MALNUTRITION: FAO stats are low

The bad news is that 1.02 billion people are going hungry in today's world of plentiful supplies. The even worse news is that this figure only tells part of the global food insecurity story.This is not just because no cold statistic will ever depict this scourge's full human toll on those unable to find enough to eat for themselves and their families. It is also due to the simple fact that the number of people living in a state of food insecurity is actually much higher than this already scandalous tally. How much higher, nobody knows. Each October the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) produces the headline hunger statistics used by international leaders, policy- makers, non-governmental organisations and the media when debating the issue. Given the complexity and resources entailed, it has no rivals for the job. It takes a conservative approach, presumably to avoid being accused of overstating the problem. The U.N. agency looks at individual states' food production and trade data to see how much food is available and then uses household consumption patterns to calculate access to it and what proportion of any given population are 'undernourished' because they do not have enough to eat to meet their minimum energy needs. The first major problem is that the estimates for the food needed for minimum energy needs are based on the requirements for a 'sedentary lifestyle'. This suggests that many people are not counted as undernourished even though they are not getting enough calories to sustain a healthy, active working lifestyle. "FAO's estimates are conservative in the sense that if we used higher energy requirements, more people would be counted as undernourished," David Dawe, a senior economist at the FAO told IPS. Perhaps an even bigger issue is that, even if one accepts that the FAO's figure tells us how many people are 'undernourished', it still does not say how many poor people are 'malnourished' because they cannot afford an adequate diet.
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