A decade ago, at the beginning of a new millennium, food experts were convinced that global hunger was on the run.  Hopes were high that the number of chronically hungry people in the world could be halved by 2015.  Oil prices were at near record lows and the question of whether the world was warming was still sharply debated. 

Today, it’s a different world. More than 1 billion people in the world are underfed. Global hunger has been on the rise for a decade now.  In the last five years, we’ve seen two global food crises. The first one, the 2007-8 food crisis, was precipitated by the depletion of the world’s grain reserves, and it led to a doubling of wheat and corn prices and a tripling of rice prices.  Food riots broke out in more than two dozen countries as many of the world’s urban poor could not afford to buy food.  Just a few months after that crisis eased, a second food crisis, triggered by the Global Recession, flared up.  Food prices had fallen, but the number of people living in severe poverty shot up, increasing, once again, the ranks of the world’s hungry.

The latest potential food crisis is being blamed on climate change.  Droughts in Russia and the Ukraine, along with flooding in Pakistan and China, are putting upward pressures again on world grain prices.  It’s too early to determine the extent to which extreme weather will impact food prices, but it’s beginning to look like we are drifting from one food crisis to another.

Last year, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned that global food production would have to rise by 70 percent by 2050 to meet the world’s growing appetite for grain, and that food production in developing countries would need to double to keep pace with rising population. 

When that forecast was made a year ago, few people thought that meeting the world’s soaring demand for food would be easy.  Farmers would have to overcome a host of obstacles, including the loss of arable land and top soil, rising energy prices, increasing water scarcity, and the effects of climate change.

Today, the challenge of feeding the world’s hungry is looking a whole lot harder.  Long before the fires and the floods broke out in Asia, the World Food Programme was desperately trying to raise money to feed 4.5 million people in Niger and other parts of the African Sahel.  Now it has to provide emergency relief to Pakistan where 6 million people are in urgent need of food assistance, more than 200,000 farm animals have been killed, topsoil has been eroded, and farmers are in desperate need of seed.

Looking ahead, the challenges are only going to get larger.  Maplecroft, a global risk assessment firm based in Bath, England, last month released its Food Security Risk Index.  Employing 12 criteria developed in collaboration with the World Food Programme, the index identifies the countries most at risk when food prices rise. The ten countries most at risk (Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Liberia, Chad, and Zimbabwe) are all on track to double, or nearly double, their populations over the next 40 years. And many of them could suffer some of the worst effects of a warming planet. The Maplecroft report concludes that “Climate change is having a profound effect on global food security,” and warns that other countries, like Pakistan, could move up quite quickly on the list of the world’s food insecure.

It may be that the recent bout of record temperatures and severe weather is not a harbinger of things to come and that fears of climate change have been overstated. Let’s hope so. For the more than one billion chronically hungry people in the world today it may be their only hope.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President

Eighteen months ago, the Obama administration unveiled a $63 billion Global Health Initiative (GHI) to save millions of lives by expanding current programs and improving health systems in developing countries. The GHI, which has become a centerpiece of the Administration’s foreign policy, provides increased funding for HIV/AIDS, malaria, maternal and child health, family planning, neglected tropical diseases, and other critical health areas.

For starters, the GHI will increase the funding for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR is a Bush Administration initiative that has provided millions of people with prevention and treatment services. The GHI will build off the successes that PEPFAR has had with antiretrovirals. Currently there are 5 million people in the developing world who are using antiretrovirals; the GHI seeks to reach 12 million people, including 5 million orphans and vulnerable children.

With 2.7 million new infections each year the GHI will also make sure that PEPFAR puts more focus on prevention. As Secretary Clinton said, “If we are going to win this war, we need to get better results in prevention.” PEPFAR, she said, will move beyond the “abstinence, be faithful, and consistent and correct use of condoms” (ABC) approach adopted by the Bush Administration.  She called for an “A to Z” approach that will take a more comprehensive approach to sexual and reproductive health.

