Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
Development
projects
22m
Displaced
persons due
to political
conflict
25m
Natural
disasters
36m
Figure 4.1 Total number of recipients of WFP
food aid in 2000 (total 83 million in 83 different
countries; Source: WFP 2002b).
Hunger
Global political action, coordinated inter-governmentally by the WFP and nongovernmentally
by pressure groups such as OXFAM, CAFOD and War on Want has,
in recent decades, succeeded in curtailing the escalation of famines, but such groups
are quick to point out that such periodic famines are merely the tip of the global
hunger ‘iceberg’. Far more people in today’s world die of starvation through plain
poverty rather than as a result of cyclical regional imbalances between the supply and
demand for food.
The WFP claim that some 24,000 people every day die as a result of hunger and
related ailments and that over 800 million in the world suffer from malnutrition (WFP
2002c). 1 Some consider this a conservative estimate but this death toll undoubtedly
outstrips any other threats to human existence. Why then does this relentless carnage
persist in a world in which the food supply is sufficient to permit every person in the
world at least 2700 calories per day (Ramonet 1998)?
Ignorance
One explanation is that, in spite of the best efforts of pressure groups, the general
public of states wealthy enough to help alleviate the problem (and possibly some
government ministers) are simply not aware of the scale of the problem. Charitable
responses and public support for government aid for countries gripped by famine
has increased over the last 30 years, most famously highlighted in the 1980s by the
‘Band Aid/Live Aid’ campaign and its various spin-offs, organized by European
and North American entertainers in response to the sub-Sahara African famine. The
underlying issue of basic hunger, however, is a persistent problem harder to highlight
in the news media than through dramatic pictures of emaciated children
amid cracked earth and flies after a drought. ‘[B]ecause we view hunger in the background
of life, the terrible toll does not enter our headlines, nor, for most of us, our
concerns’ (The Hunger Project 1985). Crisis is a key catalyst for global political action
but a permanent problem, no matter how horrific, is not a crisis, it is a fact of life (and
death).
90