HUMANITY today lives in a world of remarkable technological advancement and rapid development. Lest there be any sense of false comfort, though, there is the other side of the coin; the wars and conflicts raging across large swathes of the globe, inequality, wide-scale displacement etc. Today, as the UN marks World Food Day that commemorates the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN in 1945, and tomorrow that is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, bring further significant reasons for sobriety and policy rethinks. The International Food Policy Research Institute, based in Washington, D.C., recently released the 2017 Global Hunger Index which identifies those places across the world where interventions to address the issue are most urgently needed. The 119 countries are given ‘hunger scores’ based on indicators such as the percentage of the population that is undernourished, or of young children suffering from wasting or stunting. A score of 9.9 denotes low hunger. But countries including the Central African Republic, Chad and Sierra Leone have alarmingly high ratings ranging from 50.9 to 38.5 (some countries, including Syria and Libya, could not be given GHI scores because of insufficient data). Though the world has overall made some progress in addressing hunger, the situation still ranges from ‘serious’ to ‘extremely alarming’ in 52 of the 119 countries rated. And, not surprisingly, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the highest levels of hunger, scoring 30.9 and 29.4 respectively.

Depressingly for a country that has an agricultural economy and produces enough to be food secure, Pakistan has performed poorly; in all of Asia, it has done better than only Afghanistan. We have been given a GHI score of 32.6, and have made negligible gains in reducing the levels of hunger in recent years. Worse, the number of children under five who are too short for their age, or stunted, has increased to 45pc. The reasons range from lack of access to food due to poverty, to external factors such as floods and climate change. But malnutrition has even been detected in a significant number of food-secure households, indicating that education, awareness and the dissemination of facts are key to successful intervention. From the scourge of child marriage to inter-generational nutritional deficiencies, the serpent is hydra-headed. These, rather than securing elections, are what policymakers need to focus on.

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2017