The GHI also calls for making the U.S. a leader in family planning and maternal and child health. Currently, a woman dies every minute and a half due to pregnancy related causes and another 20 women suffer major injury.

Secretary Clinton made clear that family planning must play a leading role in the GHI:

Saving the lives of women and children requires a range of care, from improving nutrition to training birth attendants who can help women give birth safely. It also requires increased access to family planning. Family planning represents one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available in the world today. It prevents both maternal and child deaths by helping women space their births and bear children during their healthiest years. And it reduces the deaths of women from unsafe abortion.

Another major goal of the GHI is to increase integration of services so that people do not have to go to multiple clinics to receive different treatments. Currently a woman may have to go to one clinic to get her HIV/AIDS treatment, another one to get health care for her children, and another one further away for contraceptive supplies. This ‘siloed’ approach, as Secretary Clinton emphasized yesterday, has failed.  “Women we save from AIDS will die in childbirth. Children we save from polio will die from rotovirus.”

By integrating programs, the GHI is looking to produce a measured and sustained reduction in maternal and infant mortality and a qualitative improvement in the health of women and children. With adequate funding, including more funding for international family planning, the GHI can save lives and make a world of difference.

Full text and video of Secretary Clinton’s speech is available here.

Posted by Jennie Wetter, Program Manager

Currently there are about 40 million such refugees. When disaster strikes, the initial focus is often on finding food and housing, but refugees have needs much greater than just food and shelter, especially when the average length of displacement is17 years. International relief agencies must address all of their requirements, including their reproductive health needs. Children still need school, people still need health services, and women still give birth or want to prevent becoming pregnant.

In Sub-Saharan Africa 6-14% of women and girls age 15-49 will be pregnant at any given time and in any population 15% of those pregnancies will have unforeseen complications. Lacking access to family planning supplies, women develop unwanted pregnancies, particularly where rape is prevalent. As a consequence, many women turn to unsafe abortion. But without access to basic reproductive health care, common and easily treated complications can become deadly.

That’s why it’s essential to provide reproductive health services, and quickly, to refugees. In the wake of a disaster, displaced populations should have access to the Minimum Initial Service Package (MISP) for reproductive health, which is the international standard for care as laid out in the IASC Health Care Cluster Guide and the SPHERE Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response. The MISP gives women access to emergency obstetric care, safe birth kits, precautions against HIV infection, and contraceptives. MISP services prevent and respond to sexual violence, and should also lay out a long term plan for providing more comprehensive reproductive health care once the initial emergency has passed.

The MISP has been implemented in Haiti, and recently CARE, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Save the Children and Women’s Refugee Commission did an evaluation, called “Four Months On: A Snapshot of Priority Reproductive Health Activities in Haiti”. The report finds that while reproductive health services are a recognized priority, and coordination of MISP services has improved, challenges remain in Haiti. Specifically, more work was needed to prevent and respond to sexual violence, expand coverage of services, and raise public awareness of MISP services.

It is important that we build off the successes and lessons learned in Haiti to effectively address the reproductive health needs of refugee populations in China, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the world. Life doesn’t stop when an emergency or disaster strikes. Neither should reproductive health services.

Posted by Jennie Wetter, Program Manager

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

With large swaths of Russia in flames, major flooding in Asia, and giant icebergs breaking off of Greenland, this is no time to lose focus on planet Earth.  With all due respect to Hawking, outer space is not an option.  It’s been more than three decades since humans last walked on the moon, and the prospect of humans setting foot on Mars keeps on receding.  Before we head to the interplanetary lifeboats, we had better refocus our attention on saving the mother ship.

In the cosmic scale of things, the investments required to save planet Earth are not large. If we can just set aside the equivalent of what we spend on beer every year (about $300 billion) for things that might actually save the planet–like family planning, child nutrition, re-forestation, energy conservation, and renewable energy–we would have a fighting chance.  Spending another$3-4 billion a year on international family planning assistance, alone, would make a world of difference, but Congress has yet to act on the mere $67 million increase requested by the President for next year.

