
World hunger not going down and obesity still growing – UN report - onion2k
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/15-07-2019-world-hunger-is-still-not-going-down-after-three-years-and-obesity-is-still-growing-un-report
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Someone1234
It seems odd to contrast the two since there's no direct relation.

Hunger/famine is generally caused by regional problems for example poor
infrastructure or security. If lack of infrastructure doesn't allow the
movement of goods (e.g. food/aid) or water, it doesn't matter how much
"excess" food there is elsewhere you cannot get it to where it is needed, and
ditto with moving supplies into areas safely.

If you want to combat hunger, build more roads, water pipes, and improve
regional security. Pointing out that there's a spare/excess $1 bag of corn on
the opposite side of the world isn't constructive, because it would cost $100
to get that $1 bag of corn to where hunger is (e.g. sea, train, then air drop,
and that ignores corruption/spoilage).

Obesity is problematic. But it has nothing directly to do with hunger. If it
was that easy to re-allocate/re-locate food to the hungry we would already be
doing so. But per the article remote and war-torn areas like African nations
remain the number one source of severe hunger.

Plus growing food nearer to where it is needed is always cheapest since
transport (and related fuel) costs can far exceed the actual food's value.
Which brings up a related problem: Water rights/water security. Even if you
can build pipes, a region may lack water flow into it if it has been diverted
(or destroyed by global climate change).

~~~
huffmsa
We might not relocate it though. Dumping massive amounts of international
sourced food typically drives down prices so much that the local producers
can't make enough money to keep their operations going, and close up shop.

Then when the food aid is turned off, the population has both grown to the
level that aid could support, and the local production capacity is less than
it originally started, meaning more famine related conflict.

~~~
Someone1234
That's an absolutely fantastic point and I thank you for raising it.

This is another example of where infrastructure pays more dividend than simply
dropping aid onto areas. You truck in concrete and build a water-way, a region
could eat for one hundred years, whereas if you bus in aid they can eat until
the aid runs out (and it competes/undercuts local food).

This is why China's effort to build infrastructure (on loan) in this
regions[0] is kind of a double-edged sword. While China's motivations may be
anything but pure (regional influence/military supply lines/indebting poor
countries) the side-effort could be reduced hunger/famine regardless.

[0] [https://africacenter.org/spotlight/implications-for-
africa-c...](https://africacenter.org/spotlight/implications-for-africa-china-
one-belt-one-road-strategy/)

------
mapcars
There is information that we have enough food to feed 1.5 population of the
world, but up to 40% of food is just wasted. To say this is a disaster is not
enough to describe the situation.

It's not even that we have to change the diet or something, if we could
deliver wasted food to whoever needs it that would be enough.

>Roughly 30 to 40% of food in both the developed and developing worlds is lost
to waste, though the causes behind this are very different. ... For example,
in India, it is estimated that 35 to 40% of fresh produce is lost because
neither wholesale nor retail outlets have cold storage

[https://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-
to-f...](https://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-to-
feed-10-billion-people-so-why-does-hunger-still-exist-8086d2657539)

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41173771_Food_Secur...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41173771_Food_Security_The_Challenge_of_Feeding_9_Billion_People)

~~~
swarnie_
Do you know what the issue was refrigeration is? We've had ice machines for
170 years and wide adoption of home fridges since the 1930's

It cant be a technology issue...

~~~
azernik
In food logistics this challenge is called the "cold chain" \- you need to
build a _complete supply chain_ , from harvesting to production to retail to
consumer, with temperature control at every point in the way. It takes quite a
lot of capital to create, and good infrastructure to maintain.

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FiReaNG3L
Too many people on the planet - feed these 820M hungry people and in 20 years
you have 2B hungry people instead. We should provide for a better quality of
life for fewer people (in all countries), but given human nature, population
control is not exactly feasible.

Somewhat related - every natural population experiencing exponential growth
over the long term collapses. And even drastic measures like reducing the
population by half only buys you one 'doubling time' which since the 1900s for
humans is a very short time... anyone seeing the population graph and thinks
this is sustainable is crazy.

[https://cnx.org/resources/87c6cf793bb30e49f14bef6c63c51573/F...](https://cnx.org/resources/87c6cf793bb30e49f14bef6c63c51573/Figure_45_05_01.jpg)

~~~
remcob
This is a rude misconception. Family size is mostly related to child mortality
rates. In better off places the population growth is neutral or negative and
evidence suggests this is causal, so better circumstance lead to _less_
growth, not more. (Source: Hans Rosling's Factfullness)

~~~
jbob2000
The question then is, can we lift enough people out of poverty before they
reproduce themselves (and us) into extinction?

~~~
hackeraccount
The idea that poverty is harder on the environment then wealth is one that
people are having a hard time wrapping their minds around.

I think it plays against the idea that we should be punished for success and
rewarded for frugality. The idea that you can just pay money to get out of
environmental problems strikes everyone as unfair.

I think that's a fair description of how the world really works though.

~~~
yesbabyyes
I think you have a sadly distorted view of the world. How do you believe that
money paid affects your surroundings, really?

