Editor's Choice
April 15, 1999
Anthropology and Global Hunger
One of the major tragedies of our civilization is the hundreds of millions of people
who daily go without sufficient food. Each day 35,000 children under the age of five die
of starvation or preventable infectious disease that thrives on malnourished bodies.
Anthropologists have a special role in helping people understand the reasons for this
tragedy. One of the major areas of anthropological research is the subsistence patterns
and strategies of different societies, that is how people go about producing,
distributing, and consuming food. For most of human history, people gathered wild plants
and hunted large and small game. Some 10,000 years ago some people began to cultivate
foods and domesticate animals, not because it was easier (it wasn't) but probably because
population density in some areas had reached a level that made gathering and hunting
inadequate to feed the population. Then some 200 to 300 years ago the industrial
revolution and the urban revolution that it fostered, moved people off the land, and into
factories and cities where their access to food depended largely on their ability to pay
for it. In the United States today, some two percent of the population grows food for the
other ninety-eight percent.
There are many misunderstandings about the nature of world hunger, including the idea
that people starve because of inadequate food supplies. That is not true; there is more
than enough food to feed the present population (see the January 15, 1999 Editor's Choice
Column, The Debate Over Population Growth ). You can find out
more about this and other myths about world hunger at Six Myths About Hunger a brief fact sheet from the World Hunger
Program at Brown University. It quickly exposes some commonly held, but faulty,
ideas about why people starve to death.
The United Nations report, Food Supply Gap displays and discusses the availability of food
from one part of the world to another and displays the average daily food energy available
per person over a given period. Note that this is not what is simply available in a given
area or country; it is what people have the ability to pay for. As the report makes clear,
there is sufficient food for everyone (in spite of the fact that growers ostensibly grow
what they believe can be paid for, not what is needed). As one UN official said, "If
you look at the world as a whole, there is enough food produced to feed each person, each
day. But it isn't happening because it's access to food that's the real problem." You
can also get a good idea of the unequal distribution of food resources (and the
relationship to income) from the table from the World Health Report 1998
on the global distribution of
overweight and underweight people .
To understand why people go hungry in a capitalist economy you must stop thinking about
food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something
companies produce for other people to buy. Food is a commodity. Furthermore, agricultural
producers choose to grow, not only what people will and can buy, but they grow things for
which they will get the best price. This has various implications. For example, much of
the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal,
tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are maginally
nutritious, but for which there is a large market. Millions of acres of potentially
productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water
and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries. More than half the
grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to
livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is
fed. Furthermore, growers must be careful not to "overproduce"; that is they
must not grow or raise more food than people can pay for as this would cause a
decline in food prices.Thus in many countries agricultural producers are discouraged from
producing; furthermore, as food producing corporations grow larger, they are able to
control production to ensure they don't "overproduce." The problem, of course,
is that people who don't have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people
earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don't count in the food equation. In other words, if
you don't have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you. Put yet another
way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers,
or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you
would not expect Archer, Daniel Midlands ("Supermarket to the World") to produce
food for them. Aid programs or governments may take up some of the slack by purchasing
food from producers, and distributing it; but this may do more harm than good by
undercutting the market of local food producers. What this means is that ending hunger
requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough
money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food.
Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen is one of the foremost spokespersons on
global hunger and poverty. His book, written with Jean Dreze, Hunger and Public Action , is one of
the most comprehensive studies of hunger yet written. You can get a summary of their ideas
in this address, Public Action to
Remedy Hunger . In this address, Sen summarizes the major points of the book. There
are, he says, two types of hunger: famine and endemic depravation-- the daily lack of
sufficient food. Famine, while receiving the most attention, is less prevalent that the
largely hidden endemic hunger from which some one billion people suffer. While the problem
of hunger is widespread, Sen warns about being pessimistic. People are hungry, says Sen,
because they lose their entitlement to food--they lack either the land to grow food, the
money to buy it, or access to state programs of food or wage distribution. With the will,
he says, no one needs to go hungry. Among the most important features necessary to prevent
hunger, he says, is a democratic (and thereby accountable) government and a free press
that publicizes the threat of hunger
The major question, of course, is what can we do to end poverty and the hunger that it
causes? Unfortunately global hunger, as Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze note, often generates
cynicism ("not a lot can be done about it"), or complacency ("don't blame
me... I'm not answerable"). But, of course, we can do something, and we are, as
members of the richest country in the world devouring the resources of the poorest
countries, largely responsible. The
World Hunger Program ( )at Brown University, suggests a number of things that we can
do individually and collectively.
At the author's Web site you can find many additional Internet resources
on hunger and poverty .