Reducing carbon emissions will not be easy, but it need not be terribly costly.  The proceeds from a stiff carbon tax could be rebated to taxpayers by a cut in payroll taxes, holding consumers largely harmless, but Congress this year refused to nibble on a far less ambitious cap-and-trade proposal.  So climate change legislation is dead, even though the deleterious effects of climate change are becoming all too real.

If Congress is concerned about the fate of the planet, it’s not evident. Maybe members of Congress think, like Hawking, that we can all book a seat on the first flight to Alpha Centauri. But with nearly 7 billion humans on the planet, most of us will have to stay home and make do with the mess that we are creating. 

Dimitar Sasselov, a top-ranking astronomer, recently announced that the Kepler Telescope, launched last year by NASA, has so far detected 150 Earth-sized planets, and that there may be 100 million Earth-like planets in our galaxy.  If there’s intelligent life out there, let’s hope that it exhibits more intelligence than we do.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President

Maybe not.  Sending humans to the moon and safely returning them to the Earth is easy.  Been there, done that.  Feeding 9 to 9.5 billion people or more by 2050?  Not so easy. We’ve never done that.  And there are good reasons to believe we might not be able to.

Let’s take a closer look at what the writers at Nature said, and do a little dissecting.

In 2009, more than 1 billion people went undernourished — their food intake regularly providing less than minimum energy requirements — not because there isn’t enough food, but because people are too poor to buy it. At least 30% of food goes to waste.

Scientists, like everyone else on this planet, need to differentiate the theoretical from the economical and the practical.  If, as a result of grain embargoes by Russia and (possibly) Ukraine, the price of bread doubles this year, the impact on the world’s urban poor–many of whom are living on less than $1.25 a day–will be devastating.  And it matters not whether wheat reserves are rotting in India or whether Russia and Ukraine have surplus wheat. And it doesn’t matter how many bread crumbs we discard. 

The dictates of the marketplace can be brutal. There is plenty of money in the world, far more than is needed to eliminate severe poverty, but severe poverty persists.  In a global economy, where people’s ability to feed themselves depends on the cost of rice or bread, hunger can exist on a wide scale, even if there is plenty of food–in theory–to go around.

Don’t believe that?  Take a look at what’s happening today in the African Sahel. Last month, Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), warned that, as a consequence of widespread hunger, Niger was in danger of “losing a generation.”  She said that the development of children under the age of five in Niger will be severely impaired unless food relief arrives soon. WFP plans to reach 4.5 million people in the region in the next few months, but Sheeran warned that the situation is deteriorating rapidly and that WFP needs about $100 million to bridge the funding gap. 

Here’s what Nature said about the last global food crisis:

The 2008 food crisis, which pushed around 100 million people into hunger, was not so much a result of a food shortage as of a market volatility — with causes going far beyond supply and demand.

Wrong.  During the 2007-8 food crisis the prices of wheat and corn doubled, while the price of rice tripled.  Why?  Because the world’s grain reserves during that period fell to the lowest levels in several decades. While market volatility may have contributed in some small measure, food production was not keeping up with demand.  When grain reserves grow dangerously low, speculators will always drive up prices. Scarcity always does.

Here’s what Nature said about projected population growth:

Scientists long feared a great population boom that would stress food production, but population growth is slowing and should plateau by 2050 as family size in almost all poorer countries falls to roughly 2.2 children per family.

Not so fast. The highly respected Population Reference Bureau estimates world population is currently 6.9 billion and that it will reach the 7.0 billion mark next year. It projects that world population will be just shy of 9.5 billion by 2050.  And the U.S. Census Bureau projects that world population, at that point, will still be expanding by more than 40 million people a year.

The writers at Nature say:

Producing enough food in the future is possible, but doing so without drastically sapping other resources, particularly water, will be difficult.

