World's Undernourished Reaches Record Levels

Its official! In spite of all the promises made by leaders of the advanced industrial nations at the three international conferences since 1974, called to discuss the issue of hunger across the world, there are now more malnourished people on earth than at any time in history! Moreover, some 36 million people are now estimated to die from hunger, directly or indirectly, every year.

According to a new United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003, across the planet 842 million are malnourished and the figure is growing by 5 million per year. This includes 10 million in the industrialized countries, 34 million in countries in transition and 798 million in developing countries. The report says the new figures “signal a setback in the war on hunger and make previous pledges to address the problem “increasingly remote”

According to SOFI2003, only 19 countries successfully reduced the number of undernourished during the 1990s. “In these successful countries, the total number of hungry people fell by over 80 million”. At the bottom of the table are some 26 countries, where the number of undernourished people increased by 60 million during that same period, including countries in transition, where those suffering from hunger climbed from 25 million in the mid-1990s to 34 million at beginning of this century

Twenty-two countries, inclusive of Bangladesh, Haiti and Mozambique, succeeded in addressing the problem of hunger. In these countries, the report states, “the number of undernourished declined during the second half of the decade after rising through the first five years” But in 17 other countries, “the trend shifted in the opposite direction and the number of undernourished people, which had been falling, began to rise. This group includes a number of countries with large populations, including India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Sudan”.

The report also cites a number of countries in Central and West Africa which saw their numbers of hungry rise due to war.

In a number of ‘successful’ countries, including China, progress slowed after impressive gains in reducing hunger had been made in the early 1990s. The report says that having reduced chronic under-nourishment to modest or low levels, “these countries can no longer be expected to propel progress for the developing world”.

Referring to the last World Food Summit’s goal of reducing the number of undernourished people by half, by 2015, Hartwig de Haen, FAO Assistant Director-General, Economic and Social Department, said: “The goal can only be reached if the recent trend of increasing numbers is reversed. The annual reductions must be accelerated to 26 million per year, more than 12 times the pace of 2.1 million per year achieved during the 1990s”. He added: “The SOFI project has provided us with many insights about hunger. Through SOFI we are learning more everyday about what works to reduce hunger and what causes increased numbers of people to suffering from under-nourishment. We are now in a position to make very specific recommendations that countries can follow to alleviate hunger and malnutrition sustainably”. Those countries who have began reducing the number of their hungry share five characteristics, concludes de Haen—faster economic growth, rapid expansion in the agricultural sector, slower population growth, lower rates of HIV infection and far fewer natural emergencies.

Whilst de Haen observes that "investment in agriculture is a precondition for growth in incomes of the poor and the food supply,” in reality such investment has been dwindling and there is little to suggest any immediate change.

And those 19 countries who have reduced the number of their hungry can hardly brag. The plain truth is that they have been fortunate not to have experienced the levels of droughts and natural disasters that have increasingly troubled other parts of the ‘Third World’ this past decade.

The influence of domestic politics on population growth is negligible, when poverty is widespread. Population growth tends to be determined largely by levels of poverty – the tendency being that the more dire your plight, the more intense your poverty, the more children you invest in to look after you when you grow old and infirm. For many poor families a large number of children are an insurance policy for old age.

And neither can poor nations address their Aids epidemics in the way the rich world can with its new drug systems, with its patents and profit quests that put essential drugs out of the reach of so many. Aids has killed over 25 million in the ‘Third World’ and in this decade it is expected to kill as many still as the numbers who died in both world wars. The undeveloped world is hit harder as it devastates agricultural communities, leaving hungry orphans.

Those countries suffering the most malnutrition are those most reliant on agriculture and many countries find they have to use land, hitherto used for crops, for cash crops such as cocoa and coffee to pay off debts. There are even instances of countries with undernourished millions producing flowers and strawberries for western markets.

The report points out how “half the higher prices received for exports went not to farmers but traders," and that “there was no increase in production in response to the higher prices". Furthermore, it says that "prices are expected to rise more steeply for food products that developing countries import than for the commodities they export.”

Little wonder that it then forecasts how “the lion's share of benefits from trade liberalisation is expected to go to developed countries."

