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href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/">Behind the Numbers: The PRB blog on population, health, and the environment</a></h1></div> <div class="hr"></div> <div class="hr2"></div> <div class="left"> <h2 class="widgettitle">Authors</h2> <ul> <li class="widget widget_authors"> <ul><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?author=4" title="Posts by Bill Butz">Bill Butz</a> (8)</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?author=6" title="Posts by Carl Haub">Carl Haub</a> (5)</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?author=11" title="Posts by Charlie Teller">Charlie Teller</a> (6)</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?author=19" title="Posts by Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs">Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs</a> (1)</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?author=14" title="Posts by Deborah 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Hunger and Malnutrition?</a></h2> <p class="postmetadata"><small>July 29th, 2009 Charlie Teller </small> Posted in <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?cat=8" title="View all posts in Income/Poverty" rel="category">Income/Poverty</a> | </p> <div> <p><em>by Charlie Teller, Bixby visiting scholar</em></p> <p>In 1995, the international community proclaimed the goal of reducing hunger by 50 percent by 2015. However, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that while the number hungry fell from 900 million in 1970 to 875 million in 2005, it has risen to over 1 billion in 2009, related to the 2008 food price crisis. But do we really know the exact numbers of hungry and malnourished and the direct causal relationship to food prices, and now more recently the financial crisis?</p> <p>After participating in an Institute of Medicine-organized workshop, “Mitigating the Nutrition Impacts of the Global Food Price Crisis,” held at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, DC, I’m afraid to report that we don’t have the answer to either the statistical or the causal questions. After all the media frenzy in the last year, the international community, which was well represented at the workshop by particpants from the academic, UN, donor, foundation, private sector, and NGO worlds, has to admit: <em><strong>we don’t know the impact of the food price crisis!</strong> </em></p> <p>There <em>was </em>agreement that poverty, hunger, and malnutrition are long-term chronic AND structural problems, and should not be considered crises. There is also a consensus that the predominant food-first, food-aid, and acute feeding focus (mainly by the U.S. government and World Food Program) needs to be reoriented toward agricultural productivity, and food and nutrition security policies and strategies. The numbers show that the geographic focus should be on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, among the most vulnerable populations, and that there should be NO artificial separation of food issues from nutrition issues. A final consensus was that the best group to ensure that crucial linkage is small-farmer women.</p> <p align="center"> <img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113im_/http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3613/3604354275_7d0622e403_m.jpg"/></p> <p align="center"><em>Photo used under Creative Commons from </em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.flickr.com/photos/carsten_tb/"><em>10b travelling</em></a></p> <p>Very little was said by the many prominent speakers about the relevance of population, reproductive health, and family planning factors and policies to hunger and malnutrition. The comprehensive and professorial opening keynote speech on the current food price crisis and its future reported that population growth rates were “dropping, although not as rapidly as some would prefer” (P.P.Anderson). The U.S. congressman on the closing panel who co-sponsored the important report: “Roadmap to End Global Hunger” noted the need to ensure that nutrition and food security programs are integrated with global health interventions, mentioning eight of them, but reproductive health/family planning was not included in what he called a comprehensive package. Only one of the dozens of speakers emphasized long-term population, environmental, and water resource constraints on agriculture and food production.</p> <p>There were three demographically relevant points made during the workshop:</p> <p><span id="more-70"></span></p> <ul> <li><strong>Key age groups.</strong> WHO, UNICEF and FAO concur that target groups for nutrition interventions should be children 0 to 24 months old and pregnant women (as documented in the Lancet Nutrition Series).</li> <li><strong>Rural population growth.</strong> Catherine Bertini’s presentation included rural population growth as one of the four reasons for the worsening of hunger and poverty, including pressure on limited land and water supplies, and climate change. She also stated that food production has fallen behind population growth See more at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/">www.thechicagocouncil.org</a>.</li> <li><strong>The poor, but not mainly the URBAN poor, as the most vulnerable. </strong>Many originally forecasted that the urban poor would be the most vulnerable to rapid food price changes due to the greater dependence on purchased food. The International Food Policy Research Insitute’s (IFPRI) Marie Ruel demonstrated that the poorest, wherever they are, suffer the most with such price increases, thus a need to focus on agriculture. In addition, a higher percentage of the rural population is poor compared with the urban population.</li> </ul> <p>I came away from extensive and passionate discussions with many long-time colleagues in the international food and nutrition field with the following concerns:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Fragmentation among the international community.