By Jonathan Power
Once again, the media is presenting us with images of the mother of all famines — stretching from Yemen to Somalia, to Sudan and South Sudan, to the Central African Republic, to northern Nigeria and, most recently, to Gaza.
It’s a bad famine, but there have been bad famines in the not-so-distant past—the great Ethiopian one in 1985, which triggered the rock star Bob Geldof to organise a massive worldwide popular response. (I remember running with tens of thousands of other campaigners in London’s Hyde Park to raise money.)
Before that, in 1974, at the World Food Conference, there was a real feeling that the world was running out of food and dramatic new policies must be put in place by the richer countries.
They were, and much progress was made. Between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of children under five who had stunted growth fell from 33% to 22% of the world’s children, according to UNICEF. People who are still underfed are less severely so. 45 million children suffer from malnutrition—that is one in three children under five. In Africa, it is more than that.
Increased food production is happening all over the place.........