EDITORIAL - Going hungry

Self-rated hunger is up, with about 4.3 million households experiencing hunger last month, according to the latest survey by the Social Weather Stations Inc. The number is not as bad as in December 2009, but it could get worse as harvests are affected by recent massive flooding in the rice granaries of Central Luzon.

Even without the floods, rising global food costs pushed 70 million more people worldwide into extreme poverty in the past year, according to the World Bank. Climate change is wreaking havoc on food production, while trading in food commodities futures is contributing to instability in food prices, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. As World Food Day and World Food Week were marked recently, the FAO noted that the world’s population grows by 80 million each year but global food production has failed to keep up with the demand.

This failure has been traced by the FAO to long-term under-investment in research, technology, equipment and infrastructure on food and agriculture. That’s an accurate description of the situation in the Philippines, a major importer of its staple, rice. Cataclysmic flooding in Thailand, one of the biggest rice producers, could push up prices in the world market and aggravate hunger incidence.

Some measures have been proposed to reduce the volatility of world food prices. But the FAO emphasizes that a key requirement for food security is bigger investment in agriculture. This is particularly true in developing countries, which account for 98 percent of the world’s hungry. At current population growth rates, the FAO estimates that developing countries need to double their food production by 2050 to meet the needs of their people.

The UN World Food Program, for its part, is focusing on proper nutrition for children. The WFP launched its “Feed a Child, Feed a Dream” initiative ahead of World Food Day on Oct. 16, with the message that proper nutrition provides the basic foundation for a better future. The Number One Millennium Development Goal is the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger. The Philippines still has a long way to go in achieving this goal.