Globalization and World Hunger: An Independent Monitoring of Progress
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Speaker:  Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen

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Introduction by Jonathan Taylor

            Our next speaker, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, really doesn’t need an introduction to this group, because he was in 2001 the World Food Prize Laureate. I think the award, the prize related very substantially to his work at IFPRI and particularly perhaps to the 2020 Vision Project.

            Per is now the Babcock Professor of Food and Nutrition Policy at Cornell. He is also a professor at the Danish Agricultural University, but currently he is importantly chairman of the Expert Group on Hunger of the World Economic Forum, and I think it’s that work that he will be telling us about this morning, Per, please.

Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen
2001 World Food Prize Laureate
Chair, Expert Group on Hunger, World Economic Forum
H.E. Babcock Professor of Food and Nutrition Policy, Cornell University

            Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is indeed a pleasure to be back at the World Food Prize celebration and to participate in honoring this year’s laureate, Catherine Bertini, who as I believe you all know, has made tremendous contributions towards the eradication of hunger in the world.

            At its last annual meeting in January of this year, the World Economic Forum created the so-called Global Governance Program. The purpose of this program is to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Goals by providing an independent monitoring of the progress towards achieving these goals and to make sure that those decision-makers, whoever, have agreed to help achieve those goals, don’t forget what they agreed to, by trying to contribute to the awareness about these goals and the need to do something to achieve them.

            The World Economic Forum created an expert group for each of the Millennium Goals, and I’m privileged to be chairman of the hunger group. This group is a very small group; it consists of eminent individuals from developing as well as industrialized countries.

            What I’d like to do today is to give you a very brief progress report. The final report will be presented at the World Economic Forum meeting in January, and what I’m going to say today I would have to take sole responsibility, because the final report has not been cleared with the other members.

            Let me first show you a few data as to where I think we’re going. First of all, these numbers are not exact. Whether there were 800 million malnourished people in year 1990 or ‘91, ‘92 or 700 million or 900 million, we don’t know for sure. It doesn’t really matter – they’re big numbers. There is work going on now in collaboration between IFPRI and FAO that indicates preliminarily that these numbers are too low, that in fact there is more hunger out there than what these numbers indicate.

            This shows what happened during the 1990s; as already pointed out by the previous speaker, we didn’t do too well. There was a decrease in the number of hungry people from about 815 million to about 790, in other words, virtually no change. According to these numbers, if we extrapolate – and this is not a prediction, this is an extrapolation towards 2015 – we will have virtually no change in the number of hungry people over the next 12 years. By year 2015 we will still have close to 800 million.

            Compare that to the World Food Summit goal of reducing the number of hungry people by half to about 400 million, and you see the gap as being roughly the same 400 million that we said we were going to reduce. So there’s going to be virtually no progress if we continue with business as usual.

            Now, Sakiko already mentioned that during the 1990s we didn’t do very well. So hopefully that extrapolation is going to be wrong. Hopefully, we will do much better of the next 12 years, but it isn’t exactly clear that we will. And I will come back to that in a minute.

            Now, one of the reasons that we have not seen an increase in the number of hungry people is that a few countries, particularly China, made tremendous progress in reducing the number of hungry people. So we pulled out China and then looked at the data for the rest of the world. And I should say that these data come from 74 countries that include virtually all of the people who suffer from hunger.

            Now, if you take out China, we have a starting point of about 620 million in the early 1990s. That went up to about 670 million towards the end of the 90s, and if we extrapolate that line, we would then end up with close to 800 million hungry people in the world outside of China, as compared to reducing by half the number by 311.

            So you see a dramatic gap. Not only won’t we achieve the goal, but we’re moving in the wrong direction. That, of course, is why it is so important to look behind the global numbers. Some of you may have seen different numbers to what I showed earlier. And the reason is that, as we proceed towards 2015, at the global level it looks like we’re making more progress than we are. Why? Because some countries are beginning to show negative numbers. Well, you can’t have negative numbers when you’re talking about people – when you get to zero, that’s it. When we take the negative numbers out, then, of course, what we see is what I am showing you here.

