Overweight 'top world's hungry'

You’ll hopefully be as alarmed as I was to know that there are now more overweight people across the world than hungry ones.

The BBC has reported the statement made by Professor Barry Popkin from the University of North Carolina at an agricultural economists’ conference at, of all places, Australia’s Gold Coast, where one can see whale-like people from many nations lazing in the sun. Perhaps the economists thought a field trip to the second fattest nation on earth might be fun.

According to his data, there are now 1 billion overweight people compared to 800 million undernourished.

But how to combat this spreading epidemic (no pun intended)? Professor Popkin says manipulating global food prices could be an answer:

For instance, if we charge money for every calorie of soft drink and fruit drink that was consumed, people would consume less of it. If we subsidise fruit and vegetable production, people would consume more of it and we would have a healthier diet.

But isn’t that what we have the WTO for? Don’t they specialise in letting countries subsidise some foods at the expense of others, or am I just cynical?

I know that obesity is an increasing problem, and not just in the north, but I’m concerned that a conference of development-oriented agricultural economists was focusing on it, rather than the persistent issue of world hunger. In Laos for example, close to 40% of the population is undernourished.

1 billion people may well be overweight, but the percentage of them that are morbidly obese would pale in comparison to the percentage of the 800 million people going hungry who are in dire straights. We can do so much, so easily, to prevent people from slipping below the WHO’s 2100 calorie a day threshold for food poverty line. But the invisibility of poverty in our so-called ‘developed’ country, shields us from our moral responsibilities, which, personally, I find disgusting.