That’s an understatement. In many parts of the world today food production is already sapping water resources and water prospects for mid-century, particularly in many parts Asia, are not good.  Two months ago, the Strategic Foresight Group, a think tank based in India, released a report titled ‘The Himalayan Challenge: Water Security in Emerging Asia,” which concluded that “India and China will face drops in the yield of wheat and rice anywhere between 30-50% by 2050.  At the same time demand for food grains will go up by at least 20%.”

The writers at Nature, however, suggest that technology may be the answer:

Many countries can make gains in productivity just by improving the use of existing technologies and practices.

But as the editorials writers at Nature took pains to note, “…increasing today’s brand of resource-intensive, environmentally destructive agriculture is a poor option.”  Instead, they call for investments in what they term “sustainable intensification,” so that farmers can generate greater yields using less water, fertilizer, and pesticides.

And, who knows, they may be right.  If the U.S. and other countries follow China’s example and ramp up their investments in sustainable agriculture, we might yet avert a widespread famine.  But that’s a big if.  And there are no guarantees that all the research in the world will produce a “second green revolution.”  

It all comes down to this. It may be theoretically and even economically possible to feed 9.5 billion at mid-century, but we shouldn’t bet the farm that we will.  And we certainly shouldn’t bet the fate of the world’s most severely impoverished. 

The editors at Nature say that the “investment throughout the agricultural chain in the developing world must double to US$83 billion a year.” I fully endorse that recommendation.  But what about boosting international family planning assistance by one or two billion dollars?  The need is certainly there. The U.N. estimates that there are more than 200 million women in developing countries who want to prevent an unwanted or unintended pregnancy, but who are not using modern methods of birth control. Educating and empowering women in developing countries and giving them the power to control their own fertility could go a long way toward making sure that the world can feed itself in 2050.  But, I suppose, that would be too easy.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President

Last Week, New Jersey’s Governor, Chris Christie, cut funding for state-wide family planning programs. He vetoed a bill that would have restored $7.25 million in funding for women’s health services, thus eliminating state funding for 58 family planning centers. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Christie was the first governor to make such steep cuts in family planning.

The Family Planning Association of New Jersey reports that:

New Jersey’s family planning centers last year provided reproductive and preventive health care to 126,903 women and 9,461 men, most of them without health insurance…The clinics provide low-cost birth control, breast exams, pap smears, screenings for sexually transmitted diseases, and prenatal care.

In the rural areas of New Jersey, which boast high levels of cervical cancer, teen pregnancies, and STDs, clinics worry that many women who lack health insurance will not be able to travel long distances to get the services they need.

Governor Christie cited deficit concerns and overspending in vetoing the bill, but providing family planning services actually saves money in the long run. A Guttmacher Institute report estimates that publicly funded family planning services in 2006 helped women avoid 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, which would have resulted in about 860,000 unintended births and 810,000 abortions.  The services also saved both federal and state governments $5.1 billion in 2008.  Every $1 invested saved $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures.

The state legislature can still override Christie’s veto, which would require 54 votes in the 80-member Assembly, and 27 votes in the 40-member Senate.  If 13 Assembly members, who abstained on the first round of voting, support an override of the Governor’s veto, family planning supporters believe they can successfully override the veto.

Family planning saves lives and, in the long run, it also saves money.  It’s a no-brainer.

Posted by Emily Pontarelli, Program Associate

The first is the International Violence against Women Act (IVAWA).  An estimated one out of three women in the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.  In some developing countries, the rate of domestic violence reaches or exceeds 70 percent. 

 IVAWA would establish an Office for Global Women’s Issues in the State Department to coordinate efforts regarding gender integration and empowerment of women in U.S. foreign policy.  At USAID, it would establish an Office for Women’s Global Development to integrate gender in U.S. foreign assistance programs and policies, and direct the agency to develop a comprehensive five-year strategy for programs to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls in countries with severe levels of violence against women.