------
hycaria
> Children under 5 who are overweight (high weight-for-height): 40 million
> (5.9%)

> School-age children and adolescents who are overweight: 338 million

> Adults who are obese: 672 million (13% or 1 in 8 adults)

Impressed that there is overall more overweight/obese people than starving
ones.

~~~
Kaiyou
Diets aren't that popular nowadays, so I'm not surprised.

~~~
hanniabu
Ot maybe it's because of all the poison in processed food meant to make people
want to eat more of it and also drive down costs with unhealthy filler
ingredients and cheaper alternative ingredients

~~~
Kaiyou
Eating that type of food is still a choice. The Internet and an abundance of
human knowledge is at the tip of the finger of most people.

------
cagenut
This is, IMHO, the ultimate counter-point to the Hans Rosling / Bill Gates
school of optimism and progress.

There were roughly a billion people on earth prior to the industrial
revolution. Through growth we have raised the _average_ quality of life, but
what does that matter to the nearly constant number of people living lives of
hunger and poverty?

It's like trying to fix a web performance problem where 80% of your requests
time out by adding so much _other_ traffic that your failure rate is now only
8%. You fixed nothing.

~~~
korantu
What do you mean _other traffic_? These are different people. Probability that
you suffer from hunger in your life reduced from 0.8 to 0.08, an order of
magnitude.

If one had choice, one would certainly choose to be born now.

Yes, there is still lots of suffering, but as Rosling says, things can be bad
and getting better at the same time

~~~
cagenut
But the point is "things" did not and are not getting better. It's literally
right there in the title of the shared article you don't even need to click or
read it.

~~~
korantu
Just to conclude, before industrial revolution civilisation could only provide
hunger-less life to 0.1B people.

Now, civilisation provided hunger-free life to 7B people.

If this is not 'getting better', I don't know what is, even if same _number_
of people go hungry.

At least now the food to feed them actually exists, which was not the case
before

~~~
cagenut
I'm sorry I don't want to turn this into a back and forth internet debate but
I feel like you're very deliberately missing the point.

Averages are an abstraction. People are real. "getting better" for those
people means ... actually getting better. Its that simple. You're overthinking
this and trying to apply mathematical models and abstractions, which don't get
me wrong, are very valuable tools. But don't lose your anchor in material
reality.

------
PeterStuer
We promote a socio-economic system centered on exploiting and then act
surprised that it fails people on all sides?

~~~
fche
"exploiting" is a conspiracy theory

~~~
PeterStuer
No, it is a factual property of the system that does not require the actors to
conspire.

------
neverminder
I find it ironic that evolution optimized us for such effective energy storage
because of constant food shortages, but now the same food and efficient
storage is killing us.

As someone who is into fitness for the last decade I can understand many other
people with less willpower to resist the hunger. People can give up drugs,
alcohol, smoking, etc, because ultimately you don't need those things to
survive, but we do need food to survive and it's so damn easy to overeat.
Another bit of irony is that once you give up all those other unhealthy
triggers of dopamine, food remains the (only?) main one, making it even so
much harder to resist it, considering that apparently obesity is worse for
your health than alcohol and smoking combined.

------
coldtea
One of many aspects and data points (e.g. regarding the environment and the
social horrors of climate change, legitimacy crisis, rise of far right), and
so on, that cherry-picking painters of comforting pictures like Hans Rosling
and Steven Pinker conveniently forgot...

------
api
Isn't this trivially explained by the fact that it costs money (often a lot
due to refrigeration, etc.) to ship food?

If I could teleport any excess food to a place in the world where it's needed,
I would.

------
michaereyess
tl:dr This underscores the immense challenge of achieving the Sustainable
Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030, says a new edition of the annual The
State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released today.

"Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only
in scale but also in terms of multisectoral collaboration," the heads of the
United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for
Agricultural Development, the UN Children's Fund, the World Food Programme and
the World Health Organization urged in their joint foreword to the report.

People experiencing moderate food insecurity face uncertainties about their
ability to obtain food and have had to reduce the quality and/or quantity of
food they eat to get by.

This calls for a profound transformation of food systems to provide
sustainably-produced healthy diets for a growing world population.

------
triplee
We're all gonna die sometime. Some of us will starve from no food, others will
have a heart attack from poor quality food.

Eat Arby's.

------
fche
where there is hunger, birth rates are too high

where there is obesity, birth rates are too low

------
spoovy
"The annual UN report also found that income inequality is rising in many of
the countries where hunger is on the rise, making it even more difficult for
the poor, vulnerable or marginalized to cope with economic slowdowns and
downturns."

Why? That doesn't follow at all. Increasing income inequality does not mean
that poor people are getting poorer or their lives are getting more difficult
in any way. Political grandstanding from the WHO, which is a shame.

------
zihotki
It's indeed sad, but I wonder why does this link belong to HN?

~~~
thomasedwards
Hacker News is basically a list of problems that need solving, or
startups/libraries/repos/products that are trying to solve a problem. World
hunger is probably one of the biggest problems, so frankly this should be
pinned to the top of the home page until somebody finds a way to solve it ;)

~~~
zihotki
It's actually not a list of problems but list of technological tries to solve
a problem, thus it has a 'hacker' in the name. There is nearly infinite amount
of problems all around the world of various levels of importance, shall they
be reported and pinned here as well, like climate stuff, food/water pollution,
health, etc. "untill somebody finds a way to solve it"?

