Hunger

Compact2025 is described as an inclusive global effort to support countries, institutions, and initiatives for the elimination of hunger and undernutrition by 2025. (Photo: World Bank/flickr/cc)

by Thalif Deen, IPS News

The United Nations aims to help eliminate hunger and undernutrition – described as two of “greatest scourges” facing humankind — by the year 2030.

But the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has launched an ambitious new initiative to help end global hunger by 2025 – five years ahead of the UN target.

IFPRI believes that its initiative, dubbed Compact2025, can help end global hunger by 2025 if countries replicate strategies that worked in places such as China, Brazil, and Thailand, where huge strides have been made toward reducing hunger.

“We can eliminate both hunger and undernutrition, and we can do so by 2025—which will also help end extreme poverty and will contribute to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals,” says IFPRI.

But there are significant knowledge gaps related to eliminating hunger and undernutrition that must first be filled for effective and cost-efficient action, IFPRI said.

Compact2025 is described as an inclusive global effort to support countries, institutions, and initiatives for the elimination of hunger and undernutrition by 2025.

It will work toward this goal by identifying pragmatic, innovative, and action-oriented strategies to address challenges on the ground while learning from stakeholders at all levels and from multiple sectors, including agriculture, nutrition, and health.

Compact2025 also plans to address these gaps by acting as a ‘Knowledge and Innovation Hub’ that will help guide countries in developing and implementing strategic actions for food security and nutrition.

Dr. Shenggen Fan, IFPRI’s director general, told IPS eliminating hunger and undernutrition in 10 years is a huge task, but it can be accomplished.

He pointed out that Brazil, China, Thailand, Peru, and Vietnam have each dramatically reduced hunger and undernutrition in a relatively short time.

At the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in the Peruvian capital of Lima last week, the final declaration adopted by over 60 legislators said Latin America and the Caribbean– of all of the world’s regions– had made the greatest progress in reducing hunger.

The region also reduced the proportion of hungry people by more than half, in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which is fast moving towards its 2015 deadline by the end of December.

During the Nov. 15-17 Forum, delegates of the national chapters of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger (PFH) also reasserted their determination to promote laws to “break the circle of poverty and enforce the right to food” in the region.

Dr Fan said learning from the experiences of the five Asian and Latin American countries, “and leveraging strong international and national commitments to end hunger and undernutrition, it is possible to accelerate progress even further, he added.

While not all the MDGs have been achieved, the world has made incredible progress in reducing extreme poverty and hunger, he noted.

In fact, he said, the target on reducing hunger was just narrowly missed, as the proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half since 1990, from 23.3 per cent in 1990–1992 to 12.9 per cent in 2014–2016.

IFPRI says Compact2025 will contribute to accelerating progress to end hunger and undernutrition and is fully supportive of SDG 2 (End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture).

Compact2025’s work will also support the achievement of many other SDGs (e.g. Goals 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere, and Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages).

The 2025 target relates to many of the SDGs because ending hunger and undernutrition are stepping stones to ending extreme poverty, said Dr Fan, who received the Hunger Hero Award from the World Food Programme (WFP) in 2014 in recognition of his commitment to, and leadership in, fighting hunger worldwide.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted by world leaders at a summit meeting in September, also include the eradication of poverty by 2030

To inform actions that lead to concrete results, Compact2025, through its Knowledge and Innovation (K&I) Hub, will provide policymakers and practitioners with context-specific, evidence-based advice on scaling up success stories to end hunger and undernutrition.

IFPRI said Compact2025 will also build the knowledge-base and promote innovations to help countries develop, scale up, and communicate policies and programmes for the biggest, most cost-effective impacts—and in doing so will help weed out ineffective or inefficient policies and prevent a duplication of efforts.

To build on existing momentum, Compact2025 will complement established networks such as Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) and initiatives such as the Zero Hunger Challenge.

Additionally, it will also work with those who are already dedicated to achieving this goal by 2025 such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Rwanda at the national level; the African Union at the regional level; and the European Commission, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and World Food Programme (WFP) at the institutional level.

Compact2025 will contribute with the following approaches and activities:

• Serving as a Knowledge and Innovation Hub for stakeholders at all levels. • Sharing experiences, problems, and solutions within and across countries. Supporting evidence-based policies and experiments • Using pilot projects and policy experiments to strengthen the design, sequencing, and scale-up of successful policies and strategies.

• Promoting monitoring and evaluation systems and regulatory mechanisms for effective impact. Mobilizing a data revolution • Providing reliable and timely data on relevant indicators for evidence-based policymaking. • Collaborating to significantly improve data collection and analytical capacity in developing countries. Facilitating country-led strategies and investments • Facilitating implementation of country policies and strategies at national and subnational levels.

• Adapting successful food security and nutrition policies to local contexts. Strengthening inclusive and accountable partnerships • Engaging with established and new players including emerging countries, the private sector, and philanthropic organizations. • Developing country and global level accountability mechanisms for tracking progress.

Asked how much of funding is needed to achieve the goal of eradicating hunger, Dr Fan said that according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), investing 50 billion dollars per year can end hunger by 2025 (Schmidhuber and Bruinsma 2011).

