Veterinarians and World Hunger

Veterinarians are often tied intimately to food safety and production as well they should be. So how do you feel when you hear an American agricultural producer or politician offer the bumper sticker cliché, “We feed the world”?

Before you start heating up the tar and collecting feathers understand I completely respect all that agriculture does here and abroad. The fact is, no food production system in human civilization has been more abundant or efficient as the one we benefit from here in the U.S. today. And yes, we produce more for others than anyone else.

Still, we do not feed the world. We’re not even close to doing so. In fact, we don’t even feed all Americans.

One in six Americans does not have sufficient or reliable access to food to maintain a balanced diet. That includes some 2 million rural households; not just the suburbs or inner cities.

Globally, the situation is worse. Almost a billion souls come under the definition of hunger. More than half are found in Asia and the Pacific, not Africa as many presume. Sub-Saharan Africa is second with more than a quarter of the world’s hungry. Even the developed countries provide 19 million hungry to the tally.

Let’s get something else straight. These statistics describe undernourished people; not the malnourished. There is no reliable estimate of malnourishment defined as the cellular imbalance between the supply of nutrients and energy and the body's demand for them to ensure growth, maintenance, and specific functions.

The most important and lethal factor in malnourishment remains a lack of protein-energy. It’s also the part of malnutrition veterinary medicine can most affect directly.

Ironically, from a caloric standpoint, humans produce enough food to actually feed the world if all other contributing factors to hunger could drop away. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did in 1972. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 calories a day.

From 1961 to 2009, worldwide production of pork has gone from 8kgs./person per year to 15kgs. Poultry went from 3kgs, to 13 kgs. Beef has gone from 9 to 11kgs. and now down to about 9kgs. again. Small ruminants have remained steady at about 2 kgs. And fish has gone from less than 1 kg. to more than 8kgs. per person.

Has veterinary medicine’s role in this increased production increased proportionately? Should it?