            In China, for example, if you extrapolate the lines, the development during the 1990s, to 2015, China will have a fairly large negative number of poor people; that makes absolutely no sense, of course. So that is one of the reasons why, if we limit ourselves to the global data, we are kidding ourselves; we think we’re doing better than we actually are.

            The point we’re making in the Expert Group is that every country needs to achieve the goal. We think they need to achieve the World Food Summit goal of reducing by half the number of hungry people. Every country is obligated, it seems to us, to do so; because otherwise, most of the world can hide behind the progress in a couple of big countries, such as China, Nigeria and a few others.

            The Millennium Development Goal is easier to achieve. The Millennium Development Goal says we want to reduce by half the percentage of the total population that is malnourished. And the percentage in the early nineties was a little less than 16%, so that needs to be reduced to a little less than 8%.

            So you see the gap as being somewhat smaller, but we still have the gap. In other words, we do not believe that, with business as usual, meaning what happened during the 1990s, even the Millennium Development Goal will be achieved at the global level.

            China, of course, is a major actor in this. We take China out, and what you see is a much larger gap between the Millennium goal and what would actually happen with business as usual.

            So we need to disaggregate, and this is what we have tried to do here. We obviously have tables with each and every one of the 74 countries used for this summary, and I’ll be glad to send that information to anybody that is interested. I didn’t bring it here today.         

            About 26 out of those 74 countries will see an increase in the number of hungry people between the early nineties and 2015. That’s about one third of the countries that we are talking about. About between one fifth and one fourth of the countries will see a decrease, an improvement, if you like – 17 countries corresponding to about 23%. Almost all of those countries will meet the Millennium Development goal with business as usual, 16 out of the 17 countries. Only 12 of them will achieve the World Food Summit goal.

            And let me repeat that the difference between the two is that the Summit goal calls for a reduction in the percentage of the total population that is malnourished, and because the population, of course, grows, that is an easier goal than reducing the number by half, which is what the World Food Summit goal states.

            About 6 of these 12 countries will, in fact, according to these extrapolations, bring the number of hungry people to zero by 2015. China, again, is a major actor in this, but there are five other countries that would also do this.

            Now, we don’t believe in linear extrapolations in the sense that they will actually achieve the level or not of a single hungry person in the world. Even the richest countries have hungry people. But we think that it indicates that they would get very close.

            Now, let me talk a little about the assessment of progress. We looked at basically four different characteristics for the world community: intentions, initiatives, implementations, and whether the world is on track to achieve the two goals.

            We think there are lots of good intentions out there. We think that lots of initiatives have been taken. And let me explain that we’re looking here at the last year or two – we’re not going back to 1990; we’re looking at what has happened during the last 12-24 months. We think that there is very little implementation, so we give a score for implementation that is very low. And we do not believe, as I have already pointed out, that the world is on track to achieve either of the two goals by 2015. This again is based on action that we have seen during the last couple of years.

            Now, the World Economic Forum wants us to give the world community a score, one number. Of course, we disaggregate the world community into the private sector, the public national sector, the international public sector, and the nongovernmental organization civil society. We do all of that disaggregation, and then we come up with a score.

            Preliminarily, we are giving the world community a score of three. A score of ten means that we are on track and we think we will achieve the World Food Summit goal, and that is the goal we think should be achieved. We think the Millennium goal is too easy, it’s too little. So we think that on a score from 0-10, we are very low, probably around 3. We give very high score for good intentions and for initiatives; we give very low score for implementation.

            Now, we also looked at the action this last year compared to the year before. In other words, is the trend in the right direction? Are we doing better this year than last year? And what we find is that, yes, many more initiatives have been taken this last 12 months, and again with very good intentions, but virtually none of it has been implemented.

