Hunger haunts India

India is among 29 countries with the highest levels of hunger, stunted children and poorly fed women, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s “Global Hunger Index 2010” released on Oct 11, 2010. Despite a strong economy that was last week predicted to overtake China’s within three years by The Economist magazine, India ranked ti7th among 85 countries in terms of access to food.

The report points to widespread hunger in a country that is the world’s largest producer of milk and edible oils, and the second- largest producer of wheat and sugar.

The country has a high “hunger score” of 24.1 and ranks behind all its neighbours, barring Bangladesh. Values between 20 and 29.9 on the index denote an “alarming” hunger situation.

Globally, the world is nowhere near meeting the target of the UN’s goal of halving the proportion of hungry people.

India also runs the world’s largest free-meal programme for school-going children. Yet, the 2010 hunger report reveals that more than 90 per cent of the world’s stunted children (whose height is low for their age) live in Asian countries, such as India and Bangladesh, apart from some Africa countries.

The highest regional hunger indices — suggesting the worst performers —are almost the same for South Asian countries, such as India, and Sub-Saharan African nations, such as Congo.

India is among countries with “hunger levels considerably higher that their gross national income per capita would suggest”. “It’s kind of ironic,” Ashok Gulati, Asia director of the Washington- based IFPRI said.

The IFPRI hunger index — complied in partnership with German NGO Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide —ranks countries on three equally weighted indicators: the proportion of undernourished, the proportion of underweight children under five, and the child mortality rate.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defines hunger as the consumption of fewer than 1,800 kilocalories a day — the minimum required to live a healthy and productive life.

What is Global Hunger Index

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a multidimensional statistical tool used to describe the state of countries’ hunger situation. The GHI measures progress and failures in the global fight against hunger. The GHI is updated once a year.

The Index was adopted and further developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and was first published in 200ti with the Welthungerhilfe, a German nonprofit organization (NGO). Since 2007, the Irish NGO Concern Worldwide joined the group as co-publisher.

The 2009 GHI was calculated for 121 developing countries and countries in transition, 84 of which were ranked. Every year, the GHI report focuses on a main topic: in 2009 the Index measures the connection between hunger and gender equality. In addition, the impact of the financial crisis on the hunger situation was analyzed. In additional to the yearly GHI, the Hunger Index for the States of India (ISHI) was published in 2008 and the Sub-National Hunger Index for Ethiopia was published in 2009.

Calculation of the Index

The Index ranks countries on a 100 point scale, with 0 being the best score ("no hunger") and 100 being the worst, though neither of these extremes is achieved in practice. The higher the score, the worse the food situation of a country. Values less than 4.9 reflect "low hunger", values between 5 and 9.9 reflect "moderate hunger", values between 10 and 19.9 indicate a "serious", values between 20 and 29.9 are "alarming", and values exceeding 30 are "extremely alarming" hunger problem.

The GHI combines three equally weighted indicators:

(1) the proportion of the undernourished as a percentage of the population;

(2) the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five; and 3) the mortality rate of children under the age of five.

The data used for the 2009 GHI are for the period from 2002 to 2007 – the most recent available global data for the three components of the GHI. The data on the proportion of undernourished come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and are for 2003-2005. Data on underweight of children under 5 are based on data collected by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and MEASURE DHS for the latest year in the period 2002–07 for which data are available and data on child mortality are for 2007 from  UNICEF. The 2009 GHI and the recalculated  base value of 1990 GHI are not directly comparable to previously calculated GHI values.

Global and regional trends

The 2009 GHI report shows how the hunger situation has developed since 1990 at global, regional, and national levels. Globally, the GHI fell nearly one forth from 20 to 15.2 points. Regardless of this positive trend, the global fight against hunger is stagnating and not reaching its goals fast enough. The global averages hide dramatic differences among regions and countries. 29 countries still have an alarming (20-29.9) or extremely alarming (≥ 30) hunger situation. The 2009GHI had fallen by 13% in Sub-Saharan  Africa compared with the1990 GHI, by about 25% in South Asia, and by 32% in the Near East and North Africa. Progress in Southeast Asia and Latin America was especially great, with the GHI decreasing by over 40%.

Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia share the highest regional GHI scores (22.1 and 23.0 respectively), but food insecurity in the two regions stems from different reasons: In South Asia, the major problem is a high prevalence of underweight children under five, which is a result of lower nutrition and educational status of women. In contrast, the high GHI in Sub-Saharan Africa is due to high child mortality rates and the high proportion of people who cannot meet their calorie requirements.

Hunger and Conflict

The report shows that conflict and political instability and economic collapse have increased hunger in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries and North Korea.

Hunger and Gender Inequality

A comparison of the GHI 2009 results with the respective rankings in the World Economic Forum’s 2008 Global Gender Gap Index shows that hunger and gender inequality— particularly inequalities in education and health—o'en go hand in hand. Hunger in India: 'The real cause is  lack of political will'

The poker is glowing red hot in the flames of the burning wood. Suklal Hembrom holds a leaf against his stomach and warily eyes the older man sit- ting on the other side of the fire. Suddenly Thakur Das takes hold of the poker and lunges towards the boy's stomach.