</strong> Complex, multisectoral problems like hunger and malnutrition are hard to address in an integrated manner. Policymakers often operate within stove-piped, vertically aligned structures of the UN, donors, commercial private sector, and line ministries of agriculture and health. There were also outcries against “turf-protection” constraints.</li> <li><strong>Weak information, surveillance, monitoring and evaluation systems.</strong> There are different indicators of hunger, food insecurity, undernourishment and malnutrition, and sources of data are unreliable and untimely; one major player in famine early warning systems admitted to the negative utility of nutrition data and that they were “lagging and unreliable”. </li> <li><strong>Country context over global generalizations</strong>. The in-depth case studies of Mexico, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh presented very different responses of governments to food price volatility, and varied responses by different livelihood groups within the countries. The differences illustrated how dangerous it is to generalize about the impacts of the global food price crisis. For example, in Ethiopia, wheat had huge excess economic rents, but the more common staples (sorghum, teff, false banana, and maize) did not. Meanwhile, off-farm daily wages increased. IFPRI concluded that “most” of the price shocks were local in this landlocked country!</li> </ul> <p>Based on all of this I asked myself, “how can we get population dimensions back under consideration of the poverty-hunger reduction thrusts of the G8, UN, and foundation and NGO communities?” Given the lack of credibility of alarmist and doomsday Malthusians (such as,,“population will inevitably outpace food supply”), there can be a macro and a micro approach: through the population-resources-water-environment-climate change nexus, including migration and urbanization processes, one can show at the national, regional, and local level how different aspects of demography impact hunger. At the household level one can highlight women’s role in household food production, feeding, caring capacity, and disease management and how maternal/reproductive health and nutrition programs can decrease hunger and malnutrition.</p> <p>Country-specific and contextual analyses are needed to avoid generalizations. Analyses should take into account differences in the demographic dynamics of hunger and malnutrition within the same region, such as India vs. China, Malawi vs. South Africa, and Guatemala vs. Mexico (chronic malnutrition being much higher in the first of each pair). </p> <p>Did you, the reader, find it quite complex to follow the causal chain from international food price shocks and economic volatility to household level undernourishment and malnutrition? Have you seen it well documented anywhere?</p> <br/> <p> <small> <span> You can follow any responses to this entry through the</span> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?feed=rss2&p=70">RSS 2.0</a> <span>feed.</span> <span>You can </span><a href="#respond">leave a response</a>, <span>or</span> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/wp-trackback.php?p=70" rel="trackback">trackback</a> <span>from your own site.</span> </span></small> </p> </div>  <div class="addthis"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?pub=blogohblog&url=http://prbblog.org/?p=70&title=“Like a Wave on Top of a Tsunami”: Have the Food Price and Financial Crises Increased World Hunger and Malnutrition?" title="Bookmark using any bookmark manager!" target="_blank"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113im_/http://s9.addthis.com/button1-bm.gif" width="125" height="16" border="0" alt="AddThis Social Bookmark Button"/></a></div> </div>  <div class="comments"><h3>5 Responses to ““Like a Wave on Top of a Tsunami”: Have the Food Price and Financial Crises Increased World Hunger and Malnutrition?”</h3></div> <ol class="commentlist"> <li class="alt" id="comment-399"> <div class="gcomment"><cite>tonyphuah</cite> Says: <br/> <small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment-399" title="">July 30th, 2009 at 1:47 pm</a> </small></div> <div class="ucomment"><p>The causal web (not chain) is indeed complex, beyond our current knowledge to generalize it. I would suggest to study it case by case basis, using data to build quantitative model and simulate it to validate the model with historical behaviour. This allows us to test the hypotheses proposed. Then hopefully with the more cases studied, we can find out their common characteristics.</p> </div> </li> <li id="comment-412"> <div class="gcomment"><cite><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.usaidalumni.org/" rel="external nofollow">Gary Merritt</a></cite> Says: <br/> <small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment-412" title="">August 4th, 2009 at 8:47 pm</a> </small></div> <div class="ucomment"><p>Charlie,<br/> Thanks for your excellent rapportage! </p> <p>That little was said about demography and family planning at the IoM/Kaiser ‘workshop’ is a fair indicator of the muddle in which we find ourselves in where applied sciences and public policy fail to join. Understanding and promoting human fertility regulation seems ever more rare in fora aimed at decreasing poverty and malnutrition. This crucial domain of causalities and concerns has fallen into a real funk - possibly retrievable but badly needing fresh infusions.</p> <p>Re following the ‘causal chain’ from shocks & volatility to malnutrition, I think volumes have been written over the past 70 yrs, including Jolly et al. w/in UNICEF. Best - GaryM</p> </div> </li> <li class="alt" id="comment-438"> <div class="gcomment"><cite>Craig H</cite> Says: <br/> <small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment-438" title="">August 16th, 2009 at 1:23 pm</a> </small></div> <div class="ucomment"><p>“But do we really know the exact numbers of hungry and malnourished and the direct causal relationship to food prices, and now more recently the financial crisis?”