Skip to main content

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?


Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index, which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available?


The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions.

If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income.

GHI Chapter two figure one

An illustration of the score system is just below.

GHI Severity Scale

And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000 to 2015.



GHI Chapter two figure three


Let's note down those countries that have seen very little improvement; Namibia, Sri Lanka, Central African Republic, Iraq, Chad and Pakistan.

Now let's note those with the highest scores overall; Central African Republic, Chad, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Haiti.

The Central African Republic and Chad are on both shortlists. Maybe we should look at these two and see what kind of scores their governments get in the Economic Freedom of the World index. The EFW rankings are from 0.1 to 10 with 10 being complete economic freedom.

Central African Republic - 5.3
Chad - 5.1

What kind of contrast would that make with the EFW scores for those countries that have managed high improvement rates in their GHI scores?

Cambodia - 7.3
Myanmar - 5.6
Rwanda - 7.4

Myanmar sticks out, though its EFW score is still higher than either of the laggardly countries dealt with here. The lesson? Leave people alone to their own devices and world hunger goes away in a generation. Interfere and you look like the Central African Republic and Chad.

If that sounds simplified it's cos it is, but look through the data as much as you please and you'll still find that the thrust of what I'm saying is true.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Private Ownership and the Emergence of Field-based Agriculture

Quick update: There is a nicer, fancier article on this very subject on another blog. If for some reason you read my article below, treat yourself and partake of properal's piece too . ~~~ There is a paper by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi called 'Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene' and it is wonderful. It leaves a few stones unturned and its thesis needs to be empirically verified or falsified but it really begins to clarify the intimate relationship between the form of agriculture that we refer to as farming on the one hand and private ownership on the other. Their thesis is that technology was not the driver that led to long-term (inter-generational) farming, but also that farming did not follow some moment where the folks in a society all said "hey, let's all have private property now!" Rather, what they posit is that farming and private property actually coalesced, ad-hoc and over a multi-generational time-fram...
Post a Comment
Read more

Doomer Eternal?

Youtuber Sarah Z talks about the Doomers, those who despair of the world. I am not trying to criticize Sarah Z's take since it is remarkably similar to mine, but I will dump my thoughts below anyway. [ 1 ] ~ ~ ~ The media has broadcast nothing but wall-to-wall doom-and-gloom for a-hundred years and then some. If things feel more hopeless now it's because so much of that media is social media generated by us, so that we are sharing the doom-and-gloom meme with each other AS WELL AS getting it from the mainstream media. Human life is in less peril than ever before (barring the possibility of WW3 between China & Russia v. NATO & SEATO) as economic development makes comfortable civilized living more and more accessible to more and more people every year, and the carbon intensity of every unit of GDP is continually declining. CO2 emissions could plausibly lead to specific calamities with identifiable bodycounts in the near future, and preventing CO2 emissions by the one plau...
Post a Comment
Read more

Iain McKay, Bryan Caplan & the Case of the "Anarchist" Anarchist

In the past I have written blog posts disputing claims contained in the online document called An Anarchist FAQ principally written by Iain McKay. I spent those posts trying to contend with Iain's claims re  the ancap question  and  the mode of production called capitalism . McKay has a bee in his bonnet re anarcho-capitalists' insistence on referring to themselves as anarchists, that much is obvious. Every reference to ancapism runs something along the lines of "an"cap or "anarcho"-capitalism. I find this very amusing because 'anarchist' or 'anarchism' are words (articulate mouth-sounds) first and specific concepts second.  Ditto 'socialist' and 'socialism' friends. Speaking of socialism... In  the comment section of one of his videos  the Youtuber called StatelessLiberty responded to a criticism by linking to Caplan's work  on the Anarchist adventure in Spain in the 1930's . The critic shot back with a  critic...
1 comment
Read more