The report reiterates the well-known statistic that the West spends 30 times more on domestic farming subsidies than it does on aid. It cites the US spending $3.9bn (£2.3bn) a year subsidising its 25,000 cotton farmers - more than the entire GDP for Burkina Faso and how Europe is now the world's second- largest exporter of sugar, despite the fact that EU sugar costs twice as much to produce as does that of Third World growers.

The report is straightforward in concluding "the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will.” In truth, in a world where profits are to be had, there are more pressing concerns than the world’s starving.

Back in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger boldly announced that within 10 years global hunger would be eradicated. There were then 400 million malnourished people on the planet and this figure was a 75 million increase over the previous decade. In 1996, a World Food Summit pledged to halve world hunger by 2015. Six years later, in June 2002, came the second World Food Summit, called to review the progress made since 1996. Here the FAO revealed there were still about 815 million hungry people in the world. One of the clearest conclusions of that Summit was that little progress had made since 1996 and that it would take until 2030 to get global hunger figures down to the levels they had been when Kissinger made his famous promise back in 1974.

So here we are, 30 years after Kissinger’s famous remark and despite vast improvements in technology and food production methods there are now more than twice as many malnourished. In reality the leaders of the large industrialised nations don’t give a shit. The USA comes instantly to mind.

At the 1974 World Food Conference, governments examining the global problem of food production and consumption, soberly proclaimed that "every man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop their physical and mental faculties". But, within a decade the US would twice tell the world what they really thought about the 1974 proclamation. In 1981 and 1983, the US voted against UN resolutions declaring access to nourishment a human right (1981: 135-1, with the US voting against and in 1983: 132-1, the US voting against). The very fact that this had to be put to a vote in the first place shows how much warped thinking abounds. Did the UN really think it necessary that a vote was needed on whether humans should have a right to food? How the hell can you consider addressing the problem of hunger if first you need a vote on whether access to food is a human right?

As any socialist will argue, not only does that right very much exist, but that we can already feed the present world population and more. Organisations like Food First (Institute for Food and Development Technology –www.foodfirst.org) are clear that the world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. “That's enough to make most people fat!” they assert. And this estimate does not take account of many other universally eaten foods—vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Indeed, if all foods are considered together, sufficient is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs. Put that on a platter in front of most people and ask term to eat it and the thought of it makes them nauseous.

“Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today,” declares Food First. They go on to point out how, in the past 35 years, increases in global food production have outstripped the world's record population growth by about 16 percent. Indeed, mountains of unsold grain on world markets have pushed prices strongly downward over the past three and a half decades. Grain prices rose briefly during the early 1990s, as bad weather coincided with policies geared toward reducing overproduction, but still remained well below the highs observed in the early sixties and mid-seventies.

Hold on! Isn’t it the case that most of the world's hungry are living in countries with food shortages - countries in Latin America, in Asia, and especially in Africa?

Hunger in the face of abundant food supplies is all the more shocking in the ‘Third World’. The FAO has previously reported that gains in food production since 1950 have kept to the fore of population increase in every region except Africa. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced in a report published in 1997 that 78% of all malnourished children under the age of five in the developing world live in countries with a food surplus.

The simple fact is that what underlies global hunger is the maxim of the present mode of production—capitalism: can’t pay can’t have. Whichever country you live in, if profits are threatened enough then governments can be found ordering the destruction of food to keep prices high and paying farmers to take land out of production.

A close look at some of the world's hunger-ravaged countries confirms that scarcity, war and poverty are not the cause of hunger – they might result in hunger, but they are the symptoms of capitalism. And in an age when the US can overnight mobilise an invasion force (and supplies) of 130,000 troops thousands of miles away, there is no logic in saying drought and natural disaster cause hunger, for if the political will was there then those ill-fated multitudes could be rescued, fed and housed in a day.

In years to come expect similar reports like this recent offering from the FAO to be just as grim, and for one reason — they believe the problem of hunger, in a world of abundance, a problem rooted in the way our society is organised for production can be solved by reforming that system, by coaxing the capitalist class into mending their ways. Thirty years of world conferences on hunger, a thousand promises by the defenders of capitalism have proved otherwise and always will until we end their system.

The Jarrow March Remembered

On September 14th, 93 year-old Con Whalen of Hadrian Rd in Jarrow, South Tyneside, the last of the original Jarrow Marchers, died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.

