Is global starvation on the horizon?

According to the World Health Organization, the number of people globally affected by starvation rose to as many as 828 million people in 2021, an increase of approximately 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the Green Revolution taking place in the 1960s and advances in novel genetic engineering techniques to expand our food supply, the numbers still paint a grim picture of our current situation. While most people shrug off worrying about the world’s current progress in food production, why is the world hungrier than ever?

One of the biggest and most obvious reasons is the staggering human population — in fact, the annual increase rate is estimated at 67 million people. Needless to say, there’s a long history associated with the effect of rises in the human population on food supply, starting with a bold, groundbreaking claim made by English economist Thomas Robert Malthus. In 1798, Malthus wrote an essay (An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society) predicting that mass starvation would result if humans did not check their fast-growing numbers. He believed that pressures placed on our resources could lead to potentially famine and war. A debate over Malthus’ gloomy outlook sparked during his lifetime and is still occurring today. While most Anti-Malthusians believe that resources aren’t becoming scarcer, there’s still a small minority of Neo-Malthusians who believe that our resource supply won’t be able to cope with the ever-increasing human population. China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, have both relaxed their one-child policy for quite some time now, but these troubling policies created many side effects at the time. In fact, Neo‐​Malthusian policies aimed at limiting family size increased female infanticide and sex‐​selective abortion, skewing the world’s sex ratio at birth to 107 boys per 100 girls.

Another cause of the rapid decline in resources is global conflicts, with nearly 60% of the world’s hungry people living in areas affected by war and violence. Recent events such as the Russian-Ukrainian war indicate how conflict feeds hunger, ostracizing people out of their homes and erasing their sources of income entirely. Such conflicts inflict extreme conditions on civilians and survival becomes challenging.

The ongoing climate change crisis is also another source of the rapid decline in the world’s current food supply. Natural events like droughts, greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, floods, hotter temperatures, and water scarcity affect crops around the world. For example, corn and wheat production has declined rapidly in recent years due to extreme weather events, plant diseases, and a global water crisis. Poverty-stricken countries like Africa and India contain most of the world’s arable farmland, but if natural disasters continue occurring frequently, the incredible effort put in by farmers in plowing their acres of farmland will be in vain. Furthermore, unpredictable harvests aren’t within the control of farmers — they can only do so much in a day. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 80% of the causes behind an unpredictable harvest for crops in areas like Africa’s Sahel fall down to climate variability. In other areas of the world like Bangladesh and Vietnam, increasing sea levels create a different threat to food security. In such areas, coastal farmlands are frequently flooded by saltwater, which kills off rice crops. With half of Vietnam’s national rice production centered in the Mekong Delta (i.e., imagine roughly the size of Maryland), even a minor flood can have major consequences to wreck the country’s agricultural output. As one might naturally expect, given the unpredictable nature of natural disasters, climate change can also increase food wastage.

The amount of food wastage is also another huge concern. In fact, some people argue that the rate of food production today isn’t the problem behind growing starvation numbers — rather, it’s the amount of food wastage. Just take our dining halls as an example. There’s so much food wastage that they have to flash figures on the amount of daily food wastage above the dustbins. On a global level though, roughly 17% of total global food production (or 1.3 million tons) is wasted on an annual basis. People are encouraged to take small portion sizes and take full advantage of leftovers, so anything left can be frozen (to avoid spoiling, of course) or added as an ingredient to another dish. While most people subconsciously know that their uneaten food could have gone to a poor family in a poverty-stricken country in the world, most people waste it anyways. They’re not at fault, for we have an improper system. Though some exist, we don’t have as many nets or organizations in the world to facilitate the process of sending uneaten food to starving families. Logically speaking, it makes sense why we haven’t made much progress towards achieving this goal because most food items are perishable. Nevertheless, we will need to figure out a workaround in the near future. Understanding food labeling is also another important idea, specifically the difference between “use by” and “best before.” “Use by” indicates the date up to which food is safe to be eaten, while ‘best before’ signifies that the food’s quality is best prior to that date, although it is still safe to be eaten afterwards in most cases.

As the human population is likely to continue increasing rapidly, it becomes ever important to unlock new ways to accelerate food production and encourage people not to waste food meaninglessly. Any excess food can also be donated through in-person donations to food banks or beneficial mobile apps like Olio. There are multiple ways we can reduce our food waste print, yet some choose to actively ignore these suggestions (as indicated by the growing food wastage figure). Each little step can make a gradual impact on significantly reducing starvation issues in our world to ensure every person, regardless of financial conditions, receives a proper meal.