Glennie, 2010), and through a variety of disruptions to physical and economic food access initiated by conflict that hunger can result from it (de Waal, 2015). So, it is apparent that both aid and war are two factors which allow hunger to persist. In summary, this essay has explored a range of reasons for hunger’s persistence throughout the world today. Having established that hunger persists despite a sufficient supply of food being available to feed the world’s population (Devereux, 2001), it became apparent that hunger’s persistence is due to limitations in the accessibility rather than the availability of food supplies (Runge et al., 2003). By interrogating a range of academic literature surrounding the inaccessibility of food, this essay has responded to the question, ‘Why does hunger persist?’, revealing that poverty, war, and the distribution of foreign aid are three factors central to hunger’s persistence.

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Reference List: Arezki, R. and Bruckner, M. (2011) Food Prices and Political Instability, [e-book] Washington, International Monetary Fund. Available at: [Accessed 8 April 2018]. Brautigam, D. A., and Knack, S. (2004) Foreign Aid, Institutions and Governance in SubSaharan Africa, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52(2): 255-285. De Waal, A. (2015) Armed conflict and the challenge of hunger: Is an end in sight?, in 2015 Global Hunger Index: Armed conflict and the challenge of hunger, Washington, International Food Policy Research Institute: 22-29. Devereux, S. (2001) Sen's Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-critiques, Oxford Development Studies, 29(3): 245-263. Djankov, S., Montalvo, J. G. and Reynal-Querol, M. (2008) The Curse of Aid, Journal of Economic Growth, 13(3): 169-194. Edkins, J. (2000) Whose Hunger?: Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid , [e-book] Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Available at: [Accessed 7 April 2018]. Ehrlich, P. R., Ehrlich, A. H. and Daily, G. C. (1993) Food Security, Population and Environment, Population and Development Review, 19(1): 1-32. Environmental Change and Security Project (2001) Environmental Change and Security Project Report 7: Conflict: A Cause and Effect of Hunger, Washington, The Woodrow Wilson Centre. Food and Agriculture Organisation (2001) The Sate of Food Insecurity in the World, Rome, Food and Agriculture Organisation. Glennie, J. (2010) The Trouble with Aid: why less could mean more for Africa, [e-book] London, Zed Books Ltd. Available at: [Accessed 15 March 2018].

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Gonzalez, C. G. (2010) The Global Food Crisis: Law, Policy and the Elusive Quest for Justice, Yale Human Rights and Development, 14(1): 462-479. Hossain, N. (2017) Inequality, Hunger, and Malnutrition: Power matters, in 2017 Global Hunger Index: The inequalities of hunger, Washington, International Food Policy Research Institute: 24-29. Institute for Social and Economic Research (2006) The Economic Position of Large Families, Leeds, Corporate Document Services. Moore, F., Collins, J., and Rosset, P. (2014) World Hunger, [e-book] London, Routledge. Available at: [Accessed 8 April 2018]. Oxford Institute of Population Ageing (2014) Infant Mortality and Fertility: Population Horizons Factsheet No. 5, Oxford, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. Patel, R. (2009) Food Sovereignty, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(3): 663-706. Riddell, R. C. (2007) Does Foreign Aid Really Work?, [e-book] Oxford, Oxford University Press, Available at: [Accessed 9 March 2018]. Runge C. F., Senauer B., Pardey P. G. and Rosegrant M. W. (2003) Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Food Security and Globalization, [e-book] London, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Available at: [Accessed 30 March 2018]. Saad, M. B. (2013), The Global Hunger Crisis: Tackling Food Insecurity in Developing Countries, [e-book] London, Pluto Press. Available through: University of Exeter Library [Accessed 8 April 2018]. Sachs, J. (2005) The End of Poverty: How we can make it happen in our lifetime, London, Penguin books. The Economist (1977) The Dutch Disease, The Economist, 26th November: 82-83. Trostle, R. (2008) Global Agricultural Supply and Demand: Factors Contributing to the Recent Increase in Food Commodity Prices, [e-book] Washington, United States Department of Agriculture, Available at: [Accessed 7 March 2018]. United Nations (1975) Report of the World Food Conference, New York, United Nations.

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[Accessed 7 April 2018]. Unwin, T. (2007) No End to Poverty, The Journal of Development Studies, 43(5): 929-953. Von Braun, J., Bouis, H., Kumar, S. and Pandya-Lorch, R. (1992) Improving Food Security of the Poor: Concept, Policy, and Programs, [e-book] Washington, International Food Policy Research Institute. Available at: [Accessed 8 April 2018]. Walker, R. J. (2016) Population Growth and its Implications for Global Security, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 75(4): 980-1004. Watts, M. F. (2009) Famine, in Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G., Watts, M. J. and Whatmore, S., eds. The Dictionary of Human Geography. Malden, Massachusetts, WileyBlackwell: 240. Watts, M. J. and Bohle, H. G. (1993) Hunger, Famine and the Space of Vulnerability, GeoJournal, 30(2): 117-125. Wiesmann, D., Weingartner, L. and Schoninger, I. (2006) The Challenge of Hunger: Global Hunger Index: Facts, determinants and trends, [e-book], Washington, International Food Policy Research Institute. Available at: [Accessed 9 April 2018]. World Bank (2010) World Development Report 2011: Food Insecurity and Conflict: Applying the WDR Framework, Washington, World Bank. World Food Summit (1996) Rome Declaration on World Food Security. [online] Available at: [Accessed 9 April 2018]. World Hunger (2016) World Hunger News: World Hunger, Poverty Facts, Statistics 2016. [online] Available at: [Accessed 9 April 2018]....