For 60 plus years, Con treasured the memories of the now famous march and of the solidarity he and his comrades encountered along their 291 mile route to London, even if he could dismiss the event as having achieved nothing.

Con, who last year had a beer named after him by a Jarrow Brewery – the Old Cornelius – was proud to have taken part in an event that had been the subject of numerous books and which would even feature in the National Curriculum.

Indeed, so significant is the march now that it is a poor 1930s documentary that does not show footage of the 200 strong band of thin-faced Geordies making their way to the capital to protest to Stanley Baldwin’s government the plight of the town.

The economic slump that plunged Britain and many other countries into depression was felt in fewer places harder than in Jarrow, where unemployment soared above 80 percent, where people lived in overcrowded and vermin-infested houses and where poverty was unimaginable.

In 1933, JB Priestly, having visited Jarrow, wrote about the town in his book English Journey:

“Wherever we went men were hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its people would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished.” (Penguin edition, 1977, page 296).

Not long after the publication of the English Journey, in January 1934, a delegation of 300 people from Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling travelled to Seaham to argue their case with the town’s MP and leader of the largely Conservative National Government, Ramsay McDonald.

Leading the delegation was “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, MP for Jarrow, hoping to impress upon the PM the plight of the people along the Tyne and their desperation for work.

No doubt McDonald was all too aware of the pathos of the situation and the reality of the present situation and capitalism’s inability top solve the crisis. The advice he gave the member from, Jarrow was later described by her as “sham sympathy”:

“Ellen, why don’t you go and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for this?”

The reply was cold and smacked of the same indifference a similar delegation received when they visited Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, regarding the opening of a steelworks in Jarrow. Said Runciman, “Jarrow must work out its own problems.”

Jarrow, it seemed, was indeed left to sort out its own problems. To a town whose ship industry had closed down and whose much anticipated steelworks had failed to materialise, Runciman’s words were received as icily as they had been uttered and sent a shiver down the collective spine of the borough.

At a time when the entire country seemed to be taking part in hunger marches and protest rallies, Councillor David Riley’s suggestion in July 1936 that the unemployed of Jarrow should march to London hardly seemed original or serious in light of the fact that many marches had been dismissed as “communist demonstrations.”

However, the idea was discussed at length with the town’s MP and the Jarrow Labour Party executive. Eventually it was decided that any march should be a town’s march and only to go ahead with the full support of the citizens. The town council went on to sanction the march and above the signature of the mayor went appeals for support, and this was followed by the sending out of letters requesting the use of services and halls to towns along the proposed route to London. As the pace of events hotted up, the organisation of the march was done from the town hall and under the supervision of the town clerk.

At the same time, though denied the oxygen of publicity the Jarrow march was attracting, men were marching from South Wales, Cumberland, Durham and Yorkshire, all bent on expressing their grievances against the means test and the UAB regulations, which was for the Jarrow men “a welcome sign that other men felt the same as they did and were kicking, too.” (Wilkinson, The Town that was Murdered, 1939.)

So on a cold morning, October 5th, 1936, 200 marchers set out; ahead of them representatives from the Labour and Conservative parties to arrange meetings en-route to London. Even the Inter-Hospital Socialist Society came to their assistance, sending out relays of helpers performing dentistry and medical necessities.

The marchers had hardly time to get blistered feet when their organisers were condemned by a labour party meeting in Edinburgh for “sending hungry and ill-clad men across the country on a march to London.”

Incensed, Ellen Wilkinson left the marchers and travelled to the Conference in Edinburgh in an attempt to rally support. Her efforts were in vain for the conference had more important matters to discuss, such as their attitude to the Spanish question and the rearmament issue – a time-honoured and typical response from the Labour Party to requests for help from the working class.

Neither was support to be found with the TUC, who similarly blacked the march and advised trade councils against giving help.

Wilkinson had this to say: “I went from the warm comradeship of the road to an atmosphere of official disapproval;…had the Labour Party put its powers behind the marches, sent out the call for solidarity with them, then by the time these men reached London, not only from Jarrow, but from all parts of the country, the support that would have been aroused…would have been enough to shake the complacency of the Baldwin government.” (ibid. p.204-5).

There was, however, no shortage of support and working class approval of the march. After all, 47 per cent of the industrial population of the country at that time resided in areas scheduled as “distressed” or in need of being so scheduled.

