Julia Tatarchuk

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University, Ukraine

PROBLEM OF WORLD HUNGER IN GLOBALIZED WORLD

The topic of research is really important and actual in current situation as still just under one billion of people on the planet suffer from hunger and undernourishment. Moreover, this problem is still up to date despite high levels of economic development and technological progress.

Solution of world hunger is possible both having clear vision and knowledge of this fact and developing new ways and approaches which will fit globalization process of the world. It’s important to analyze this problem and ways of solving it from different sides and angles to see the whole complete picture.

In today’s globalized world countries tend to integrate in different spheres including international economy and solving of global problems. This fact has already shown that global cooperation is more efficient in dealing with global problems such as hunger than self-interest of particular country. When problem is becoming global the ways of solving it are also becoming global. Cooperation in solving world hunger problem nowadays is presented in wide range of ways. Moreover, further years will require even more approaches and instruments to bring world to stability and predictability.

The world is changing rapidly and those facts that now seem to be obvious only a decade ago weren’t taken in account. MDGs were set in 1990s at the time when climate change wasn’t a major problem and didn’t seem to influence the picture of world hunger. Price spikes weren’t considered as well. Nowadays, both factors have shown their impact on the subject of study. Food-price crisis in the 2007–2008 and further volatility in 2011 were a major incident that had a great influence on increasing the number of undernourished people.

Nevertheless, the 2000s are the years of progress against world hunger and poverty. This period of time shows better results in fighting world hunger than any other ever. If to look on figures, the number and the percentage of undernourished people in the world are keeping to decrease (Table 1).

Table 1. Number and percentage of undernourished persons [1]

Such success may be explained by higher level of international cooperation and attempts to solve this problem. International cooperation in this sphere is demonstrated by setting Millennium Development Goals. Each country in the world agreed to support this project.

Geographically the highest levels of world hunger and undernourishment are present in Southern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. 65 percent of the world's hungry live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia [2].

Nowadays it is possible to say that world consumption patterns are not efficient as 12% of population suffer from hunger and undernourishment and another 10–15% suffer from overweight and obese. While there is still a problem of world hunger, billions of dollars are spent to treat diseases related to being overweight or obese.

Fast development in economy and trade led to major changes in food consumption. On one hand, urbanization and increased income allowed to enlarge variety of products in diet, made them affordable year round in convenient retail places. On the other hand, so called «western diet» became a habit in developed countries with high intake of meat, fat, processed foods, sugar and salt. Such changes influenced people’s health because of diseases of urbanization and affluence. Moreover, they have an impact on ecology and food production.

So, today’s world presents a picture on which the problem of hunger exists due to extreme poverty in one countries and the problem of obese exists due to higher incomes in other. It’s important to find the middle point and to implement those actions which will insure healthy diet for society.

Level of hunger is strongly connected to per capita income. As GDP per capita grows, the prevalence of undernourishment tends to decrease. That is why it’s necessary to make income in developing countries higher.

Low-income countries are able to deal with the problem of hunger and actually function due to official development assistance (ODA) provided by Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of Organization for Economic Co-operation and development (OECD). Since adoption of Millennium Declaration ODA has increased and reached $133 billion in 2011(Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. ODA from DAC countries in United States dollars and as a proportion

of donor-country gross national income, 1960–2010 [3]

Yet such amount of aid isn’t big enough to solve the hunger problem. If compare ODA with gross national income of donor-country it tends to decrease which means that new innovative ways of financing should be implemented.

In conclusion, it’s obvious that present strategy in solving world hunger problem needs to be supplemented by new approaches and projects as well as by new sources of financing. The process of globalization should be taken into account to maximize its positive effect on solving global problems and minimize it’s negative effects as global crisis and shocks.

The list of references:

1. Website of Bread for the world institute [Web resource]. – Access mode: http://www.bread.org/institute

2. Website materials of Food and Agriculture organization [Web resource]. – Access mode: http://www.fao.org

3. Website materials of OECD [Web resource]. – Access mode: http://www.oecd.org