World Hunger Day 2022

Posted on: 27 May 2022 by Barry Goldson in Blog

May 28, 2022 is designated 'World Hunger Day'. In this blog Professor Emeritus Barry Goldson reflects upon child poverty and hunger in both 'poor' and 'rich' worlds.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and World Hunger Day

In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. The wide-ranging ambitions underpinning the ‘Agenda’ are expressed through 17 ‘sustainable development goals’. It is no coincidence that the first three ‘goals’ refer to: ending poverty in all of its forms everywhere; ending global hunger and achieving food security, and; ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all of the world’s people at all ages.

Just under seven years later and May 28, 2022 marks World Hunger Day. The profound global impacts of COVID-19, the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change and ongoing wars and military conflicts – not least in Ukraine - have intensified poverty, food insecurity and hunger.

Poor-world, rich-world relations

Today it is estimated that 2.4 billion people, one in three of the world’s population, are denied access to adequate food. And children and young people are disproportionately negatively impacted by poverty and hunger. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, approximately 45 million children suffer from severe malnutrition every year and nearly half of all deaths of children under the age of five years are attributable to hunger. To put it another way, an estimated 3 million of the world’s children die from malnutrition annually; the equivalent of a child dying every ten seconds.

And of course, it is not only the global health pandemic, climate change, geo-political conflicts and war that are implicated when analysing such profoundly distressing phenomena. The ‘business’ of food and the relations of production, distribution, exchange and profit are also pivotal. Approximately one trillion US-dollars-worth of food is lost or wasted every year, and identifiable rich countries waste as much food as some of the world’s poorest regions manage to produce.

Analysing the relations between the human suffering in the poor world and the behaviours of the rich world is critically important. Such interconnectedness is also extraordinarily complex, defying the reach of a short blog such as this. A key point to make, however, is that child poverty and hunger is neither inevitable nor accidental. Rather, it is largely a consequence of calculated, conscious and considered political and economic postures. In this sense it is the planned and purposeful construction of otherwise avoidable human suffering that is of primary interest.

Child poverty and hunger in the rich world: looking where we stand!

Although the most extreme forms of child poverty and hunger are to be found in the poorest regions of the world, the socio-economic landscapes of many rich world countries are similarly scarred and disfigured. For example, Philip Alston, writing as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, recently observed that:

‘The United Kingdom, the world’s fifth largest economy, is a leading centre of global finance [and] boasts a fundamentally strong economy… But despite such prosperity, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty. Four million of those are more than 50 per cent below the poverty line and 1.5 million experienced destitution in 2017, unable to afford basic essentials… child… poverty… is again on the rise… For [so many] children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain [is] not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster rolled into one’.

The ‘disgrace’ to which Alston refers was more recently illuminated by Arianne Shahvisi in a short essay published in the London Review of Books:

‘This is the forecast: disposable incomes are set to fall by 2.2 per cent, the steepest decline since records began in 1956… while inflation could soon exceed 8 per cent. Households will be around £1100 worse off over the coming year (the average annual spend on groceries is more than £1300 per person, so those living on the poverty line will effectively have their food budget wiped out). An additional… half a million children, will be tipped into absolute poverty… the UK has the highest proportion of children living in severely food insecure households [in the EU] … Between January and July 2020, nearly 2500 children were admitted to hospital with malnutrition, twice as many as the year before’.

Perhaps most significantly, deepening and widening patterns of child poverty and hunger can ultimately prove to be fatal as David Taylor-Robinson and his colleagues note:

‘As a result, inequalities in infant mortality increased, with the gap between the most and the least deprived local authority areas widening… Overall from 2014 to 2017, there were a total of 572 excess infant deaths… compared with what would have been expected based on historical trends… The findings suggest that about a third of the increases in infant mortality between 2014 and 2017 can be attributed to rising child poverty’.

It doesn’t have to be like this… but…

As stated, child poverty and hunger is neither inevitable nor accidental. Rather, it emanates from calculated, conscious and considered political and economic postures. So how is the UK Government continuing to behave on both the international and the national stages?

At the international level, it appears that Government Ministers have chosen the ‘worst moment in history’ to slash the UK’s contribution to international humanitarian aid by 51%.

At the national level, a combination of depressed wages, precarious employment and persistent benefit cuts have imposed deep deleterious effects. On one hand, 75% of children who are growing up in poverty in the UK live in a family where at least one person is working. On the other hand, the decade 2010-20 witnessed more than 50 cuts to benefits meaning that approximately £36 billion less was being spent on social security in 2020 (compared with 2010) and, by 2023, the shortfall is estimated to amount to £40 billion.

As we recognize ‘World Hunger Day’, we are left with many questions. Perhaps the most pressing question for the UK Government to consider is: where is the integrity of a political regime that knowingly and deliberately impoverishes children and renders them hungry?

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Professor Emeritus Barry Goldson will be reflecting further on ‘justice for children’ at an event at Lancaster University on June 8, 2022. Further details can be found on the Centre for Child & Family Justice Research website.