The brainwashed Trades and Labour Council at Chesterfield might have obeyed the TUC circular denouncing the march, but this did not stop the local Conservative Party from rallying to the aid of the marchers, providing hot meals and a place to sleep. The Labour Party rationalised their apathy by asserting that if they gave support to one march, then support would have been demanded by them all. This from an allegedly working class party!

Along the route to London, members of the working class and, indeed, capitalist class, were all too ready to support the march

By the time the marchers reached Leicester their boots were falling apart. In response, the Co-operative Society’s own cobblers took it upon themselves to work all through the night without pay to repair the boots of the Jarrow men, the Co-op donating the necessary material free.

One cobbler almost anticipated Socialism, saying: “Its seems sort of queer, doing your own job just because you want tot do it, and for something you want to help, instead of doing it because you’d starve if you didn’t.” (ibid. p. 297).

Elsewhere, at Leeds, a newspaper proprietor laid on free food and beer (no doubt providing his own paper with a story) and at Barnsley, Joe Jones, a miners’ leader, had the municipal baths specially opened and heated in time for the arrival of the marchers. A group of journalists, following he march, even clubbed together and purchased a dozen mouth organs in an attempt top boost the morale of the marchers.

The march continued and gained support and sympathy the entire 291 miles of its journey. The men marched between 10 and 21 miles every day and held meetings every night. After three and a half weeks on the road, they reached Marble Arch tired and rain soaked, perturbed that only a small crowd had braved the October weather to greet them.

The following day they were given permission to hold a meeting at Hyde Park. The Communist Party was already there, holding a mass demonstration to protest unemployment. Realising the Jarrow men were in the area, they suspended their rally for an hour and asked their audience to swell the Jarrow Crusade meeting.

When Parliament reassembled two days later, the men marched to the Houses of Parliament and handed in 2 petitions, one containing 68,500 signatures from towns along the Tyne. The petition presented the case for Jarrow in simple language, pointing out how Jarrow was experiencing a stage of industrial depression unprecedented in the town’s history. Shipyards had closed and the steelworks had been denied a lifeline. Once, 8,000 workers were in employment. Now the figure stood at 100, with others on temporary schemes. The petition continued:

“The town cannot be left derelict, and therefore your petitioners humbly pray that His Majesty’s Government and this honourable house will realise the urgent need that work should be provided without delay.”

As many of the marchers as possible had been crammed into to public galleries anticipating a lengthy debate, aware that many an MP had been bombarded with letters regarding the march from their constituents. But there was no debate! As Wilkinson points out:

“A few questions were asked…and the house moved on to consideration of other things.” (ibid. p.209).

The marchers took it all in their stride. Wilkinson describes them as being “rather sporting about it” and how they were afterwards entertained to tea in the house. Demoralised to the point they had given up hope would have been a more fitting description of the marchers’ sentiments – men pushed and crushed until they could only accept their fate.


When the marchers arrived home, they did so to a hero’s welcome. Tens of thousands turned out to greet them and bonfires burnt long into the night. For many they had achieved something – even if it meant no change to their meagre existence.

Wilkinson writes of the marchers:

“Many were politically educated men, who through the long, bitter struggle, knew who and what was the real enemy.”

To be honest, and not to disparage an important event in labour history, where they? Where they so educated as to think marching could better their lot and did they really think it possible that capitalism could be bargained with? Did they realise that, in truth, they were marching for the right to be exploited by a system that cared not a jot had the marchers perished to a man en-route to London?

Three years later, work did come to Jarrow in the form of a new rolling mill, and much more would follow as World War Two kicked in and the capitalist war machine revved up.

Walking through the site when the men were laying the concrete foundations of the rolling mill, Wilkinson was greeted with: “This is what we marched to get.”

Red Ellen could only find a strange pathos in the statement. She commented:

“The grim reality is that the workers have no share in these mills. When the works are built they will still be subject to the toll of profit, the exigencies of a system where they can be closed at the will of people far away to suit a financial policy.” (ibid. P.213).

Perhaps like the cobbler at Leicester, the stark reality of the madness, the insanity of capitalism, had finally become apparent to the member for Jarrow, and perhaps she at last realised that the internal mechanisms of capitalism run on with a will of their own, oblivious of logic and their own foul contradictions and men with Geordie accents and sweaty feet.