Dear Jomo and all,
Please let us also remember that the modest progress against chronic undernourishment in the last 25 years is due entirely to the FAO's abrupt change of methodology announced in its 2012 State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) report. Here are the official FAO numbers of chronically undernourished -- in millions -- according to the old and new methodologies side by side:
OLD NEW
1990 843 1010
1996 788 931
2001 833 922
2006 848 884
2008 963 867
2009 1023 867
2010 925 868
2014 795
Comments.
1. It is very bad practice to make so dramatic a change in methodology, with hindsight, in year 22 of a 25-year measurement exercise.
2. It is entirely incredible that undernourishment should have remained constant while food prices near-doubled from 2005 toward twin peaks in 2008 and 2011.
3. The new definition of undernourishment (see p. 50 of the 2012 SOFI) is absurd. A person is counted as undernourished only if her/his
(a) “food energy availability [no other nutrient deficiencies count]
(b) is inadequate to cover even minimum needs for a sedentary lifestyle”
(c) for “over a year.”
This fails to count all the people who are seriously short of vitamins (e.g. A), minerals (e.g. iron), proteins or any other crucial nutrients. It fails to count all those who must do hard physical labor for a living and thus need more than the 1800 kcal allocated for a sedentary lifestyle. And it fails to count all those who are hungry for months but not over a year. According to this definition, there cannot ever exist an undernourished rickshaw driver because, if such a person were to fall below the calorie intake needed for a sedentary lifestyle, he would be dead long before the year is up. (A rickshaw driver needs 3000-4000 kcals per day.)
The FAO's new methodology vastly understates the number of chronically undernourished, and this huge undercount then also produces a much-too-rosy trend picture. (Note that there were various important changes in definitions and methods during the Millennium Development Goal period and, after every change, the trend figures improved. Surely no coincidence!)
The 2015 SOFI (p. 52) explicitly defends the new methodology against two criticisms made by myself and others:
1. "At the moment, few surveys accurately capture habitual food consumption at the individual level and collect sufficient information on the anthropometric characteristics and activity levels of each surveyed individual; in other words, very few surveys would allow for an estimation of the relevant energy requirement threshold at the individual level." -- My response: So do some surveys instead of repeating your flawed exercise. Even just a random sample of a few thousand people would give you a sense of the quality (or lack thereof) of your estimates for some country or province. It is a scandal that world hunger is estimated in the primitive way that it is, that we don't even know, roughly, how many chronically undernourished people there are.
2. "Within the population, there is a range of values for energy requirements that are compatible with healthy status, given that body weight, metabolic efficiency and physical activity levels vary. It follows [!] that only values below the minimum of such a range can be associated with undernourishment, in a probabilistic sense. Hence, for the PoU [prevalence of undernourishment] to indicate that a randomly selected individual in a population is undernourished, the appropriate threshold is the lower end of the range of energy requirements." -- My response: this is gibberish. What really follows is that one has to use the minimum of the range if one wants to be 100% certain of never counting as undernourished anyone who is not. But this certainty -- given the FAO method -- comes at the cost of not counting hundreds of millions of people who have enough calories for a sedentary lifestyle with low body weight and high metabolic efficiency but do not have enough calories for their actual life style, actual body weight and actual metabolism. This comes on top of ignoring (not counting) all those who are short of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) other than energy. Think of all the millions suffering from iron-deficiency anemia, are they not undernourished and chronically so?
I know that the new methodology was brought in before you, Jomo, joined the FAO. In any case, I am convinced that most of the colleagues at the FAO have the best of intentions. Like with other UN agencies, the top officers of the FAO serve at the pleasure of politicians and get FAO's funding from politicians; and, in order to get more support toward pursuing the noble goals of the FAO, they may have to help politicians defend their policies and in particular their grand globalization project. If I were an FAO official, perhaps I would give politicians nicer-looking numbers and trend figures in exchange for greater support for FAO's work. But someone, somewhere, also needs to speak the truth, needs to say that the poor have been dramatically betrayed, that undernourishment is vastly more common and persistent than the FAO statistics claim, that there ought to be an independent group of academic experts producing sound alternative estimates. It is our responsibility as world citizens to relieve the FAO's dreadful conflict of interest and our responsibility as academics to develop reliable estimates even if governments obstruct any such effort. We here on this list can do this job, and we should join forces to do so!
