Hunger still stalks Canada and the world

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Twenty years after world leaders gathered in Quebec City to declare a war on hunger, 780 million people are still hungry, undernourished or starving around the world. And more than 850,000 Canadians use food banks

by BARRY WILSON

Ever since 1798, when English preacher Robert Malthus predicted mass starvation because population growth was exceeding food production, the Malthusian apocalyptic vision has held some sway.

Anti-consumption advocates use it as an argument for reducing excess while doomsayers add it to the list of pending calamities – climate, war, disease and hunger – to make their end-of-the-world arguments.

Meanwhile, science's true believers point to the fact that population has more than trebled since Malthus and, except in extreme circumstances, mass starvation has been averted in large part because of more efficient and higher-yielding plants created by science.

So it was with some bravado and optimism that world and agricultural leaders gathered in Canada two decades ago to proclaim yet another war on hunger. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), world leaders met in Quebec City, where it all began in 1945, to celebrate and to proclaim an ambitious goal.

They marched to a statue commemorating the first recognized Canadian farmer – Louis Hébert – and then returned to the luxurious Chateau Frontenac Hotel to proclaim a vision and then to retire for a good meal.

World hunger would be reduced by half within 20 years as part of a commitment to make the turning of the new millennium five years later a meaningful milestone – the millennial goal, it was called. Speeches were made about meeting the goal. What an outrage that hunger existed in a world of food plenty!

FAO's new director general Jacques Diouf was there, as was Canadian agriculture minister Ralph Goodale and a plethora of politicians and farm leaders. At the time, the accepted number of chronically hungry, malnourished or starving was 800 million, then one-fifth of the world's population.

Two decades on, the number of chronically hungry in the world as calculated by the FAO in late 2015 was 780 million, a smaller portion of the world's population than in 1995 for sure, exaggerated by current wars and refugee flows, but also a sure sign that ending hunger is as elusive a goal as it was in Malthus's time.

And lest Canadians think that this is a problem for "them" in some poor or drought-stricken country, the latest report from Food Banks Canada (FBC) is a sobering wake-up call. Hunger stalks this bountiful land as well, some of it hidden in rural Canada.

In late 2015, FBC reported that, in its annual spring survey, more than 850,000 Canadians – adults and children– were found to have picked up food from food banks on a surveyed month last year to stave off hunger.

And the increase last year is chronic – more than 26 per cent higher than when Canada entered the "Great Recession" in 2008.

The reasons are multiple – poverty, job loss, ill health, addiction – but the reality is the same. Canada is home to close to one million people who depend on charity to eat. And after December, when charity and giving are the norm, January is the cruelest month when giver attention moves on.

Politicians and farm groups like to talk about the need for a national food policy. If that ever happens under this new activist Liberal government, which seems to have a plan for everything other than agriculture, will the focus be broader than producers, buyers, manufacturers, processors and exporters? Will it include anything close to the United Nations call for a "right to food" for Canada's hungry? BF

Barry Wilson is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery specializing in agriculture.