Is there more world hunger today or 200 years ago?

September 9, 2009 8:10 PM

Is there more world hunger today or 200 years ago, globally and in the USA?

I am wondering if there is more world hunger today, or before the advent of modern agriculture. I am interested in this both globally and in the USA. It would be especially interesting to see how rates of hunger changed over time. So, for example, are there any estimates of how many people were hungry in 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, and 2000? In addition to the raw numbers of people who are hungry, I am curious, given that there are so many more people now than in 1800, if we have more hungry people per capita. Does anyone have suggestions for researching this? Are there websites or books that have charted this issue? Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

posted by tnygard to society & culture (8 comments total)

I'm not sure of the answer to your question, but consider that the definition of hunger may be much different now than it was in 1800.
posted by emilyd22222 at 9:09 PM on September 9

Not a direct answer but "Green Revolution" might be a good read.
posted by caelumluna at 9:58 PM on September 9

You may be interested in this recent book on World Hunger (from a British point of view rather than global) or this one. FAO should have some historical statistics.
posted by saucysault at 10:04 PM on September 9

Johan Norberg writes:
In my lectures, I often point out that hunger is being reduced in developing countries. It is. In 1970, 37 per cent were undernourished, in 1991 20 per cent and in 1996 18 per cent. However, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) annual hunger report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003, this strong trend was reversed in the last half of the 1990s, a fact that is now being circulated in the media. The revised figures show that the number of hungry in developing countries was reduced by only 20 million people in the last ten years. However, since population has grown by almost 700 million, this means that the proportion of undernourished in developing countries is the lowest ever, about 17 per cent.
posted by martinrebas at 1:53 AM on September 10

If the world population in 1800 wasn't yet a billion, and we're now pushing 7 billion, it seems hard to believe that there could possibly be "less hunger" now than there was then.
posted by allkindsoftime at 5:14 AM on September 10

If the world population in 1800 wasn't yet a billion, and we're now pushing 7 billion, it seems hard to believe that there could possibly be "less hunger" now than there was then.

Indeed, you'd have to think that a reduction in the amount of hunger is likely one of the biggest causes of that population increase.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:54 AM on September 10

This is a difficult question to answer, since the leading cause of hunger in premodern societies (at that point, almost everything outside of England, the US, and maybe France) was crop failure. In marginally agricultural parts of the world, crop failure and the associated famine could happen once or twice a decade. So the answer to this really depends on what year you pick. (I don't know what the statistics are for 1800.)

As far as I know, starvation-level poverty was still pretty rare in the US in 1800--there was, after all, plenty of cheap land. Industrialization still hadn't taken its toll on urban life. And while the Green Revolution still hadn't happened, obviously, most "developing nations" (in Africa, for instance) were still not affected by imperialism and thus lived in fairly stable, small-scale traditional societies, in which infant mortality prevented population growth from outpacing food production.

So it's definitely true that there is more hunger in raw numbers today, and it may even be true that there is more hunger per capita. But for 1800 it's all conjecture.
posted by nasreddin at 8:08 AM on September 10

I should have said "preindustrial," not "premodern," sorry.
posted by nasreddin at 8:18 AM on September 10