Two years ago, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation launched a petition to fight hunger with the slogan: One Billion People Live In Chronic Hunger And I’m Mad As Hell.
Since then, more than 3.4 million people, among them celebrities, have added their voices to the online campaign calling on governments to make the elimination of hunger their top priority.
But outrage over the “horrifying figure” of one billion hungry people around the world, as it was described by former FAO head Jacques Diouf, has turned to embarrassment in the light of growing doubts about the accuracy of the number.
Many researchers say the estimate was simply too high. “The fact that it’s one billion is a much better story and that’s why it stays in people’s minds,” said Richard King, a food policy expert with Oxfam.
The controversy led the Committee on World Food Security, a top-level UN forum, to urge the FAO to overhaul its calculations using better data and methodology and to call for a set of internationally agreed food-security indicators.
The first fruits are due in October when a new estimate of the number of undernourished people will be published along with revisions for previous years as part of the FAO’s annual report on food insecurity.
The figures will incorporate fresher data on world food supplies and more timely and comprehensive household consumption surveys from different countries, said Carlo Cafiero, a senior statistician.
The report will also include supplemental indicators of hunger, such as the share of household budgets spent on food.
“If you only present one number, there is a tendency to over-interpret it and take it as if it were capturing everything, but we want to try and be more explicit in recognising the various dimensions of food insecurity,” Mr Cafiero said.
Nutritionists have long complained that the FAO’s hunger estimates focused too narrowly on calorie intake, ignoring the bigger picture – protein, vitamin and mineral deficiencies in diets and the serious health problems they cause.
Calculating the number of hungry people around the world at any given moment, let alone predicting how that number is likely to change in the future, is no easy task.
Models for working out how many people don’t have enough to eat are not so precise or forward-looking, partly dueto lags in the release of national-level statistics.
Shifting economic conditions alter the buying power of the poor and food harvests – increasingly affected by extreme weather – fluctuate, causing price volatility.
When the FAO came under pressure to say how much hunger was increasing due to skyrocketing food prices and the global financial crisis in 2008, it decided to combine US Department of Agriculture projections of how economic turmoil would hurt food production, consumption and trade with its own hunger estimates of previous years and extrapolate from there.
It estimated a “historic high” of 1.02 billion undernourished people or around one-sixth of humanity, in 2009.
But problems emerged with the assumptions behind the number. Economic conditions did not turn out to be as disastrous as anticipated and food production and consumption held up better than expected.
In addition, prices didn’t rise as much as feared in some developing countries, like India and China, because they used export bans and subsidies to keep them down. Finally, people were able to maintain the amount of calories they ate by switching to cheaper foods and cutting spending on other basic needs like education and healthcare.