David Dodwell

Outside In | Israel-Gaza war is just one example of how conflict is the biggest driver of world hunger

While climate change and pandemics helped cause a nearly US$4 trillion loss in crops and livestock over the past 30 years, wars played the most pernicious role

Almost all of the world’s worst food crises are the products of or worsened by war – from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan and Somalia, to Syria, Yemen and now, Gaza

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A young girl in a tent set up for Palestinians seeking refuge, in an UNRWA centre in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 19. Entire city blocks have been levelled, water, food and power have been cut off, and over one million people have been displaced. Photo: AFP

David Dodwell

Published: 8:30pm, 10 Nov 2023

In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, warning that unchecked population growth put unsustainable pressure on food supplies, and that poverty, starvation and other miseries would follow. There were less than 1 billion people in the world then.

With the world’s population surging past 8 billion, few theories can have been proven so comprehensively wrong. But what Malthus represented over 200 years ago is an unstaunched anxiety over poverty – in particular, food security. Many would also blame unchecked population growth for some of our more recently recognised scourges, such as climate change, environmental degradation and pandemics.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently delivered its report, “The Impact of Disasters on Agricultural and Food Security”, and some very Malthusian thoughts must have been front of mind: it calculates the world has lost US$3.8 trillion of crops and livestock over the past three decades – that’s US$123 billion a year.

The largest losses were in cereals (about 69 million tonnes a year), fruit and vegetables (40 million tonnes), sugar (40 million tonnes), and meat, dairy products and eggs (16 million tonnes). About half of these losses were incurred in Asia.

While floods as well as heat and other malign weather accounted for many of these losses, disasters linked to climate change, pandemics and, most pernicious of all, armed conflict, have played a massive role.

The FAO estimates that 2.4 billion people faced food insecurity last year, nearly half (1.1 billion) of them in Asia. And the food losses over the past three decades, it says, are equivalent to the daily dietary requirements of 400 million men, or 500 million women.