 The House bill (H.R. 4594) was introduced by Rep. Delahunt and currently has 118 cosponsors.  The Senate bill (S. 2982), introduced by Senator John Kerry, has 31 cosponsors.  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was scheduled to consider the bill earlier this week, but the “mark-up” was postponed at the last moment.  No action has been taken on the House bill, which was referred to both the House Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee.

The second is the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act (H.R. 2103, S. 987), which was introduced in the House by Rep. Betty McCollum and in the Senate by Senators Richard Durbin and Senator Olympia Snowe. Child marriage is a recognized violation of human rights, but an average of 25,000 girls a day become child brides, and unless something is done to change this trend within the next 10 years, over 100 million girls in the developing world will become child brides. 

The legislation authorizes the President to provide assistance to prevent the incidence of child marriage and promote the educational, health, economic, social, and legal empowerment of girls. The State Department is required to come up with a multi-year strategy to prevent child marriage and promote the empowerment of young girls who are at risk of child marriage. Last month, the Human Rights Commission held a compelling Congressional hearing on the issue of child marriage, but no action has been taken as yet by either the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Momentum has been building for both of these legislative initiatives, but the Congressional clock is ticking. There are probably fewer than 25 legislative days remaining before Congress leaves town in October, and while a lame duck session this year is virtually assured, it may be difficult to pass these bills when Congress resumes in late November.

Empowering women in developing countries may not rank as high on the Congressional agenda as job creation, but the issues of violence against women and child marriage are of crucial importance to millions of women around the world.  While President Obama and Secretary Clinton have demonstrated outstanding leadership on these issues, they need the support of Congress now, not next year when a new Congress is sworn in. In Congressional parlance, these bills are not a “heavy lift.”  But they would provide a big lift to women in the developing world.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President

The flooding, of course, has been caused by torrential rains, but deforestation is often a major contributor to flooding in the developing world.   Such is almost certainly the case with respect to the North West Frontier (recently renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) Province, which is one of the most densely populated and fastest growing regions in Pakistan.  Deforestation is a critical problem in many parts of Pakistan, but particularly in the NWFP, where subsistence farmers are heavily dependent upon trees for fuel and lumber. A 2006 report on deforestation in Pakistan found that: 

Forest depletion is one of the most serious environmental issues for Pakistan.  According to an estimate 39 thousand hectares of forests are vanishing annually.  Between the years 1990 and 2000, the deforestation rate in Pakistan was 1.5% annually (FAO, 2005). Studies based on remote sensing show that the rates of decline in forest cover in NWFP will lead to a complete disappearance of the forest from most areas within 30 years.

The report, which focused on the NWFP, noted that:

The winter season is very harsh with heavy snowfall and the people have no other option except to use forest wood for cooking and heating purpose. With the average household size of more than 9 persons the demand for firewood and fuel wood is increasing rapidly thereby adding enormous pressure on already degraded forests.

The region’s population, which has grown from 11 million in 1981 to an estimated 21 million today (not counting an estimated 1.5 million Afghan refugees), is largely rural and heavily dependent on agriculture, but the urban population is now rapidly growing as people are finding it more difficult to survive off the land.

Five weeks ago, population growth was apparently the subject of intense debate in the region’s legislative assembly.  According to a news report, PML-N member Javed Abbasi said that rapid population was the root cause of the prevailing social and economic problems being faced by Pakistan. Mufti Kifayatullah, a member of the rival MMA party, reportedly dismissed that assertion saying that, “The more children are born, the more Mujahid (jihadists) would be there.”

You don’t have to be worried about jihadists to be concerned about a desperately poor region that is suffering yet another humanitarian disaster.  Emergency aid will help to limit the suffering from this disaster, but unless more is done to expand family planning services in this region and elsewhere in Pakistan, the death toll from natural disasters like this one will only rise in the decades ahead.

