World hunger not going down and obesity still growing – UN report
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Hunger/famine is generally caused by regional problems for example poor infrastructure or security. If lack of infrastructure doesn't allow the movement of goods (e.g. food/aid) or water, it doesn't matter how much "excess" food there is elsewhere you cannot get it to where it is needed, and ditto with moving supplies into areas safely.
If you want to combat hunger, build more roads, water pipes, and improve regional security. Pointing out that there's a spare/excess $1 bag of corn on the opposite side of the world isn't constructive, because it would cost $100 to get that $1 bag of corn to where hunger is (e.g. sea, train, then air drop, and that ignores corruption/spoilage).
Obesity is problematic. But it has nothing directly to do with hunger. If it was that easy to re-allocate/re-locate food to the hungry we would already be doing so. But per the article remote and war-torn areas like African nations remain the number one source of severe hunger.
Plus growing food nearer to where it is needed is always cheapest since transport (and related fuel) costs can far exceed the actual food's value. Which brings up a related problem: Water rights/water security. Even if you can build pipes, a region may lack water flow into it if it has been diverted (or destroyed by global climate change).
Then when the food aid is turned off, the population has both grown to the level that aid could support, and the local production capacity is less than it originally started, meaning more famine related conflict.
This is another example of where infrastructure pays more dividend than simply dropping aid onto areas. You truck in concrete and build a water-way, a region could eat for one hundred years, whereas if you bus in aid they can eat until the aid runs out (and it competes/undercuts local food).
This is why China's effort to build infrastructure (on loan) in this regions[0] is kind of a double-edged sword. While China's motivations may be anything but pure (regional influence/military supply lines/indebting poor countries) the side-effort could be reduced hunger/famine regardless.
[0] https://africacenter.org/spotlight/implications-for-africa-c...
Alas, cue hard times, and you have today (or these past ~3 years).
(This is a terrible simplification of Venezuela's ills, I only say it because it is an interesting case where internal food aid did the same destructive thing. It seems if you want lasting food aid, you should always try to make the aid bottom up, from the farmers.)
I think in this case the link between obesity isn’t on the other side of the world, it’s that those with access to food in these locations don’t have access to healthy food.
It's not even that we have to change the diet or something, if we could deliver wasted food to whoever needs it that would be enough.
>Roughly 30 to 40% of food in both the developed and developing worlds is lost to waste, though the causes behind this are very different. ... For example, in India, it is estimated that 35 to 40% of fresh produce is lost because neither wholesale nor retail outlets have cold storage
https://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-to-f...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41173771_Food_Secur...
It cant be a technology issue...
to correct the issue requires agreement on a world stage where governments which actively harm their people are removed yet even with the most glaring examples we have supposedly advanced countries opposing intervention; the two best examples are the support that North Korea and Venezuela get.
But hunger, globally, is not caused by insufficient production. It is almost entirely a problem with distribution.
Somewhat related - every natural population experiencing exponential growth over the long term collapses. And even drastic measures like reducing the population by half only buys you one 'doubling time' which since the 1900s for humans is a very short time... anyone seeing the population graph and thinks this is sustainable is crazy.
https://cnx.org/resources/87c6cf793bb30e49f14bef6c63c51573/F...
It's very likely that by ~2060 human fertility rate will drop below "replacement rate" (2.1 children per woman), thus beginning a long, slow decline in population.[2]
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
[2] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...
impact = population * consumption
One way or another, our impact is going to go down.
But if you halve the population, you aren't experiencing exponential growth. Are we even experiencing exponential growth now, I thought we had passed peak child?
Plus people have been making claims that we cant feed X billion people for the last 70 years, is there any particular reason why your prediction will be correct, where all others weren't?
Also, be careful with the we/them separation. 'They' will lift themselves out of poverty, just like 'we' did.
There are different lenses through which to view the world: a collaborative one.
Someone could also say something similar with regard to pollution, where it’s not the poor countries that are posing today an extension threat to the world.
I think it plays against the idea that we should be punished for success and rewarded for frugality. The idea that you can just pay money to get out of environmental problems strikes everyone as unfair.
I think that's a fair description of how the world really works though.
How would that work? A catastrophic population crash would have a cause, and high population isn't itself a cause.
If we're talking overconsumption, that's a different conversation.
And "the rich" usually means "everyone having more money than I do".
Of course there are many ressources that would decline. You are completely correct with that.
(I don't think the data from this org is correct, but it still shows an undeniable trend)
Where did you get that from? Some countries have been quite successful implementing family planning policies. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Bangladesh
> School-age children and adolescents who are overweight: 338 million
> Adults who are obese: 672 million (13% or 1 in 8 adults)
Impressed that there is overall more overweight/obese people than starving ones.
There were roughly a billion people on earth prior to the industrial revolution. Through growth we have raised the average quality of life, but what does that matter to the nearly constant number of people living lives of hunger and poverty?
It's like trying to fix a web performance problem where 80% of your requests time out by adding so much other traffic that your failure rate is now only 8%. You fixed nothing.
If one had choice, one would certainly choose to be born now.
Yes, there is still lots of suffering, but as Rosling says, things can be bad and getting better at the same time
Now, civilisation provided hunger-free life to 7B people.
If this is not 'getting better', I don't know what is, even if same _number_ of people go hungry.
At least now the food to feed them actually exists, which was not the case before
Averages are an abstraction. People are real. "getting better" for those people means ... actually getting better. Its that simple. You're overthinking this and trying to apply mathematical models and abstractions, which don't get me wrong, are very valuable tools. But don't lose your anchor in material reality.
As someone who is into fitness for the last decade I can understand many other people with less willpower to resist the hunger. People can give up drugs, alcohol, smoking, etc, because ultimately you don't need those things to survive, but we do need food to survive and it's so damn easy to overeat. Another bit of irony is that once you give up all those other unhealthy triggers of dopamine, food remains the (only?) main one, making it even so much harder to resist it, considering that apparently obesity is worse for your health than alcohol and smoking combined.
If I could teleport any excess food to a place in the world where it's needed, I would.
"Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only in scale but also in terms of multisectoral collaboration," the heads of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the UN Children's Fund, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization urged in their joint foreword to the report.
People experiencing moderate food insecurity face uncertainties about their ability to obtain food and have had to reduce the quality and/or quantity of food they eat to get by.
This calls for a profound transformation of food systems to provide sustainably-produced healthy diets for a growing world population.
Eat Arby's.
where there is obesity, birth rates are too low
Why? That doesn't follow at all. Increasing income inequality does not mean that poor people are getting poorer or their lives are getting more difficult in any way. Political grandstanding from the WHO, which is a shame.
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