The Great Capitalist Lie (Part Two)
Endless hunger. How the capitalist machinery manipulates and adjusts statistics to tell feel-good stories of progress.
Why should there be hunger and deprivation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? There is no deficit in human resources. The deficit is in human will.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
At the first United Nations Food Summit in 1974, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger promised to eradicate hunger within a decade.1 Kissinger, a strong proponent of US-sponsored (and led) military coups and interventions in foreign independent nations (particularly in those implementing socialist policies that ran counter to Western corporate interests and neoliberal free-market reforms), passionately argued for international solidarity transcending ideologies and political systems to ‘eliminate this scourge.’ ‘Within ten years, no child would go to bed hungry,’ he declared.
To determine, truthfully, whether any progress regarding the number of people suffering and dying from hunger has been made, we must delve deeper into the mechanics and the ideological context of hunger statistics. There is more to those numbers than meets the eye.
In part one of this three-part essay series, we discussed how the capitalist myths of development and progress are propagated and how the aid industry — the industry of lies — serves as a tool for moral absolution:
Counting the hungry
Every year, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in collaboration with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP), publishes detailed reports on the numbers, developments, and trends in ‘food insecurity.’ Governments and institutions all over the world then utilize these figures to determine and distribute aid efforts, policies, and payments. The facts and numbers presented in the FAO's reports quite literally determine the fates of millions of people. How are they calculated?
Because most countries of the Global South lack the resources to accurately account for all of their citizens and their respective circumstances, the FAO is forced to resort to statistical estimates to arrive at its figures. These calculations, which take agricultural inventories, food imports and exports, and a multitude of other factors into account, are highly malleable. Numbers can be subtly adjusted to fit political narratives, exploiting the trust the general public puts into ‘official’ statistics. A 2014 New York Times article titled Counting the Hungry gives a detailed account of these, quite frankly, shocking practices.2 Economist and anthropologist Jason Hickel further examines them in his 2017 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions.3
Manipulating numbers — at the cost of lives
In 1974, when Kissinger made his pompous declaration and the UN announced that ‘every man, woman, and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop their physical and mental faculties,’ FAO experts put the number of people suffering from hunger at around 460 million.4 In the FAO’s 1992 report, they then stated that there were around 786 million hungry people in the years from 1988 to 1990 — not cumulative, but on average.5
What had happened to ‘eliminating hunger within a decade’? Instead of ending or, at the very least, reducing hunger, within a mere fifteen years, the numbers had surged dramatically. Incidentally, in the 1970s and 1980s, Western institutions had intensified the forceful imposition of neoliberal policies in many countries of the Global South — a reaction to the 1973 oil crisis and capitalism’s looping failures. It was bad optics.
Therefore, in the same 1992 report, the FAO revised the figures from its own 1974 report, stating that ‘its statistical methods at the time had been wrong.’ They corrected the figure from 460 million to 941 million hungry people at the time — more than twice the original number. This, in turn, allowed politicians and capitalists to celebrate the achievement of reducing the number of people suffering from hunger by 155 million. Hunger had not been eradicated, as promised, but at least it had been dramatically reduced. The official statistics tell quite a convincing story.
This wasn’t the end to the FAO’s number games — far from it. In 2004, the number of 815 million hungry people worldwide was reported.6 An increase from the 786 million figure that was reported in 1992 (for the years 1988 to 1990). Again, the FAO reacted by revising its previous figures, now claiming that the number in 1992 had been 823 million rather than 786 million. Therefore, hunger had been reduced again.
The 1992 numbers were further readjusted several times after that. The figure was increased to 833 million in 2011, 980 million in 2012, and 995 million in 2013.7 By including 20 million ‘undernourished’ people, the FAO eventually arrived at 1.015 billion hungry or undernourished people in the years from 1988 to 1990, representing a fifth of the world's population at the time. This contentious figure was then used as a baseline for demonstrating progress in subsequent reports. A practice still in use today.
Hunger statistics as a propaganda tool
While it does appear possible that statistical methods and calculations have improved drastically over the years, allowing for more accurate estimates, it is hard to imagine that they have changed to the extent required to revise a number from 460 million to 941 million (for the year 1974) or from 786 million to more than a billion (for the years 1988 to 1990). What makes this so troubling is the fact that these figures are deemed ‘official.’ They are used to evaluate progress and direct funds and development projects. Hundreds of millions of lives depend on them.
Rather than showing us the world as it is, rather than guiding and enhancing our efforts, hunger statistics are used as a propaganda tool. They justify the enormous bureaucratic apparatus that is the UN and its underlying institutions, guaranteeing thousands of jobs; they soothe our consciences and pacify those unfortunate enough to not be born in the West; they convince governments, donors, and private philanthropists that their money is well spent; and, most importantly, they justify and entrench the capitalist order of things.
Graphs that tell convenient stories
When looking up numbers and statistics on global hunger, one is most likely to come across graphs that show figures from 2005 to today or, even more frequently, from 1990 to today. Why these particular years?
