820m went hungry last year: Two scandals challenge our decency

Last March, Ireland joined 200 other countries when we committed to the Food Waste Charter. The objective is to, “by 2030, halve global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses”.

Food waste is one of the great moral failings of our age. Comparing just two figures in the United Nations’ State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018 report, published yesterday, confirms that discomforting assertion. Hunger rose for a third consecutive year in 2017. Last year, 821m people — one in nine of us — went hungry.

Another finding, that in a parallel, Coke-and-burger universe, 672m adults — more than one in eight of us — are obese, points to inequity on a grand, opportunity-crushing scale.

This metric, one that suggests we have a Faustian pact with the worst aspects of our character, rose from 600m in 2014, more than a 10% increase in three years.

Something around 1.3bn tonnes of food are dumped globally every year, more or less a third of all the food we grow

It may be boy-scout naive to suggest an unwanted pizza in Kinvara can help feed a hungry child in Kinshasa, but this 821m/672m contrast seems an affront to decency. It hardly seems enough to wring our hands in impotent despair.

Using America as an example — all affluent Western societies behave more or less the same on this issue: The richer we are, the more we waste — gives an idea of the scale of the scandal.

According to the US Department of agriculture, Americans waste more than €140bn in food every year. From an Irish farmer’s perspective, it must ring an alarm bell that dairy products account for the largest share of food wasted, at about €80bn.

This is not just a food/hunger/injustice issue; it has a profound impact on climate change. By dumping a third of the food we grow, we suffer the consequences of a third of the carbon emissions caused by intensive farming, but for no gain. Invaluable, irreplaceable water is misused, too. Intensive farming is a primary driver of climate change — the very phenomenon causing so much hunger in parts of our divided world. Neither can we pretend growing world hunger does not have an impact in comfortable Europe. It is the primary catalyst for the division challenging European social democracy — relentless, challenging immigration.

But, the eternal question again: What to do?

In a world where the apex democracy has fallen into a psychotic blindness of America-first isolation, the West’s default leader is part of the problem rather than the solution. The recent decisions to cut aid to Gaza and the vile threats to the ICC (should the latter have the temerity to investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan) are its latest, shameful, tantrums dressed as policy. Europe may not be as enfeebled, or as divided, but as Brexit food stockpiling looms, the unity, the common purpose needed to respond on the appropriate scale may be otherwise engaged. The scale of this crisis is daunting; if it was any less so, it might have been resolved generations ago. Or, in our market-driven world, would it?