Chewing on food facts

Global hunger is usually a popular topic on World Food Day and one that never ceases to lose its importance – a trend that Sri Lanka is surely part of.

The United Nations focused World Food Day talks on Tuesday on lowering food prices in the face of droughts in Australia and the United States and a drop in harvests in Europe and the Black Sea region.

A meeting at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome chaired by French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll brought together ministers from 20 countries including major producers and import-dependent developing countries.

The talks were aimed at boosting the effectiveness of measures to address food price volatility and to reduce its impact on the most vulnerable but is likely to have little effect. Global food prices rose by 1.4 per cent last month, after holding steady for two months, as cereals, meat and dairy prices climbed. The food import bill for poor countries is therefore estimated to rise by 3.7 percentage points from last year to $36.5 billion.

FAO estimates that about 870 million people in the world – or one in eight humans – suffer from hunger, saying the figure is “unacceptably high” even though it has gone down from more than a billion in the early 1990s.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, believes that figure rises to 1.5 billion people if you include malnourishment, which hampers the physical and psychological developments of children.

The Global Food Security Index has ranked Sri Lanka 62nd out of 105 countries and while such numbers make little sense to the layman, it is a confidence boost to see the island ahead of India and Pakistan. However, this is the first time that this index has been published after being launched on 10 July 2012 and gives a good opportunity to examine the core issues of food affordability, availability, access, and quality across countries.

Sri Lanka, being a developing country and emerging from three decades of war, can rightly be proud of the ranking that it has received. Yet, it is also a strong agriculture-reliant country with a population that relies heavily on food consumption. It has also been pointed out numerous times that local agriculture needs to be made more productive through fresh technology and human resource advancement to effectively tap into an export market.

In addition, food security in Sri Lanka is heavily threatened by the cost of food with the main complaint against successive governments being that they have been incapable of keeping prices moderate. An inconsistent and expensive transport network also makes food expensive with post-harvest losses regularly hitting the 40 per cent mark. This has resulted in massive wastage and artificial price increases since Government outlets such as Lak Sathosa have a limited impact on the overall cost of living.

More recent events, such as the severe drought that is still keeping its parched hold on regions such as Polonnaruwa, will provide their own challenges to food security. Beyond the effect it will have on the economy is the environmental carnage it can wreck on a people heavily dependent on fertile land. The disconcerting spread of kidney disease among farmers and the virtual disappearance of small fish and birds due to excessive use of chemicals while farming are all results of the quest for food security.

Unless food security issues are addressed in a meaningful and sustainable manner, Sri Lanka’s placement on indexes will remain limited to a pointless number.