Every one in the village knows what should happen next. The child will scream loudly as the flesh begins to blister. Held down, he will writhe in agony. Again and again, the poker will jab at his belly. The more the child screams, the happier everyone will be, because the villagers of Mirgitand in India's Jharkhand state believe the only way they can "cure" the distended stomachs of their famished children is by branding them with pokers.

Das sees nothing wrong with the procedure. Nor does anyone in the village – most have scars of their own. Even though some children have died, the villagers continue because the alternative – providing enough nutritious food to sustain their children or paying for medical treatment – is simply not an option. In common with millions of others in the world's 11th largest economy, they face a daily ba7le to put even the most basic meal on the table.  

A report out today warns that even in a fast-growing economy like India, failure to invest in agriculture and support small farms has le' nearly half the country's children malnourished, with one fi'h of the one billion plus population going hungry.

Action Aid, which published the report ahead of next week's summit in New York to discuss progress on the millennium development goals, says hunger is costing the world's poorest nations £290bn a year – more than 10 times the estimated amount needed to meet the goal of halving global hunger by 2015.

India now has worse rates of malnutrition than sub-Saharan Africa: 43.5% of children under five are underweight and India ranks below Sudan and Zimbabwe in the Global Hunger Index. Even without last year's disastrous monsoon and the ensuing drought and crop failures, hunger was on the increase.

The government has promised a new food security bill to provide cheap food for the poor, but progress has been slow. The reality is that a country desperate to take its place at the world's top table is unwilling to commit to feeding its own population.

Last month the country's supreme court castigated the government for allowing 67,000 tonnes of badly stored grain to rot – enough to feed 190,000 people for a month – and ordered it to distribute 17.8m tonnes in imminent danger of ro8ng.

India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, protested, saying the court had crossed the line into policy-making and warning that distributing free food to the estimated 37% of the population living below the poverty line destroyed any incentives for farmers to produce. The court stood firm. It was an order, not a sugges tion, the judges said.

According to Action Aid, global hunger in 2009 was at the same level as in 1990. The charity urged developed countries to make good on £14bn pledge to fight hunger, announced at last year's G8 summit in Italy.

"On the eve of the most important development summit for five years, a billion people will be going to bed hungry," said Meredith Alexander, the charity's policy head. "Despite promises to the contrary, one-sixth of humanity doesn't get enough to eat. But we grow enough food to feed every man, woman and child on the planet. The real cause of hunger isn't lack of food, it is lack of political will."

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation announced today that the number of hungry people worldwide has dropped by 98 million to 925 million in the past year. However, Oxfam warned the decline is largely down to luck, such as two years of favourable weather pa7erns, rather than action from world leaders.

Abandoned to its fate

Mirgitand lies in hills about 195km east of the state capital Ranchi, at the end of a stony, vertiginous track. It is part of India, but at the same time not part of it: abandoned to its fate by the state, in the hands of Maoist Naxalite guerillas who hold the security forces at bay with apparent ease.

Das squats next to the fire, poking it with a stick. The poker lies cooling on the ground. This time he did not make contact, warned in advance that the child must not be harmed for the demonstration, though he came worryingly close.

Instead, the villagers instruct the children to show their scars. Molilal Kisku li's his shirt. He is five, with a large, distended belly. There are dark circles on the skin from where the poker was applied. There is not a child unscarred.

Manoranjan Mahta, 44, sits on a log, watching. He works for the post office, he says: he is an educated man. Yet he submi7ed his son, Hemanth, to the process.

"My son had a protruding belly. We went to many doctors, but they didn't cure it," he says.

"In this village when a child has a big pot belly we put a piece of banana leaf on the skin and then we put burning charcoal or a burning rod on the leaf. If the child is writhing in pain, the notion is that the germs are dying."

But it was Hemanth who succumbed. The wound became infected and he died on 21 December 2007. He was seven years old.

Struggle for survival
India may be thriving economically but it is still dogged by poverty and hunger.

A recent Oxford University report found 410 million people were living in poverty in just eight Indian states – more than in the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year's Global Hunger Index placed India in the "alarming" category, ranked 65 out of 84 countries, below even North Korea. Across the country, hundreds of millions are malnourished A study released in May warned that 66% of children under the age of six in Delhi's slums were malnourished. The report noted that the most vulnerable sections of society were not covered under government schemes which were supposed to support them.

In Jharkhand state, a study of 20 villages carried out last year recorded 13 deaths from starvation and 1,000 families suffering from chronic hunger syndrome. It is estimated that each year, nearly 50,000 children in the state die before their first birthday. It does not help that Jharkhand's doctors are among themost poorly paid in India, earning barely half what their contemporaries in Delhi might earn. This may explain why 2,200 of the 2,468 doctors recruited by the state five years ago have moved on. The state is said to need more than 800 primary health centres, although it has just 330.

The situation in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh is, if anything, worse than in Jharkhand. More than half a million children below the age of five have died in the past five years and ti0% of its children are categorised as malnourished. The government estimates that 37% of the population subsist on less than the official poverty line of 327 rupees (£4.57) per month in rural areas and 570 rupees in urban areas. In May, television and newspaper pictures showed 100,000 tonnes of wheat ro8ng in the open in the state.

And in Ganne, in U7ar Pradesh, children have resorted to eating mud. When the reports began to surface, officials apparently sent some food and told the villagers to keep quiet.

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