If you only had $5 in your pocket, you’d have to be a magician to come up with something that was filling, tasty and nutritious for lunch.
But what if you were able to pool $5 on behalf of everyone in Australia? You would have nearly $120 million, and you’d need a pretty big pocket. That’s a serious lunch for one person, and a good deal of food, and food security, for millions of hungry people across the world.
Well that’s exactly what our government did on our behalf in 2014. Australia contributed $112,790,663 USD to the United Nations World Food Programme – the largest humanitarian organisation in the world working to fight hunger across the globe.
The program’s Executive Director Ertharin Cousin will be in Australia this week. She’s in country to talk to the nation's politicians and encourage them to go further in helping to achieve food security in our region.
For years, Australia has consistently been in the top-10 donors to the World Food Program. Our leadership has ensured that millions of people from countries across the Asia-Pacific can get access to food now and depend on its availability into the future.
A big way to achieve food security is by investing in small, family farms. According to the World Bank, about 75% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and work on the land. Investment in agriculture leads to increases in productivity and gives ongoing access to highly nutritious sources of food.
In Laos, a country to our north a bit bigger than Victoria, more than 80 per cent of people work in agriculture. Australia is helping to increase productivity in smallholder farms through our contribution to the World Food Program, an initiative that will benefit more than 250,000 people.
It may sound strange, but another way to guarantee food security is to work with developing nations to get them ready for the possibility of natural disasters. Disasters, like the cyclone that devastated Vanuatu in March this year, cause huge damage on crops and lead to massive losses of livestock – two very important sources of food.
Before Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu, Australia funded an early warning system that gave farmers strategies for how to prepare their crops for the impending cyclone. By all accounts, the devastation could have been much worse had the farmers not been so well prepared.
As the Australian government is in the midst of negotiating a landmark trade deal with 11 other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, it makes important economic sense to couple open trade with increased investment in food security across the region.
In Asia, for example, a quarter of children younger than five are under-nourished and underweight. It’s likely that these kids will never reach their full potential, and the ripple effect is profound: stunted children are much more likely to underperform in school, earn lower wages, have more children, poorer health and live a life of poverty.
Australians should be proud of the important role that we have played to bring down the number of hungry people in the world and across our region. Let’s celebrate the leadership and ask them to go further as we strive toward a goal of achieving Zero Hunger in our lifetime.
And I reckon that would be $5 well spent.