I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry on this one. For at least three decades, groups such as WorldWatch repeated the familiar mantra: there are too many people chasing too little food, and eventually starvation will be right around the corner. Unfortunately for WorldWatch, even they can’t simply ignore the data, so recently the group issued a report noting that for the first time in human history there are more fat people than there are hungry people.
Why? Ironically because of something that WorldWatch said was all but impossible — incomes levels around the world are exploding. On the one hand, this means fewer hungry people; today 1.1 billion people are classified as “underfed” which is a large number of people, to be sure, but actually represents a significant decline in the number of hungry people as a percentage of the total world population. On the other hand, today there are many more people and they are much better off than at any time in history. As a result even in countries that still lag the developed world, people are able to afford to eat enough calories to become overweight.
Latin America, for example, held its first Conference on Healthy Weight in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Brazil is a good example of a country that “experts” once thought was doomed because it was extremely poor and extremely populous. Today, however, conditions have improved so much in Brazil that 6 percent of the men and 13.3 percent of the women are classified as obese according to the Brazilian Association for the Study of Obesity. The figure for women is especially stunning given the propensity in many developing nations for resources to be disproportionately controlled by men.
Brazilians have much the same “problem” that Americans have — as their income level rises they tend to eat more fast food.
So are the folks at WorldWatch dancing in the streets to the knowledge that the famine and starvation they predicted never happened and that, in fact, people in the developing world are becoming so wealthy that they’re eating too much? No, of course they’re as dour and concerned as ever. According to a WorldWatch’s Gary Gardner,
The hungry and the overweight share high levels of sickness and disability, shortened life expectancies, and lower levels of productivity — each of which is a drag on a country’s development.
In fact, if anything the world has lost ground. As WorldWatch puts it, “Meanwhile, the population of overweight people has expanded rapidly in recent decades, more than offsetting the health gains from the modest decline in hunger.” Got that? We’re no better off today than we were 20 years ago when far more people were suffering from hunger.
There’s just no satisfying the doomsayers.
Sources:
Worldwatch Paper 150. Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition. Gary Gardner and Brian Halwell. Worldwatch Institute, September 1999.
Obesity rising in Latin America. The Associated Press, July 1, 2000.