Writing lessons of relevance from the World Environmental Day 2013

Jun 05, 2013

Every morning, newspapers, reports and magazines are full of news about hunger and famine in Africa. Television images and pictures always haunt us.

 By Dr. Majwala Meaud Major

Every morning, newspapers, reports and magazines are full of news about hunger and famine in Africa. Television images and pictures always haunt us - stunted, bony bodies and long lines waiting for a meager bowl of gruel.

This famine- hunger in its acute form, the kind that no one could miss in life time, but hunger could come in another form. It is the day-in-day-out hunger that over 900 millions suffer. While chronic hunger may not usually make evening news, it takes more lives than famine.

Every year, this largely invisible hunger kills as 20-22 million people- more than twice the number who died each year during the World War II. 

We will discover that how we understand hunger determines what we actually think are its solutions. If we think of hunger only as numbers- numbers of people with few calories- the solution also appears to us in numbers- numbers of tones of food aid, numbers of tones of food wasted or lost in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption chain, or numbers of dollars in economic assistance or required to intervene with meaningful remedies to deal with hunger or famine.

But once we begin to think of and understand hunger as real people coping with the most painful emotions, we can ably perceive its roots and possibly aggregate correct solutions to manage it. 

A key indicator for micro-level food security and more broadly for poverty is the prevalence of child under-nutrition, availability and quality of nutrition/diet, that captures the food insecurity-poverty nexus by accounting for inequality and assessing progress towards sustainable development at  population level.

Younger children’s nutritional status tends to be most responsive to changes in living conditions and to be particularly vulnerable to food shortages and feeding-related sickness, due to high physiological nutrient requirements for growth, their special dietary needs, and their often more direct exposure to adverse health conditions and dependence on adults for their feeding/nutritional needs.

Poverty is characterised by insufficient income to acquire quantity and quality of food needed, living in disease-prone environment, poor access to quality health/nutritional services and lack of education and nutritional-relevant knowledge.

We need to use this year’s World Environmental Day theme of “Think, Eat, Save” to inform and  stimulate debate on key policy priorities for a joint vision on food security, poverty reduction, environmental protection in light of enhancing a green economy for sustainable development.

The theme significantly enhances our efforts towards efficient farming systems to ensure increased productivity of food, agro-processing for quality durable and value-added food supply, and retool the allocation of public spending on food preservation and storage infrastructure to effectively check on food wastage and unnecessary losses in the production and supply chain.

 Worldwide, at least one-third of all food produced, worth around $ 1 trillion, gets lost or wasted in food production and consumption systems, according to the data from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO 2013).

Food loss occurs mostly at the production stages, harvesting, processing and distribution while waste typically takes place at the retailer and consumer-end of the supply chain.

In Uganda we are lost on the road to food sovereignty- the government food stores (Silos), the foods and beverages industry are only historical references yet the developing private sector seems not so much interested in offering a helping hand interns of investments in food storage infrastructure or interventions in form of corporate social responsibility to minimise food waste and loss at different levels or bail out small scale farmers to produce enough food for sustainable consumption.

Small-scale farmers are responsible for producing much of our food supplies, yet lack of financial services often prevents them from making productivity-enhancing investments.

Therefore, enabling rural financial services in form of micro finance, rural saving and credit facilities and micro-insurance for smallholders is vital and urgent.

Change of lifestyles in favour of a more disciplined food policy with practices aimed at ensuring sustainable consumption that is, ‘doing more and better with less’ through effectively reducing resource use.

Even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed the 870 million hungry people in the world.

The writer is the President of Sustainable World Initiative – East Africa

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