This is a moderate-ish effort post about the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Insecurity report, which is showing some grim news for some regions, Africa in particular. The results in the graph are from the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, a simple questionnaire that asks the following questions:
During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources:
1. You were worried you would not have enough food to eat?
2. You were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food?
3. You ate only a few kinds of foods?
4. You had to skip a meal?
5. You ate less than you thought you should?
6. Your household ran out of food?
7. You were hungry but did not eat?
8. You went without eating for a whole day?
There’s some some obvious criticisms about how effective this questionnaire is at understanding food insecurity (especially in the nominally calorically sufficient west), the first being the somewhat subjective nature of the experience and the second being that it likely underestimates “hidden hunger” or having sufficient access to calories but not to adequate nutrition that can underlie conditions like being overweight or obese.
Based on the FAO’s surveys Asia and Latin America appear to be trending back down from their pandemic spikes, but hunger in Africa has trended upward unabated. Likely issues include the continued importance of subsistence agriculture for nutrition among lower-income households, disruption of imports of grain and fertilizer due to the Ukraine-Russia conflict (most small farms in Africa are engaged in nutrient mining, meaning they take more nutrients off the soil from harvests than are replenished through fertilizers and natural processes), lack of postharvest storage (forcing producers to sell their crops when prices are low at harvest and then rebuying when prices are high during the off season), conflict (including farmer-herder conflict; climate change is shifting the areas where forage is available for pastoralists), continued high rainfall variability and its attendant consequences, and the continued fragmentation of small farms as land gets subdivided among more and more people. An increasing share of African small farms are no longer on land areas large enough to sustain an average household given current yields.
tl;dr 
and his ilk can shove it, things are getting worse for a lot of people, we have enough food but its production and distribution are highly uneven, fuck systems that allow people to starve in the midst of abundance.
wonder if there’s maybe some other factor that ties the countries where food insecurity is lowering together, and the ones that are getting worse together, other than just which region they’re in.
Answering that would make this a very high effort post - individual country breakdowns are little bit challenging because (a) FAO has a lot of holes, although the data are probably out there somewhere* and (b) because while governance has to be playing a role, we’re also seeing the early effects of climate change in countries like Pakistan (one of the most vulnerable countries in one of the most sensitive regions), which got hit with massive flooding that disrupted its wheat production. Having access to internationally traded commodities (both at the national and individual level) is becoming increasingly important as the scale of production shocks increases and the need to cover production shortfalls increases. In general, South Asia is driving much of the post-2021 recovery for Asia as region because it started at a significantly higher rate of insecurity while Eastern and South-Eastern Asia started significantly lower and generally stayed that way.
*From the report, China’s prevalence of undernourishment dropped from 7.5% to <2.5% between 2004-06 and 2020-22, Mongolia dropped from 28.8% to 8% (not sure what was going on there!) and DPRK rose from 34.3 to 45.5 (I’m assuming markets played a role). Meanwhile Afghanistan’s proportion of severely undernourished almost doubled between 2014-16 and 2020-22, no prizes for guessing what happened there.
During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources: 1. You were worried you would not have enough food to eat? 2. You were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food? 3. You ate only a few kinds of foods? 4. You had to skip a meal? 5. You ate less than you thought you should? 6. Your household ran out of food? 7. You were hungry but did not eat? 8. You went without eating for a whole day?So if someone answers yes to all of these, is that considered severe food insecurity? Like, I get if it was in the last month, but I just kinda figure everyone experiences at least a couple of these throughout the course of an entire year.
It’s based on a weighted score of the yes answers, with the weights increasing as you go down the scale.
So only 1.5% of Americans answered yes to all 8 questions in 2022?
It’s a little more complicated than that because there are statistical analyses that they do based on the survey sample; essentially you could answer yes to the bottom or to several of the top questions (but not all) and end up in the severely food insecure category. As it stands, the subjective nature of the questionnaire means we’re probably looking at an undercount. Hope things are going okay for you.
I appreciate this clarification. Things are okay at the moment, thank you. It all comes in waves, you know?
Wonder if Africa is getting worse because of the war in Ukraine? IIRC grain prices had jumped like 10% as of last year because neither Russia nor Ukraine were able to export as much as they’d like, and with the grain deal over, I imagine we’re back to that.
Yeah, the disruption of trade in both grain and fertilizers (Russia and Belarus are large sources of synthetic nitrogen) were major issues. International price volatility hits especially hard in Africa.
we had a really not great time here in brazil with hunger during covid, there was some real brutal imagery of people real hunger, not great, also mostly caused by the callousness of the people in power
