Failing the Rural Poor: Aid, Agriculture and the Millennium Development Goals

As global leaders gather in New York to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the world is in the grip of a food crisis which threatens to derail progress towards all of the goals.

The cost of staple foods has risen by an average of 80% in two years. As a result 100 million more people have joined the ranks of the hungry, and a further 750 million are newly at risk of chronic hunger.1 ActionAid calculates that as many as 1.7 billion people, or a quarter of the world's population, may now lack basic food security. Since women and girls are overrepresented among poor and excluded people, the food crisis is having a particularly harsh impact on them. According to the FAO, even before the current crisis women made up 60% of the chronically hungry.

But the current situation is, in fact, a crisis within a crisis. Hunger was already a fact of life for more than 850 million people worldwide before the explosion in the cost of food.

At the World Food Summit in 1996, the global community committed to halve the numbers of hungry people by 2015. The MDGs, agreed in 2000, include a commitment to halve the proportion of hungry people. Although there has been some progress in reducing the proportion of hungry people, both targets were critically off-track even before the food price crisis. Ten years after the World Food Summit the number of hungry people in the world has risen from 800 million to 850 million. In this new context, both targets will almost certainly be missed unless there is a major change from business as usual.