Scientific Research Focus on “To End Hunger”

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO UN), Hunger Report, Ending hunger is a major objective of the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), hunger is the term used to define periods when populations are experiencing severe food insecurity - means that they go for entire days without eating due to lack of money, lack of access to food, or other resources [1]. Hunger is strongly interconnected with poverty, and it involves interactions among an array of social, political, demographic, and societal factors.

An attention is must in the following topics to put an end card for poor hunger:

Global Hunger Index (GHI).
World Food Program’s 2020.
Global Report on Food Crises.
Smallholder-farming.
Ceres2030.

The two main international institutions are the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), joined forces to estimate what it would cost to end hunger, and the contribution that donors need to make. On their analysis focused on the cost of ending hunger through increased spending on social safety nets directly targeting consumers, farm support to expand production and increase poor farmers’ income, and rural development that reduces inefficiencies along the value chain and enhances rural productivity [2]. These institutes found that it will cost on average an extra USD 11 billion per year of public spending from now to 2030 to end hunger. In this case, USD 7 billion will come from poor countries themselves and the additional spending of USD 4 billion needs to come from donors. Importantly, this public spending will generate on average an additional USD 5 billion of private investment per year until 2030.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and national levels. The GHI is designed to raise awareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger, provide a means to compare the levels of hunger between countries and regions, and call attention to the areas of the world in greatest need of additional resources to eliminate hunger [3].

Figure 1. 2020 Global Hunger Index results: Interactive World Map [3].

In the 2020 Global Hunger Index, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, China, are the first five countries with a GHI score of less than 5 as shown in Figure 1. With a score of fewer than 5, these countries have a level of hunger that is low. In this report, India ranks 94^th out of the 107 countries with sufficient data to calculate the 2020 GHI scores. With a score of 27.2, India has a level of hunger that is serious [See an overview of GHI calculation]. Therefore, The Indian government should take this as an serious issue and try to eliminate hunger. Meanwhile, India has slightly improved the GHI than last two years reports, India has ranked 103 among 119 countries in the year 2018 and 102 out of 117 countries in the year 2019.

India Today news reported that “At present, India lags behind Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia among others on the GHI. Only 13 out of 107 countries, are including Rwanda, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Chad among others have fared worse than India” on 17^th October 2020 [4].

The UN mentioned that around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population but more than 690 million people still go hungry every day [5]. According to the World Food Program’s 2020 Global Report on Food Crises, the last year has seen at least 130 million more people at risk of hunger as a result of COVID-19 [6].

The World Bank too mentioned that “One in nine people suffer from chronic hunger, more than 1 billion people are undernourished, and 3.1 million children die every year due to hunger and malnutrition. In this case, the Bank takes this issue as seriously and helping the countries sustainably, manage landscapes such as farms, forests, watersheds and coastal fisheries so that they are more productive.

An international research consortium called Ceres2030 team find that “two-thirds of hungry people lives in rural areas. Of some 570 million farms in the world, more than 475 million are smaller than 2 hectares. Rural poverty and food insecurity go hand in hand, and yet the Ceres2030 researchers found that the overwhelming majority of studies assessed - more than 95% - were not relevant to the needs of smallholders and their families” [7,8].

Ceres2030 researchers raise the following question: so why aren’t more researchers answering more practical questions about ending hunger that are relevant to smallholder farmers? Many of the reasons can be traced to the changing priorities of agricultural-research funding.

Smallholder-farming research might not be considered sufficiently original, globally relevant or world-leading for journal publication. This lack of a sympathetic landing point in journals is something that all publishers must consider in the light of the Ceres2030 team’s findings” said Jaron Porciello, a data scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Our SNB team recommended this research article to enrich our viewer’s knowledge to know about the awareness of ending hunger and its societal factors. Government, non-government organizations, social workers, researchers, and journal publishers as well as the UN must focus to achieve the SDG to end hunger, will require an order of magnitude with more research engagement for smallholders and their families. Thus, their needs and the route to ending hunger have been neglected for too long which needs to be eradicated soon.

References

State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World 2020 online summary, http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/.
https://www.iisd.org/publications/ending-hunger-what-would-it-cost.
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/results.html.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/global-hunger-index-2020-india-ranks-94-1732452-2020-10-17.
Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero Hunger: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg2.
2020 Global Report on Food Crises (Food Security Information Network, 2020).
Feast and famine in agricultural research, Nat. Plants, 6, 1195 (2020).
To end hunger, science must change its focus, Nat. 586, 336 (2020).

Blog Written By

Dr. A. S. Ganeshraja

Assistant Professor

National College, Tiruchirappalli

Tamil Nadu, India

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Editors

Dr. K. Rajkumar

Dr. S. Chandrasekar

Reviewers

Dr. Y. Sasikumar

Dr. S. Thirumurugan

Dr. K. Vaithinathan

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