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Asia is winning the war against
hunger
By Alan Boyd
Asia is
winning the war against hunger, and it has happened
despite the best efforts of politicians, according to
the United Nations. But Africa and the Near East
continue to lag behind, making it unlikely that the
lofty goal of halving global poverty by 2015, laid down
at the World Food Summit in 1996 and reiterated at the
2000 Millennium gathering, will be attained.
It
is not a question of the availability of food. The UN's
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) contends that
there are ample supplies of food being produced to meet
the needs of the 840 million people who don't have
enough to eat, but the food is simply not reaching them.
"Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of
food as a lack of political will. Too often, eliminating
hunger has been relegated to a shopping list of
development goals," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf
stated in a preface to "The State of Food Insecurity in
the World". "But we must also have the vision and the
courage to set priorities, recognizing that lack of
adequate food threatens people's very existence and
cripples their ability both to benefit from
opportunities for education, employment and political
participation and to contribute to economic and social
development."
The number of people living on
less than $1 a day in the developing world grew by an
average of 4.5 million a year in 1995-2001, according to
the study, reversing a trend of persistent decreases
during the first half of the 1990s. While 19 countries
managed to reduce poverty levels, a further 26 reported
increases. However, Asia, which accounts for 75 percent
of the global poor and is home to the bulk of the
world's population, is bucking this trend thanks to a
few big success stories. Malaysia and South Korea have
been able to almost eliminate extreme poverty. China has
cut 58 million people from its poverty list since the
early 1990s, although the pace of poverty reduction is
now slowing in China. Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka
have also had consistent reductions, despite a temporary
reversal during the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis, and
Bangladesh and Cambodia have achieved reductions more
recently.
But while India recorded a lower
incidence of poverty in 1990-1997, it has since slipped
behind. According to reports, there was a net increase
of 19 million in 1998-2001, compared with a decline of
20 million in the previous period. Pakistan and
Indonesia also registered higher overall poverty rates,
while Afghanistan and the Philippines have backtracked
after initially reporting decreases in malnourishment
levels. Afghanistan, where 70 percent of the population
has insufficient food, faces Asia’s worst poverty
challenge. However, the FAO and other monitoring
agencies are more alarmed at the deteriorating
conditions in South Asia and Indonesia, where the social
implications of poverty are magnified by massive
overcrowding.
South Asia, the region with the
biggest incidence of poverty worldwide, recorded an
increase of 14 million people living in poverty between
1992 and 1999, mostly due to setbacks in India and
Pakistan. Bangladesh’s Agriculture Minister, M K Anwar,
said during a review of the FAO report in Rome that food
security had been weakened by high population growth, a
lack of financial resources, limited access to irrigated
water and “natural and man-made disasters”. Other
factors include poor physical and social infrastructure,
shrinking agricultural land, international trade
barriers to agricultural exports and technical and
production constraints on farm output.
Diouf
contends, “We need political will to overcome these
constraints and should embark on a common platform for
the alleviation of poverty and hunger," echoing a common
theme among population agencies. The FAO listed a lack
of political will among the probable causes of poverty,
along with the economic drain from the spread of AIDS,
wars, terrorism and the failure of the Western world to
invest in improved agricultural technology in developing
countries.
A consistent line was drawn between
poverty eradication and those nations with rapid
economic growth in the farming sector, slower population
growth and better global development rankings.
However, other studies have identified deeper
social and economic structural defects, though there is
again a dominant impression of policy neglect and
entrenched political interests.
The
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
argued in a 2002 report that poverty would not be
contained until governments showed a stronger commitment
to land reform, including the break-up of large estates.
Apart from creating a cycle of tenancy debt, the
over-concentration of land ownership has deprived the
poor of a political voice and has deterred technology
transfers that could boost crop yields. "Redistributive
land reform, whether through market-assisted land reform
programs or otherwise, should remain a substantive
policy issue for poverty reduction," the IFAD stated,
touching upon one of the more sensitive aspects of
reform.
Access to irrigation has been cited by
the World Bank as a prime development objective that can
mitigate rural poverty. In India, 69 percent of people
in non-irrigated districts are poor, compared with 26
percent in irrigated districts. Pointedly, China has had
the most success in pursuing rural development policies
geared toward reducing the dependency of impoverished
communities on marginal crops, although China has
enjoyed the benefits of dispersed ownership for decades
now.
Reform pressures are the greatest in India,
Pakistan, the Philippines and Indonesia, where
poverty-eradication policies have been least effective.
Vietnam and Thailand, which both have debt alleviation
schemes, have been cited by the World Bank as case
studies for effective public policies.
Social
activists in the Philippines have been battling for two
decades to overhaul a corrupt and inefficient land
administration system that is controlled by sprawling
provincial fiefdoms. Only 40 percent of the 14.4 million
hectares of land that can be freely exchanged is
currently registered, leaving millions with insecure
titles and depriving entire communities of access to
credit. Drafting of a Land Administration and Reform Act
(LARA) has been underway since the early 1990s, but few
expect the land barons to relinquish their main
political power bases. Diouf noted that low levels of
governance and accountability have invariably
contributed to feelings of political marginalization
among the poor. "The vast majority of the world's hungry
people live in rural areas of the developing world, far
from the levers of political power and beyond the range
of vision of the media and the public in developed
countries," he said.
In contrast, socialist
Vietnam launched a hunger eradication program at the
provincial level in 1992 and extended it nationwide four
years later with the help of a European-sponsored
program to overhaul rural development policies. Only 32
percent of rural families in Vietnam are now classified
as poor, compared with 58 percent at the start of the
campaign.
A recent study by West Germany, which
will provide 41.2 million euros in aid and soft loans to
Vietnam for development assistance during the 2003
fiscal year, attributed the country's improvement to a
consistent record of political stability and economic
growth. "The people of Vietnam are aware that if we are
not successful in the fight against poverty, then no
goal that we or the international community set -
including peace, equality - can ever become a reality,"
Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Cong Tan told a recent UN
summit on poverty.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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