            Now, let me give you the good news as far as we can tell. Rapid progress in China – and I put that first for a very good reason. That is extremely important to keep in mind, because it is a very large share of the world population. During the nineties alone, China reduced the number of hungry people by 80 million, and they continue to implement policies that are focused explicitly on geographic areas where there is a great deal of poverty and hunger.

            Secondly, we think NEPAD, the program for African development, offers tremendous promise, yet it falls into the intentions and initiatives category at this point. The implementation is pretty much limited to getting the program going, rather than doing something for hungry people. We hope that NEPAD will, in fact, materialize into something that will put food in the stomachs of hungry Africans. But we cannot make that judgment as of yet.

            Third, the prospect of ending conflict in Congo and Sedan – we think those prospects are very, very promising, and we want to highlight those. We want to highlight the declarations by a few heads of state, including the president of Brazil that hunger eradication is the principal priority for their government. Now, again, these are good intentions and initiatives are following, but at least in Brazil, there is actually quite a bit of action now being implemented in response to President Lula’s strong focus on eradicating hunger and poverty.

            Up until recently we thought that one of the great positives was a new and progressive government in Kenya. Now we are less certain. I think the jury is still out as to how that development, how that government is developing.

            We think the biofortification initiative that Peter already mentioned this morning offers tremendous possibilities, and here action is going on, it is being implemented in terms of research. And for those of you who may not be familiar with the biofortification program, let me just mention very briefly, it is a program to breed into stable food commodities a higher content of essential micronutrients, which will be absorbable by low-income people who suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, such as iron deficiency anemia, such as vitamin A deficiencies and such as zinc deficiencies. We think that program offers tremendous potential.

            And the last one I want to mention – we have others, of course, but these we consider to be the most important – the last one is the successes in the use of BT cotton seed in China, India and South Africa, and next year I believe that seed will find its way into West Africa as well.

            As I understand it, more than five million farmers in China, with an average farm size of less than one hectare, are now doubling or tripling their incomes, reducing the use of pesticide, and in fact achieving both their own economic goals as well as environmental goals by applying that particular technology.

            Now we’ll turn to the bad news, what we consider the greatest negatives and the disappointments. And I have already referred to it. There is a tremendous lack of action to match rhetoric and expressed goals. Leaders of governments from more than 180 countries can get together and in all seriousness agree on goals which they immediately forget once they get home, probably in the airplane on the way home. I’m now a professor at a university, so I can say these things. But I also think they are true.        There is very little follow-up, and there is an immense amount of rhetoric out there.

            Related to this, one of the goals that tend to be achieved, goals agreed upon at international conferences, is to write more plans and more strategies. It seems that if we can’t quite get our action together, we write another paper. We are now writing poverty reduction strategy papers for a very large number of countries, the so-called PRSPs. And so far there has been virtually no follow-up action to these strategy papers. Some of them were finished about three years ago; others are of more recent origin.

            And we in the Expert Group feel that this is one of the most critical barriers to achieving the hunger goals that we are talking about – the lack of action and the immense amount of effort spent on talking about what we ought to do.

            Thirdly, we feel there is a lack of priority on agriculture and rural areas by developing country governments and by international development assistance. And Peter McPherson already made this point. The investment to be made in rural areas is much larger than what is currently taking place.

            And Peter McPherson explained why that is so important. Seventy percent, more than two thirds of the hungry people, live in rural areas; they depend on agriculture, directly or indirectly. Investments in such things as agricultural research for developing countries, are down; they are very low. On the average, developing countries spend about half of one percent of the value of agricultural output on research. In the United States, if you count public and private investment, we spend five percent, ten times as much.

            Investment in rural infrastructure is very, very limited. Investment in primary health care, primary education in rural areas – very, very limited. The domestic markets, the internal markets in developing countries tend not to function, at least in the low-income part of the developing world, because governments are not doing what needs to get done in order for the private sector to do its job in the marketing area.

