ABUJA: There is a pain in the belly of Africa that just will not go away. It is gnawing at our development goals and undermining our economies. It is blighting the lives of the young and shortening the lifespan of the old; yet somehow it is getting forgotten. What is this scourge? A rampant virus with no cure? An insect that pricks our skin and poisons our blood? If it were so dramatic and captivating, it might gather more attention. In fact, it is much more prosaic. It is hunger that is the scourge of Africa. It is advancing rather than receding, and consuming more lives today than ever before.

A hungry person is an angry and dangerous person. It is in all our interests to take away the cause of this anger. There is a saying in my country: when you take hunger out of poverty, poverty is halved. That is why it is crucial we give top priority to ridding ourselves of this blight on development.

In this year, when so much energy has been focused on the campaign to Make Poverty History and the Commission for Africa, we should remember that hunger and malnutrition continue to kill more people than HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Food is the stuff of life. Without it, free trade, debt relief and poverty alleviation will mean little to the millions of African farmers who till the soil and herd their goats far from the benevolent gaze of the developed world.

We should not forget that the first of the UN Millennium Development Goals is that there be a firm commitment by governments to “eradicate the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty and hunger in which hundreds of millions of people continue to live”.

The grim reality we face today is that while global poverty dropped by 20% during the 1990s, the number of hungry people rose. Efforts to alleviate poverty have been most successful among populations that have some access to social services and the market economy. By contrast, the global hungry are part of a growing underclass that has no access. In the latter half of the decade, almost 5 million more people became hungry every year. Today, the total number around the world who know what it is like to go to bed hungry stands at a staggering 852 million.

While there is evidence of slow progress towards making poverty history, the underclass is growing and the world is losing ground in its bid to halve the proportion of those who suffer from hunger by 2015. In a country like Nigeria, carefully mapped out policies have promoted food production, strengthened the agriculture sector, increased food exports and income, and created employment for hundreds of thousands of people.

As chairman of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, I have called for collaboration with the World Food Programme to strengthen agriculture and research and share best practice to increase output drastically. In addition, savings from debt and debt servicing can go into these sectors that directly and immediately benefit the people. The WFP has put a price on what it would cost to eradicate hunger among the 300 million children from Africa and beyond who live with the grinding and debilitating symptoms of hunger - $5bn, if carefully targeted at improving nutrition for the neediest 100 million children, could have a seismic impact.

The plan foresees a partnership between rich and poor nations. Increasing the food supply and reducing hunger is a target across Africa, so developing nations would be encouraged to play their part, contributing food to the value of $2bn to meet the needs of women and children, especially through school feeding programmes. For its part, the developed world would be expected to provide the balance of $3bn.

When I think of Africa today, it reminds me of Oliver Twist. Like him, Africa is struggling to extract itself with dignity from poverty and neglect. It is unacceptable that Africa might be forced once again to go to the top table at Gleneagles and say: “Please, sir, I want some more.” It does not have to be that way. In partnership, we have the opportunity to conquer these challenges to development in Africa and beyond. We cannot forget that hunger is the voracious handmaiden of poverty. If we do not destroy the one, we will never consign the other to the dustbin of history.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

(The writer is the President of Nigeria)