Cheers,
Thomas
Thomas Pogge
Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs
Yale University, PO Box 208306, New Haven, CT 06520-8306
pantheon.yale.edu/~tp4 www.ted.com/speakers/thomas_pogge.html
Please let us also remember that the modest progress against chronic undernourishment in the last 25 years is due entirely to the FAO's abrupt change of methodology announced in its 2012 State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) report. Here are the official FAO numbers of chronically undernourished -- in millions -- according to the old and new methodologies side by side:
OLD NEW
1990 843 1010
1996 788 931
2001 833 922
2006 848 884
2008 963 867
2009 1023 867
2010 925 868
2014 795
Comments.
1. It is very bad practice to make so dramatic a change in methodology, with hindsight, in year 22 of a 25-year measurement exercise.
2. It is entirely incredible that undernourishment should have remained constant while food prices near-doubled from 2005 toward twin peaks in 2008 and 2011.
3. The new definition of undernourishment (see p. 50 of the 2012 SOFI) is absurd. A person is counted as undernourished only if her/his
(a) “food energy availability [no other nutrient deficiencies count]
(b) is inadequate to cover even minimum needs for a sedentary lifestyle”
(c) for “over a year.”
This fails to count all the people who are seriously short of vitamins (e.g. A), minerals (e.g. iron), proteins or any other crucial nutrients. It fails to count all those who must do hard physical labor for a living and thus need more than the 1800 kcal allocated for a sedentary lifestyle. And it fails to count all those who are hungry for months but not over a year. According to this definition, there cannot ever exist an undernourished rickshaw driver because, if such a person were to fall below the calorie intake needed for a sedentary lifestyle, he would be dead long before the year is up. (A rickshaw driver needs 3000-4000 kcals per day.)
The FAO's new methodology vastly understates the number of chronically undernourished, and this huge undercount then also produces a much-too-rosy trend picture. (Note that there were various important changes in definitions and methods during the Millennium Development Goal period and, after every change, the trend figures improved. Surely no coincidence!)
The 2015 SOFI (p. 52) explicitly defends the new methodology against two criticisms made by myself and others:
1. "At the moment, few surveys accurately capture habitual food consumption at the individual level and collect sufficient information on the anthropometric characteristics and activity levels of each surveyed individual; in other words, very few surveys would allow for an estimation of the relevant energy requirement threshold at the individual level." -- My response: So do some surveys instead of repeating your flawed exercise. Even just a random sample of a few thousand people would give you a sense of the quality (or lack thereof) of your estimates for some country or province. It is a scandal that world hunger is estimated in the primitive way that it is, that we don't even know, roughly, how many chronically undernourished people there are.
2. "Within the population, there is a range of values for energy requirements that are compatible with healthy status, given that body weight, metabolic efficiency and physical activity levels vary. It follows [!] that only values below the minimum of such a range can be associated with undernourishment, in a probabilistic sense. Hence, for the PoU [prevalence of undernourishment] to indicate that a randomly selected individual in a population is undernourished, the appropriate threshold is the lower end of the range of energy requirements." -- My response: this is gibberish. What really follows is that one has to use the minimum of the range if one wants to be 100% certain of never counting as undernourished anyone who is not. But this certainty -- given the FAO method -- comes at the cost of not counting hundreds of millions of people who have enough calories for a sedentary lifestyle with low body weight and high metabolic efficiency but do not have enough calories for their actual life style, actual body weight and actual metabolism. This comes on top of ignoring (not counting) all those who are short of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) other than energy. Think of all the millions suffering from iron-deficiency anemia, are they not undernourished and chronically so?
I know that the new methodology was brought in before you, Jomo, joined the FAO. In any case, I am convinced that most of the colleagues at the FAO have the best of intentions. Like with other UN agencies, the top officers of the FAO serve at the pleasure of politicians and get FAO's funding from politicians; and, in order to get more support toward pursuing the noble goals of the FAO, they may have to help politicians defend their policies and in particular their grand globalization project. If I were an FAO official, perhaps I would give politicians nicer-looking numbers and trend figures in exchange for greater support for FAO's work. But someone, somewhere, also needs to speak the truth, needs to say that the poor have been dramatically betrayed, that undernourishment is vastly more common and persistent than the FAO statistics claim, that there ought to be an independent group of academic experts producing sound alternative estimates. It is our responsibility as world citizens to relieve the FAO's dreadful conflict of interest and our responsibility as academics to develop reliable estimates even if governments obstruct any such effort. We here on this list can do this job, and we should join forces to do so!
Cheers,
Thomas
Thomas Pogge
Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs
Yale University, PO Box 208306, New Haven, CT 06520-8306
pantheon.yale.edu/~tp4 www.ted.com/speakers/thomas_pogge.html
