This is a moderate-ish effort post about the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Insecurity report, which is showing some grim news for some regions, Africa in particular. The results in the graph are from the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, a simple questionnaire that asks the following questions:

During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources:

1. You were worried you would not have enough food to eat?
2. You were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food?
3. You ate only a few kinds of foods?
4. You had to skip a meal?
5. You ate less than you thought you should?
6. Your household ran out of food?
7. You were hungry but did not eat?
8. You went without eating for a whole day?

There’s some some obvious criticisms about how effective this questionnaire is at understanding food insecurity (especially in the nominally calorically sufficient west), the first being the somewhat subjective nature of the experience and the second being that it likely underestimates “hidden hunger” or having sufficient access to calories but not to adequate nutrition that can underlie conditions like being overweight or obese.

Based on the FAO’s surveys Asia and Latin America appear to be trending back down from their pandemic spikes, but hunger in Africa has trended upward unabated. Likely issues include the continued importance of subsistence agriculture for nutrition among lower-income households, disruption of imports of grain and fertilizer due to the Ukraine-Russia conflict (most small farms in Africa are engaged in nutrient mining, meaning they take more nutrients off the soil from harvests than are replenished through fertilizers and natural processes), lack of postharvest storage (forcing producers to sell their crops when prices are low at harvest and then rebuying when prices are high during the off season), conflict (including farmer-herder conflict; climate change is shifting the areas where forage is available for pastoralists), continued high rainfall variability and its attendant consequences, and the continued fragmentation of small farms as land gets subdivided among more and more people. An increasing share of African small farms are no longer on land areas large enough to sustain an average household given current yields.

tl;dr and his ilk can shove it, things are getting worse for a lot of people, we have enough food but its production and distribution are highly uneven, fuck systems that allow people to starve in the midst of abundance.