The first type is frequently used to demonstrate that hunger, at least according to the UN's contentious definition, had been reduced between 2005 and 2015 (when the UN's Millenium Development Goals, signed in 2000, were supposed to be achieved),8 ignoring prior trends and only showing an increase in the most recent years. This uptick can then be attributed to a ‘general increase in political and economic instability’ (a meaningless sentiment that can be utilized whenever useful) and politicians’ failure to implement and follow through with neoliberal reforms. In this way, Western governments can be chastised for their social-democratic meddling and market interference, while governments in ‘developing’ countries are accused of failing to open up their economies quickly enough. Lastly, the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine provide convenient explanations for the most recent dramatic increase in the number of hungry and malnourished people around the globe.
What about the year 1990? Graphs depicting hunger statistics from 1990 to today conveniently omit the most devastating effects of the IMF's and World Bank's structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed on ‘developing’ nations beginning in the 1970s, as well as the unbalanced trade regulations perpetrated by the World Trade Organization (WTO).9 We will talk more about these in the next part of this essay series.
Check out my comprehensive, two-part essay series on the violent rise of capitalism, spanning the narrative from pre-history to neoliberalism and neocolonialism:
The appalling state of the world
According to the FAO's 2022 report, the number of people suffering from hunger rose to up to 828 million in 2021.10 This figure, while shockingly high — more than 10% of the world's population and a 150 million increase from 2019 (before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic) — is highly controversial.
The UN’s definition of hunger takes only total caloric intake into account, ignoring vitamin and other essential nutrient deficiencies which can lead to serious and oftentimes fatal health problems. Furthermore, calorie requirements are calculated based on minimal levels of activity (1,800 calories per day) which is unrealistic, to say the least.11 To survive, the vast majority of the world's poor must engage in hard, back-breaking manual labor, which significantly increases caloric requirements — a circumstance disregarded by the UN. Also, the UN defines hunger as ‘going without enough food for at least a full year.’ This implies that people who are hungry for six or even eleven months out of the year but gain access to food in the interim or afterward are not taken into account.
The same 2022 FAO report states that 2.3 billion people (almost a third of the global population) are ‘moderately or severely food insecure’ and 3.1 billion (almost 40%) cannot afford a healthy diet. While those seem like more realistic benchmarks for hunger, they still ignore the increased calorie requirements due to hard manual labor and the one-year time constraint.
However, even these understated figures demonstrate that there has been no progress toward eliminating hunger. Hunger has not only not been eradicated, on the contrary, it is flourishing and growing dramatically.
Note: The most recent 2023 FAO report puts the number of people suffering from hunger in 2022 at up to 783 million, and the number of people that live in ‘moderate or severe food insecurity’ at 2.4 billion.12
Capitalism has failed
They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.
— Tupac Shakur
The one single promise capitalists have made, the basic underlying fact that justifies it all, is — and always has been — a lie. More than seventy years after US President Harry Truman promised to ‘eliminate poverty and suffering once and for all’ and almost fifty years after US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared that ‘hunger would be eradicated within a decade,’ billions of people remain one bad harvest or drought away from death. Climate change, almost entirely caused by Western nations, significantly increases the likelihood of both.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the main issue is not a lack of resources but a lack of distribution. Simply put, we are refusing to share what we have — for it is not profitable. While most Western nations, particularly the United States, are dealing with an epidemic of obesity and related public health issues, people in other parts of the world are fighting over crumbs.
The undeniable fact is that in absolute terms there has never been a greater number of hungry people than today. In its 2012 report, the FAO itself recognizes the shortcomings of its definition of hunger, calling it ‘very conservative,’ ‘focused on only extreme caloric deprivation,’ and ‘clearly insufficient to inform policy.’13 Taking more realistic activity levels into account, the same 2012 report estimates 2.5 billion people to be hungry, with a clear upward trend dating back to 1990. More recent realistic figures are not available, but it appears a certainty that they have not decreased over the last ten years — quite the opposite.
Continue with part three of this essay series:
I’m author, writer, and activist Antonio Melonio, the creator of Beneath the Pavement. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack or over on Patreon. It’s the best way to support Beneath the Pavement and help me put out more and higher-quality content.
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Excerpts of Henry Kissinger’s speech can be accessed here: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/06/archives/excerpts-from-kissingers-speech-at-world-food-parley-in-rome.html
Caparrós, M. (2014, September 27). Opinion | Counting the Hungry. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/counting-the-hungry.html
Hickel, J. (2017). The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Random House.
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). (1974). The State of Food and Agriculture 1974. https://doi.org/10.18356/27755073-en
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). (1992). The State of Food and Agriculture 1992. https://doi.org/10.18356/2e118aae-en
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). (2004). The State of Food and Agriculture 2003-2004. https://doi.org/10.18356/1fc1ff21-en
See the corresponding yearly FAO reports.
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). (2018). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/millennium-development-goals-(mdgs)
Hickel, J. (see footnote 3)
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). (2022). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022. https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/cc0639en
Hickel, J. (2017b, October 6). The hunger numbers: are we counting right? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/jul/17/the-hunger-numbers-are-we-counting-right
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). (2023). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023. https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/cc3017en
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). (2012). The State of Food and Agriculture 2012. https://doi.org/10.18356/e008d848-en