Fortunately, Pakistan’s new federal government is strongly committed to expanding family planning services and information, but whether it will be successful in regions like this one remains to be seen.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President

So let’s look at the latest numbers, and let’s start with the global numbers.  PRB estimates world population for mid-2010 is now 6.9 billion (6,892,319,000 to be exact) and that it will reach the 7.0 billion mark next year, just twelve years after the 6.0 billion mark was reached.  PRB’s population clock estimates that world population is increasing at just over 83 million people per year.  

PRB now projects that world population will be 9.485 billion by mid-2050, just shy of 9.5 billion. That number is slightly higher than last year’s projection (9.421 billion), and notably higher than the U.N.’s current medium variant projection (9.149 billion), as reported in World Population Prospects: the 2008 Revision.

PRB latest data sheet  indicates a very slight decline in the world’s total fertility rate (the average number of children that a woman has in her lifetime), but it’s not uniform.  Europe’s estimated TFR increases slightly (from 1.5 to 1.6), while Eastern Africa’s goes down slightly (from 5.4 to 5.3), as does the TFR for the United States (from 2.1 to 2.0). 

Some of the changes from last year are more striking.  Last year, PRB estimated that the population of the Democratic Republic of Congo would jump from 68.7 million to 189.3 million in 2050.  That mid-century estimate was lowered this year to 166.2 million.  Some of that is accounted for by a drop in the birth rate, but more significantly perhaps the death rate is rising in the DRC:  from an estimated 13 deaths per thousand to 17 deaths per thousand.  On the other side of the population coin, the projected decline in Russia’s population has eased.  Last year, PRB projected that Russia’s population would decline from142 million to 116.9 million by 2050.  This year, the 2050 projection was increased to 126.7 million.

We should be careful to not read too much into the year-to-year changes.  But this much is clear. Contrary to the claims made by Fred Pearce and others who have declared that population growth no longer poses a challenge, the projected increased in the world’s population has important implications for the future of the planet and the welfare of humankind.  

If PRB’s projection is realized, we will be adding about 2.6 billion people to the planet over the next 40 years, considerably higher than the “2 billion” figure that’s often thrown about.  No one knows, of course, whether PRB’s population projection will be realized.  Much depends on how fast fertility rates fall, and whether death rates start rising again, as is presently happening in the DRC.  But if global population continues to grow in line with PRB’s current projection, we have a lot of work cut out for us.  Meeting our rising demand for food, energy and water, while simultaneously addressing the challenges posed by climate change, will not be easy.  It may be impossible.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President

Current population projections indicate that Pakistan’s population will grow from an estimated 181 million in 2009 to 335 million by 2050 unless fertility rates drop faster than currently projected.  At present, women in Pakistan have an average of four children.

In March of this year, Huma Yusuf, who was appointed this week as a Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, wrote a column for Dawn, one of Pakistan’s leading daily newspaper, in which she said:

The best news Pakistanis have received in the past week comes in the form of the National Population Policy 2010. The policy recognises that demographics are the key to promoting economic development and security in Pakistan. It also prioritises family planning — particularly in an effort to promote birth spacing — as the best strategy for achieving ambitious population targets (2.1 births per woman in 2025).

In her article, Yusuf stressed that educating girls is as important as family planning and information services.  She also stressed, however, that the government’s new policy is:

…short on innovative solutions to address myriad shortfalls in service delivery. For example, little attention is paid to the fact that men must be included in all family planning initiatives. And while there is a call to engage religious leaders in spreading information about contraceptives, no concrete plans for training, outreach and counselling through mosques or madressahs is put forward. There can be no doubt, however, that such campaigns are necessary: one study states that ‘psychosocial’ issues, including a husband’s opposition and perceived religious condemnation, account for 50 per cent of barriers to contraceptive use reported by women.

The government’s new population policy is promising and certainly long overdue, but as Yusuf points out, much will depend on how it’s implemented.  If it is successful, the government’s new family planning initiative could be crucial in reducing severe poverty, improving food security, reducing infant and maternal mortality, and elevating the status of women in Pakistan.  So far so good.

Posted by Robert J. Walker, Executive Vice President