The World Bank et al. estimate that 50 billion dollars over the next 10 years for a package of micronutrient interventions can help meet global stunting targets by 2025.

Additionally, IFPRI research found that investing in 100 dollars per child, or 75 billion dollars per year, can help reduce child stunting in four years (Hoddinott 2013). These estimates are just a fraction of the annual SDG funding requirement of trillions of dollars.

Photo: eideard.com

by Subhash Gatade

Whether serving food to the homeless is a crime?

Ask Arnold Arbott, known as Chef Arbott, a 90 year old man from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who along-with two other members of a Church charity faces potential jail term for at least six months for the same ‘offence’. In fact his name finds prominent mention in the police records in the past week for breaking the new city ordinance which has come into effect recently which characterises his act as breach of law, according to reports.

Talking to a newsperson he said:

“These are the poorest of the poor. They have nothing. They don’t have a roof over their head. And who could turn them away?”

Report published in ‘Independent’ tells us that he has been a campaigner of sorts who had sued the City of Fort Laurderdale when he was banned from feeding the homeless on the beach. (1999) and the court vindicated his stand and declared that the rule was against the constitution.

It may be mentioned here that starting in about 2006; several cities began arresting, fining, and otherwise oppressing private individuals and non-profits that feed the homeless and less fortunate.

Las Vegas happened to be the first city which banned feeding the homeless (2006) under the ostensible reason that ‘..[g]iving food to people already in the public park violated statutes requiring permits for gatherings of 25 or more people. “When the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada took issue with this interpretation of permit laws, the City took a more direct approach: “it explicitly outlawed the sharing of food with anyone who looked poor.” Another reason given by the city Mayor to enact such a regulation was to “push all homeless feedings indoors where it would be safer” but according to civil liberty activists it was not to protect the health of the homeless but “to protect city’s image in a tourist area”.

Coming back to Fort Lauderdale, Florida the new regulations – which has come into effect or is planned to in Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, and Philadelphia – ‘[r]equire groups to be at least 500 feet away from residential properties and food sites are restricted to one per city block, but charities have criticised the rules as forms of implementing social cleansing.’

It is possible that the international coverage which this case has attracted may deter the law authorities there to send Chef Arbott and his colleagues to jail, but the pertinent question remains how the state itself is keen not only to criminalise the destitute, the homeless, vulnerable sections of our society but also all those people who are genuinely concerned about their plight and want to do something about it.

For example, sometime back one heard of members of a group of women called ‘Women’s Institute’ were stopped from distributing flyers for a charity show. According to another report, Liza Day, 68 who was part of the group was confronted by a council litter warden, who warned her that ‘it was illegal to hand out the charity adverts.’ They were asked to ‘secure a licence from the council to legally hand flyers to passers-by.’ It was for the first time in six years they were told that they must not hand out flyers.

Question arises why the powers that be are keen that ordinary people’s concern towards plight of fellow human beings or their zeal to engage in voluntary action to do something about it is contained under a rubric of law, regulations, talk of order etc. Why they are worried about any unleashing of such concern?

Such disciplining of ordinary people helps establish the hegemony of the ruling classes and their ideas and helps defang any possible resistance to it. People are told that rules are sacrosanct and should be followed because they are in the broader interest of the society and they rarely learn to question the basis of rules themselves.

Look at the question of corporate tax dodgers and the treatment they receive at the hands of establishment.

Interestingly just when the news about Chef Arbott’s possible prosecution hit the headlines, reports of an investigation done by a consortium of Investigative Journalists which has collaborated with reporters from more than 25 countries became public. It found that more than 340 multinational corporations have avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes by obtaining secret deals in Luxembourg. The journalists obtained nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents which reveal that some of the world’s largest companies, including Pepsi, IKEA, AIG, Coach and Deutsche Bank, have channelled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg — a small country in Western Europe known as a “magical fairyland” for corporate tax dodgers. Some firms have secured effective tax rates of less than 1 percent.

In a write-up in Daily News, Juan Gonzalez describes how

‘[o]ver the past decade, multinational companies have funnelled more than $2 trillion in profits out of the U.S. and parked it overseas. Much of it is labelled “deferred taxes” and invested to make more money. They keep it overseas to evade paying our 35% federal corporate tax. Meanwhile, they’re lobbying fiercely in Washington for a huge one-year tax reduction to only 5% before they’ll agree to repatriate their money.’ He further adds that ‘Pfizer alone saved $11 billion with it, then turned around and reduced its workforce by more than 40,000, according to David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who routinely exposes corporate tax abuses.’

Anybody can gather from her/his experience that none of these corporate tax dodgers would ever be punished for their act unless and until ordinary people in the United States of America are able to raise their voice unitedly. Possibility is that – thanks to the Republican dominance in both houses of the Congress – they would be granted amnesty. Ten years back the then federal government had granted such a bonanza under President George W. Bush

One can see for oneself that if you dodge taxes i.e. ‘steal’ monies which are meant to go for the government coffers, then forget prosecution, you will be rewarded but if you try to go the Chef Arbott way, helping those very people who are living on the margins of society because of the structural inequalities, you would be sent to jail.

Welcome to USA, the strongest democracy in the world.

Global hunger and undernutrition could end by 2025

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