            We have already talked about the failure in Cancun, and it really was a massive failure for poor people in developing countries. Let me make a point here, that the issue on subsidies is not that the societies, the countries within the OECD, the industrialized countries, wish to transfer money to rural areas – that’s not the issue. The issue is that the transfer is linked, and in order to maintain that, the OECD countries, the developed countries, have to put in place high import tariffs. That’s the issue as far as hunger is concerned. If the United States government wants to transfer millions or billions of dollars to rural areas, as long as it is not done at the expense of poor people in developing countries, I see no problem. And there are many ways of delinking the subsidies from quantity produced.

            The point is not that American or European or Japanese farmers should no longer receive subsidies. The point is they should receive subsidies in such a way that poor people in developing countries have equal competitive opportunity both in our markets and in theirs – that’s really the issue. And, of course, these trade-destroying subsidies, those that are linked to quantity produced, will hit poor people, and they will cause hunger in three ways.

            First, they keep people out of our markets in the industrialized countries for such things as sugar and cotton and other commodities that developing countries are perfectly capable of competing on if they had a chance.

            Secondly, they ruin the markets in the developing countries themselves because we are dumping our surpluses, whether we call it food aid or we call it export subsidies or we call it something else.

            And third, these surplus productions that happen in OECD are depressing international prices, and there are two outcomes of that:  One is poor farmers in developing countries are not able to make money to get themselves out of poverty; and secondly, there is very little investment in rural infrastructure and all of the other things that need to be invested in rural areas in developing countries because the prices are so low that the rate of return that’s required for making those investments is way too low.

            So there are a number of implications of these trade-destroying subsidies that hopefully we can deal with.

            Now, let me quickly add that if these trade-destroying subsidies were eliminated, the biggest gainers would not be poor people in developing countries. No. They would be Americans, Europeans and Japanese. So you can wonder why we aren’t doing it.

            The fifth point I want to raise here is the decreasing development assistance; and that has already been mentioned. I want to make one point that hasn’t been mentioned so far.

            There is currently discussion in the U.S. Congress to increase U.S. development assistance by 50%, the so-called Millennium Development Fund, to the tune of five billion U.S. dollars per year once it is fully implemented. I think that’s a wonderful opportunity to begin to change the very low level of development assistance that’s coming out of the United States. Hopefully, that will pass Congress, be approved; and hopefully these good intentions and this initiative will be turned into action. But so far we haven’t seen the action.

            Sixth, too slow progress on debt relief; and where debt relief does occur, we are asking developing countries to jump through so many hoops that they may be better off not taking the debt relief. And that’s what I here call diplomatically excessive conditionalities. Why don’t we start trusting developing countries, give them the debt relief, and hope and trust that they can spend that money in what is best for them.

            There are a number of other things, positive and negative, that I could mention. One of the other negative things, of course, is that we have not paid up on the HIV/AIDS initiative, the international HIV/AIDS initiative that was created. The money that we promised for the HIV/AIDS eradication or control has not forthcome to the full extent.

            Now, let me end my presentation, Mr. Chairman, not on a negative note but on a positive note. There is no doubt, in my opinion – and I believe I can speak for the Expert Group as well – that not only the Millennium goal for hunger, but also the World Food Summit goal can be achieved in time by 2015. As pointed out by the previous speaker, a lot can be done in 15 years. We have 12 years left. We can do a lot. But somehow business as usual has to be changed to new business. And that is what we don’t quite see, except for a few countries.

            So it isn’t as though it’s a foregone conclusion that these goals will not be achieved. It is in the hands of decision-makers, including those of us in this room, whether we want to put a high enough priority on this or whether we just want to continue to talk about it.

            And I thank you for your attention.

 Jonathan Taylor

             Thank you very much. We have got time for two or three questions. I think there’s been a curious unity in the two talks. We’ve had a lot of very somber data but also some gleams of optimism. A lot can be done in a generation, and you said the same. But good intentions have to be translated into action. I think that is your bottom line. But let’s have some questions, comments or questions? Please on the right there, and then we’ll go to the left