</p> <p>Given the way that the FAO (and USDA) measure “hunger” I don’t think we can know the answer to this. Moreover, if I understand the approach correctly, the current approach is bound to show that hunger increases whenever food price increases. This goes against much of what we know from anthropological studies showing that people employ a range of responses in the face of crises. These responses might buffer household diets from price increases (although they might generate other negative impacts on wellbeing).</p> <p>It seems time for an experience-based food insecurity scale to replace the Food Balance Sheet approach. It also seems timely to set up a global network of sites that monitor food insecurity biannually. The growing network of demographic surveillance systems (DSS)could potentially be used towards this end. If such a network was set up we wouldn’t have to rely on economists’ predictions about how price increases impact on wellbeing, we’d actually have real-time data. </p> <p>CH</p> </div> </li> <li id="comment-441"> <div class="gcomment"><cite><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prb/" rel="external nofollow">charles teller</a></cite> Says: <br/> <small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment-441" title="">August 18th, 2009 at 10:32 am</a> </small></div> <div class="ucomment"><p>Craig, agree totally on the need for biannual monitoring of food insecurity, and I would add nutrition security also (often bimetrics produce more reliable data). There are other scales trying to capture the range of responses to crisis, including coping and resilience strategies, food, migration and asset-related. Using the DSS has been good for migration, mortality and nutritional measurements, but can also be attached diet diversity measurements. The FANTA website has some of these. Do you or others know of DSSs that do such measurements, and that could contribute to bi-annual monitoring? DSS also can capture the local and monthly variability in resilience, coping and local capacity to cope.</p> </div> </li> <li class="alt" id="comment-442"> <div class="gcomment"><cite>Craig H</cite> Says: <br/> <small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment-442" title="">August 18th, 2009 at 6:33 pm</a> </small></div> <div class="ucomment"><p>Charles - the INDEPTH network of DSSs comes to mind, but they are not currently conducting systematic food insecurity (or nutrition security) assessments (or at least I don’t think they are). I am a little less convinced about dietary diversity as a measure, but I certainly agree with your point about the use of several unique indicators of nutr security. Just think how much we would know about the 2007/8 food crisis had such a system had been place last year. Best, Craig H</p> </div> </li> </ol> <div class="comments"><h3>Leave a Reply</h3></div> <form action="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform"> <p><input type="text" name="author" id="author" value="" size="22" tabindex="1"/> <label for="author"><small>Name (required)</small></label></p> <p><input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="" size="22" tabindex="2"/> <label for="email"><small>Mail (will not be published) (required)</small></label></p> <p><input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="" size="22" tabindex="3"/> <label for="url"><small>Website</small></label></p>  <p><textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="60%" rows="10" tabindex="4"></textarea></p> <p><input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment"/> <input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="70"/> </p> </form> <div class="alignleft">« <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?p=69">Links Between HIV/AIDS and…the Environment?</a></div> <div class="alignright"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://prbblog.org/?p=71">Fertility Rise for Richest and Climate Change Revisited</a> »</div> </div> </td></tr></table></center>  <br/><br/> <div align="center"> <div align="center" id="ftr"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113im_/http://www.prb.org/images/footer2.gif" width="3" height="23" align="right"/><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113im_/http://www.prb.org/images/footer1.gif" width="3" height="23" align="left"/><span class="footertext">Services: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/Home/EmailSignup.aspx">Get E-Mail News</a>  ·  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/Join.aspx">Join/Renew Membership</a>  ·  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/Donate.aspx">Donate</a>  ·  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/Bookstore.aspx">Bookstore</a>  ·  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/Home/Contact.aspx">Contact</a>  ·  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/SpanishContent.aspx">Español</a>  ·  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/FrenchContent.aspx">Français</a></span></div> <span class="footer2text"><b>Copyright 2007, Population Reference Bureau.</b> All rights reserved. • <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/http://www.prb.org/Home/Privacy.aspx">Privacy Policy</a></span><br/> <span class="footer2text">1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW • Suite 520 • Washington, DC 20009-5728 • USA <br/> <b>Phone:</b> 800-877-9881 • <b>Fax:</b> 202-328-3937 • <b>E-mail:</b> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091004122113/mailto:popref@prb.org">popref@prb.org</a></span><br/> </div>  </div>  <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? 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